Media intellectuals Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Howard Owens and Howard Weaver sold me on Twitter because of their skills putting it to serious purpose. They’re masters of blogging and longer forms, but I found them just as provocative in 140 characters. 

Then The Wichita Eagle’s Ron Sylvester demonstrated the news value of the form, with his adroit Kansas.com Twitter reports on trials in progress.

It all came together for me last night in a blessedly smoke-free barroom in downtown Wichita, where folks whose employers include newspapers, branding agencies, non-profits, a church and a university came together for a Wichita Tweetup. It evolved organically around a long, noisy table as we got acquainted and exchanged tales of the D life, as L. Kelly reports here.

Ron Sylvester courtroom tweet

 I said Twittering from the courtroom would get even more interesting when five or six people — not all of them professional journalists — are covering the same trial and you can read their posts as one continuous stream. Ron Sylvester, who has been getting national attention for his Tweets, said it will get even more interesting when family members of the defendant and victim join the Twitterers.

I don’t fear the day when Ron and other professional journalists are fully part of a democratic stream of information, reporting on the same events. I think the journalists work will continue to be closely followed by those who search for the truth; I think the journalists will benefit from access to multiple contemporaneous perspectives on what’s unfolding in front of them.

Bring it on!

I’m finding it hard to concentrate this morning, so riveted am I by the death spiral of newspaper-related stocks and the carnage in newsrooms.

The day started with a terrible earnings report from Gannett, the largest publishing company. Earnings down 36% on a 14% drop in second quarter newspaper advertising revenue. USA Today ad revenue was down 17%. 

Alan Mutter, my blogging hero, reports that newspaper stocks have lost $4 billion in value since the beginning of the month. That’s his chart at right.

Meanwhile, the bodies stack up, day by day. the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported this morning it will eliminate 8 percent of its employeees, 189 jobs. It will also eliminate its geographically targeted sections, including a Gwinnett County section it has published for 20 years. I remember when it started, with great resolve and fanfare, to beat back a frightening challenge from a New York Times suburban newspaper, the Gwinnett Daily News.

That was a great time for readers, with two formidable competitors fighting for their loyalty with strong, locally-focused news and advertising products. The AJC destroyed the NYT entry. But even with a strong web presence of its own, it can’t compete toe-to-toe with all of the social, economic and technological forces making it more and more difficult for newspapers to prosper.

I had a couple of invigorating conversations today with Wichita State graduate students about the future of media. Cindy Stanford, a PhD Human Factors student, was telling me about her fascinating interest in Human-Computer Interaction, HCI. She introduced me to Friendfeed.com, rheingold.com and quotably.com in the interest of expanding my understanding of social media.

Later in the day I talked with Bobby Rozzell, a former minister who is one of the impressive grad students in the Elliott School of Communication. Bobby recommended a book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. That led to a medium-or-message discussion that reminded me of a long-ago Knight Ridder committee called, tongue-in-cheek, The Edge of Knight.

The idea of the Edge group, circa 1984, was that the people who ran Knight Ridder knew that good ideas were dying because they couldn’t get through the bureaucracy and the budget process. In theory, anyone with a good idea could come to us with a proposal that might be funded independently of the normal process. It didn’t end up working, but I remember one particular discussion about the then hot delivery system — fax machines!

Our wise technical adviser, Steve Landers, urged us to shift our business focus from the whiz-bang platform (we were sure everyone would have one at home someday soon) to the content. He was right, of course. We’re probably at a point where about as many college students will have used a fax machine at home as will have used a typewriter — virtually none.

As journalism jobs disappear by the thousands, at least from newspapers, it’s time to keep a sharp focus on content. What will the audience want, and who will produce it, remain more important questions than how they will get it.

Mass customization appears ready to take another step with Time Inc.’s Maghound, a planned September 2008 rollout of a Netflix-type service for magazines. You pay a monthly fee and choose the magazines you want, for as long as you want them, switching as often as you like.

The report on Foliomag.com says: The pricing for a membership is tiered—three titles for $3.95 per month, five titles for $7.95, seven titles for $9.95, and $1 per title for eight titles or more. Titles that have a non-discounted traditional sub rate of around $19 or more per year are considered “premium” titles and will have an extra $2 fee per month (10-15 percent of titles fall in this category). First-time users will also be eligible for a free one month trial.

In a recent presentation, a Maghound executive said he hopes to have 300 magazines participating by launch. Some major challenges would seem to be:

* Rising paper and postal costs.

* The magazine industry’s traditionally slow execution starting new subscriptions.

* More and more magazine content being accessed on the Web.

Even so, it’s a bold move. I’m going to try it. How about you? The Maghound.com site isn’t yet active, but you can click on a customer service link and they promise to email you know when it’s live.

Just came across this wonderful explanation of lack of attention span in our increasingly connected world. That’s why it’s ever more difficult for static media, such as newspapers, TV, parents and employers, to command attention.

BTW, the easiest explanation of asymptotic is that the curve line never quite touches the base line.