News Atoms is on hiatus for a while.

I’ll be fishing in another class, mashing words and data. (Math is fun!)

I’m also tending Wired Journalists, a social networking site “to help journalists who have few resources on hand other than their own desire to make a difference and help journalism grow into its new 21st century role.” It was started by Howard Owens, Ryan Sholin, and Zac Echola. I hope you’ll join us.

I’m stirring some other pots; we’ll see which one cooks first.

Readers spend more time per Web page at the Web site of USA Today than at those of other major U.S. papers.

USA Today gets about 1.2 minutes per page, but the median for the top 10 sites is 0.75 minutes per page. The lowest rate is at the San Francisco Chronicle, at 0.42 minutes per page.

You can see a table to see how I figured the numbers, or you can compare by using a bar graph.

“TV/PV” is the time per visitor divided by the pages per visitor. The source is a list of 100 top newspaper Web sites from the Newspaper Association of America.

On my computer monitor at work is a saying from a fortune cookie: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.”

 But sometimes it’s hard to imagine doing something else. I don’t mean just “I am fill-in-the-blank-occupation and this is what I’ll always do.” I don’t mean just work, and I don’t mean deliberate resistance.

I mean that it can be difficult to perceive or to think in a different way from what we as individuals normally do.

And that can be a drawback, because grooves can become ruts.

My friend Anna Haynes pointed me to a New York Times article by Janet Rae-Cupree, who says, “it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.”

This is called the curse of knowledge. Some examples are: “It’s why engineers design products ultimately useful only to other engineers. It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers.”

I think it’s good for people in general and journalists in particular to do things we don’t ordinarily do, to travel outside our comfort zone, in order to broaden our exposure and stretch ourselves.

I acknowledge that I should get out more, but there are many ways to poke outside your natural self. My paper, The News & Observer, requires that all journalists have some training outside their own field every year.

But we can step outside ourselves by doing something as simple as randomly changing the radio station and listening to whatever pops up. Or for the 21st century, we can do it with random web pages.

Doug Fisher at Common Sense Journalism reviews several changes for The Associated Press.

Pat Thornton at The Journalism Iconoclast has ideas about how newspapers can make more money online. These include marketing to current nonadvertisers and learning lessons from Web powerhouses. For instance, he suggests suggests making classifieds free or but selling ads around them or selling extra services, such as featured ads. (Found via Amy Gahran’s Contentious.)

Dave Morgan at Online Spin suggests newspaper companies should break apart to focus on different services: local news, distribution, printing, and ads and marketing. (Found via the Future of Newspapers blog.)

My friend David Cohn has earlier suggested that newspapers become less “products” and more “services.” Somewhat related is a post from ReadWriteWeb that suggested that turn around to some extent. They would help people not just find information, but also help them be found, such as with advice on attracting an audience for their videos.

Via ReadWriteWeb: The BBC is testing a customizable version of its home page. You can move things around and add and delete certain types of news.

Also, the Knight Foundation is looking for an online community manager.

I finished my class with Philip Meyer.  The final project was required to be a proposal for a new medium.

Ideas for a new medium are easy. It was more difficult to think of something that is doable for me and combines the values and lessons of the class — such as serving low-end customers or nonconsumers, and putting a priority on people’s “jobs to be done” and their priorities (making it easy for people to do what they want to do, in the way they want to do it), while still making it journalism (well-rounded meals).

The obvious nonconsumer market is youth. Much is already marketed to 15-35-year-olds. It’s smarter to think younger.

But the same lessons can be applied to just individuals but larger markets — such as underdeveloped countries. So I poked around and found a model for expansion, by Alfred Sirleaf, in Monrovia, Liberia. Lydia Polgreen of The New York Times wrote about him, so I wrote to her to see if she knows how I might be able to contact him. 

In the meantime, here’s part of my class paper.

Chalkboard Net

            Chalkboard Net would use chalkboards to bring journalism to people who live on less than $10 a day.

            It would provide news and media service to people with little or no access to traditional mass media and telecommunications. The project would serve those handicapped by poverty, illiteracy, remote location or insufficient infrastructure.

Need

            While many people in industrialized countries suffer from information overload, there is much less available for people who need it the most, especially in failed states or war-torn countries.

            In 30 countries, there is not even one radio for every 10 people. Even if people had money, in some areas there is no newspaper or telecommunication service, or even electricity. For example, for at least 14 years in the capital of Liberia, the only electricity available has been through private generators.

            Phone lines go to only about 5 percent of the country’s population. Service outside Monrovia is negligible.

            Liberia’s infrastructure was destroyed during rebellion and civil war in most of the 1990s and early 2000s. The country is rich in natural resources, but much human capital has been lost. The civil wars killed about 7 percent of the population, and many businessmen fled the country.

            Broadcasters and publishers were damaged by violence and have little money to pay employees.  

Model

            Chalkboard Net would be based The Daily Talk, a chalkboard “newspaper” in Monrovia, Liberia. (New York Times story by Lydia Polgreen, at http://tinyurl.com/yqbeg9)

            The Daily Talk is produced by Alfred Sirleaf, who writes news and editorials inside a small plywood building he constructed. For people who can’t read, he sets up items as symbols to illustrate the news.

            His work includes challenging the government to provide people with basics such as electricity and water.

            Like most people in Liberia, his income is minimal. He does get occasional gifts of cash or phone cards.

            Sirleaf uses several newspapers and a network of tipsters. Although he has no formal journalism training, his work irritated the government enough that he was briefly jailed and his newsstand was once torn down.

            “Daily Talk’s objective is that everybody should absorb the news,” he was quoted in The New York Times. “Because when a few people out there make decisions on behalf of the masses that do not go down with them, we are all going to be victims.”

I have about 10 days left to finish my proposal for the Knight News Challenge. My basic idea is to bring together a number of technical people for a short time to make local-type news projects.

Kelly Marks from my class suggested a contest that would give the participants cachet. So maybe it could go like this:

* Ask for $25,000 instead of $15,000

* Hold three events on the same weekend, in Silicon Valley, Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and Bangalore, India; with $5,000 going toward each of the first two and a few thousand for the last. The money would include a leader for each site.

* Dinners on the Fridays for the techies, local journalists and community residents.

* Prize of $7,500 to the group with best project.

* Discussion to choose projects would start online for at least a week before the events.

One concern about the shift of news and other information from paper to digital media is the potential to leave some of the public behind.

Andrius Kulikauskas and the Minciu Sodas laboratory is working on this problem with a Knight proposal for a digital “Includer,” or Flash Drive Editor.

It would be “a device for reading and writing text files (such as emails) stored on any USB flash drive. It is optimized for people in Africa with marginal Internet access so that online community might help them reach out locally.”

Newspapers are, or should be, a metaphorical village plaza, and maybe a village guide.

That is, people generally ought to be able to use the paper (taken as a whole) to find whatever they’re looking for about a given community. If it doesn’t have what you’re looking for, it should still be able to point people in the right direction.

Combine this idea with newsrooms’ growing transparancy and digital connections and opportunities and other trends, and consider making the physical space inviting to the public.

Chris O’Brien of the Next Newsroom project asks about “a space for the public to gather to discuss important community issues.”

David Cohn has suggested “a space for content producers to come and and work on stories in collaboration with their local reporters.” The People’s Channel, a public-access cable TV site, does something loosely like this.

Other possibilities:

* Have a public place for food and drink.

* Offer public wi-fi, digital terminals or both.

* Have a small public library just for community information. Including reference service.

* From the building or within it, display current work other than the print paper. This could take any of a few forms, such as a news ticker with LEDs, or one or more screens of any size showing digital work.