The new culture is open, fast-paced, and encouraging of first-time entrepreneurs. It’s about blogging and tweeting and digitized networks of people sharing information about what they’re interested in, and where they’re investing. It’s about informal “unconferences” popping up to discuss the latest tech trend. It’s populated by people who see the value in having broad networks of friends and acquaintances across lots of companies. Employers who operate in the new culture realize that the way you keep people motivated and maintain your position in the marketplace is by giving them interesting projects to work on and rewarding them appropriately . . . The new culture isn’t afraid to spread the good word about the innovation that happens . . . The new culture is about seizing opportunities, not reinforcing hierarchies.

- The Cultural Revolution: Which Side Are You On? – Boston.com

At the same time I was putting this post together, Howard Owens pushed a message across Twitter that speaks to journalism and the new culture.

howardowens @dangillmor @johnrobinson @cshirky Journalism has stumbled not because of TV or Internet, but failure to change with society.

Anything we do going foward has to be in line with the new culture in order to meet the needs of the audience and the people who don’t yet engage.

We in the media industry are not asking one right question often enough at a time where it could not be more critical.

There seems to be many random, impulsive ideas about how media companies can generate revenue quickly in a time of economic decline and a where the century-old business model no longer applies.

Let me ask this question, and many of you will recognize it because it is not new. What is the job to be done?

If the answer is just to make money, you will fail. Making money does nothing to provide a product or service that adds value to a user or customer. It does nothing to build audience or connect to a community.

Those facts are often too easily overlooked, especially in hard economic times. But doing those things will lead to money.

I am all for experimentation, failing fast and taking risks. But if the product, service or change to an existing product is not done in a way that solves a problem, fills a void or clearly adds a desired value for a user or customer than it is not worth doing until you can answer the jobs-to-be-done question.

This is a new era. Ideas have never been cheaper, and taking a product or service to market has never been easier. But the time to act smartly could not be more important, and a great way to do that is to come with a concise and demonstrable answer to the jobs-to-be-done question.

So, how many jobs-to-be-done interviews has your organization completed in the last six months? How many will it do in the next month?

Related articles

• What are the business models for attention allocators? (ac-idealog.blogspot.com)
• Zemanta for Email – But Why? (cloudave.com)
• Free SEO Training: Improve Your Google Search Engine Rankings… (ronmedlin.com)

In assessing the list of projects it’s important to keep in mind two things that were said at the introduction of new collaboratory.

The first came from Jane Stevens when she said journalism in this new era has to be participatory, contextual, solution-oriented and immediate.

“We are moving from news and information that is a mile-wide and an inch-deep to niches that are an inch-wide and a mile-deep.” – Jane Stevens

The example widely used – and there is much more evidence than what I present here – was West Seattle Blog. “People were blogging IN West Seattle; nobody was blogging ABOUT it,” says Tracy Record, editor, reporter and founder of West Seattle Blog.

The second important point came from Brian Boyer, who recently was a member of Team Crunchberry and helped built a series of fascinating conversation tools at NewsMixer.us. The exchange was shared in the event’s live blog.

RJI Collabortory:  Brian Boyer talking about “agile development” notes the need to start small and make it happen, rather than taking too long to build something that’s bloated

Mark Poepsel:  Brian Boyer: You know you’re going to screw up, so get it over with fast and move on, build half projects not half-assed ones.

With those two points being said, here is the initial round of projects, also found on the RJI ning site.

Relevance Matching: Map out what a taxonomy/relevance editor role is, how it can work in a news organization to better target coverage and enhance relevance-matching for ads.

Assessment: Community news business assessment tool: Interactive tool to gauge local info/news needs, local demographics, advertising potential, help figure out how to structure a local news biz, spot opportunities.

Apps & Widgets:  New apps or widgets would be more practical than efforts like better storytelling through multimedia

CMS & Mobile Alerts: How to connect your content management system to send out basic mobile alerts. Tutorial or recommended system.

Mobile App Standards: The Collaboratory can work towards creating standardized platform of mobile applications/interfaces

Twitter Business: Help Cedar Rapids Gazette figure out how to channel local businesses through twitter effectively

Related articles by Zemanta

• Reporters live blogging trials: the wave of the future (kevin.lexblog.com)
• NewsMixer: An Innovative Community News Framework (readwriteweb.com)
• Team Crunchberry and newsnixer.us. (wemediaguru.com)
• What powers the biggest blogs? (techburgh.com)
• Jumping Into Social Media (mediabullseye.com)

I first signed up for the microblogging site more than a year ago during the Web 2.0 Expo, but didn’t really get into it until the past few months.

For those who don’t know Twitter is a social networking application that gives you 140 characters to tell those who choose to follow you what you are doing right now.

The number of uses for Twitter increases almost daily. The newsroom where I work has not yet taken advantage of the service for breaking news or any sort of coverage or networking, but my guess is that is about to change.

So here are two examples of how it can work.

One Saturday I was at a conference in St. Louis and a guy I was following on Twitter was complaining that the weather in Cedar Rapids really sucked and so he was thinking of not going out and shooting a video as he had planned to do.

Seeing this, I quickly sent him a message saying that if he did go out and shoot a video about the weather that I would put it out on the news site that I have some control over. He quickly agreed. The video was up the next morning and had about 3,000 views in about a day. Pretty cool, huh.

The second example is more abstract, but it comes from this kid Will, who I recently met for a cup of coffee. I met Will on Twitter and we have some similar interest in social and new media stuff.

Well, about a month or so ago, Will put a tweet out that he was spending another day job searching in the social media, new media realm.

another day searching for a job in new and social media marketing 09:28 AM April 18, 2008 from twhirl

I couldn’t believe what Will described happened in the next hour. Some HR person in San Francisco say Will’s tweet on the general public timeline and passed it and a link to Will’s blog onto the company CEO. The company CEO looked at the blog, found Will on Linkedin, downloaded his resume and then within an hour Will had an email in his inbox from the CEO wanting to know more. Pretty cool, huh.

And those are just two examples of the power that Twitter has.

Welcome to Supertweets, an experiment using Twitter to report, analyze and opine on everything surrounding Super Bowl XLII, and most importantly where you are watching the big game, who you are surrounded by and our you a New England Patriots fan or rooting for the New York Giants.

Supertweets will use the micro-blogging application of Twitter and the concept recently introduced with Politweets to showcase, in one place, how people all over the world react to the game, the half time show and the often-analyzed commercials

Twitter is a place that allows users post a 140-character message informing your friends, and the world for that matter, of what you’re up to at that very moment in time. The application can be accessed via web, email or SMS.

Simply add @supertweets to your twitter text and your update will be included. You can also follow along at Twitter.com/Supertweets

Imagine the possibilities with this. The reaction to the game will be great and could be huge. But the power, to me, is in how people react to the commercials. What if in the first-quarter Pepsi or Budweiser runs a 30-second ad and within seconds has real-time reactions from thousands of consumers? And then imagine if if the advertisers could then take that data and make decisions about what ad to run it in the third-quarter based on that real-time feedback?