News organizations whose mobile apps only provide users with their articles or videos are missing a big opportunity.

An application, by definition, should be applied to perform a task, to solve a problem. Most news doesn’t do that.

Rather than just feed readers recent stories you wrote about their problems, apps can provide tools and data that enable users to actually solve their problems. When you solve problems, you get more loyal users and a chance to make more money. Here’s how.

Why is this important? Mobile consumption is about to surpass the tied-to-your-desk variety. The current watchdate is 2015.

The year 2015 is when Back to the Future II takes place, too. Just so you know.

What will people be doing online? A little bit of a lot of things, but mostly social media if current trends hold. A lot of news spreads via social networks at this point, so that’s not entirely a bad thing.

There’s also niche news sites, which are becoming a growing field.

Everyone’s friend Andy Carvin, on how he balances the job and his valuable role live-tweeting the Arab world. Sanity is a word that appears in the headline, so that’s something to keep in mind.

Of all of the great pages to see, this is my favorite. The infographic style is also an example of turning a now decade-old story into something contemporaneous. If you read nothing else, click that link and read the first lines and then the bottom right corner. Here’s the supporting story.

Seems the Guardian overreached in trying to do a realtime feed of Sept. 11. The article talks about the still developing boundaries of Twitter. I think it just as importantly speaks to the “We made this culture” culture of Twitter, which is still evolving, and being driven by the masses, not what a news outlet thinks. Also it gets to the importance of listening in a conversation. Guardian tried something, the audience didn’t like it, told them and the paper, to their credit, listened.

More here.

The Rauch brothers produced three heartbreaking cartoon shorts of personal narratives told to Storycorps whose mission is to “Our mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives.”

Sound familiar?

(T)he Associated Collegiate Press is making available a PDF file of its book, “9-11: The College Press Responds.” The book was published in Spring 2002 and includes a wide range of examples of how college newspapers covered the story.

You can see it, terrific, terrible stuff, as a PDF.

Here’s a screen capture of the old version:

And here’s the new version:

In this first issue we already have five feature stories, represented in those thumbnails below the main photograph. Below the fold the stories fall into a neat structure. There’s better comment moderation strength, ease of publication and it will be easier for students to use with a cleaner look in the browser and behind the scenes.

Now we just need to put ads on it.

In Case 1, graduate student Judith Heenan complained on multiple occasions about the unfairness of the grading and disciplinary systems in her nursing program. In response, she alleged, college officials retaliated by issuing her unwarranted disciplinary “strikes” and then ultimately expelling her from the school.

[...]

Judge Myron H. Thompson of the Middle District of Alabama was uninterested in letting Heenan’s case go as far as a trial, and summarily dismissed all of the student’s claims. The judge simply assumed that Heenan was lying, under oath, about her disciplinary strikes being undeserved and retaliatory.

Read the whole article.

The newest brain tickler, via ONA:

”’What Matters Now? Proposals for a New Front Page‘ is a 10-day collaborative effort not only to fill the walls with the Web sites, photos, videos, multimedia pieces, drawings and articles that our guests and visitors recommend, but also to explain why this material is important.

Ten years after the attacks of Sept. 11, we thought we would propose newer ways of knowing, relying on insider perspectives as well as the foreign eyewitnesses who make up much of the conventional press.

Follow the links. You can participate in this panel discussion, thought project from the comfort of your computer.

Tips on investigative reporting, follow the trail says Drew Sullivan:

And, finally, an easy visualization of the series of recent Texas wildfires.

Find the size, draw a radius and drop it over a Google Map. You’ll be amazed at how this changes your reader’s (and your) perspective on the story.

If you ignore these sites, you will fail to understand how a growing portion of the population deals with the flow of information, and inevitably how more people will deal with this flow in the future. The best journalists will be problem solvers on the social web.

If you are a journalist your JOB is to understand and insert yourself into the flow of information. That’s what Google+ represents, the flow of information.

Meanwhile as to the branding of a journalist, here’s one successful case study, by Jennifer Gaie Hellum:

It takes extra effort to maintain an online presence as a journalist. And I admitted I couldn’t tell him which tweet would be the one that got him retweeted 25 times, which blog post would be shared around the world or which skill listed on his LinkedIn profile would make him rise to the top of a search.

Nonetheless, I assured him all that extra effort was worth it because each tweet, each blog post and each online profile defined his brand and provided a virtual trail for potential employers to find him. I told him I knew this personally because I’d sent tweets that got dozens of retweets, written a blog post that someone translated into Spanish and shared from Peru to Spain and been contacted for jobs via LinkedIn, all while I was still a grad student. And I said there was no reason he and his classmates couldn’t do the same.

Today’s j-school students have everything they need to start mapping out their careers. They can write niche blogs, create simple portfolios, connect with others doing the work they aspire to do and develop professional networks across the country before they’ve even begun their job searches.

The task is clear, then.

Statistics for journalists. Great primer, there. Ten rules for visual storytelling, from Professor Mindy McAdams at Florida. It starts with this:

“I want to know more. I always want to know who, when, and where. Always! For me this is part of authentication, which is part of what makes it journalism and not interpretive art. A photo without a caption is not journalism.”

A photo without a caption is far short of adequate reporting.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks, of course. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal, headquartered across the street from the World Trade Center, published their Pulitzer Prize-winning Sept. 12, 2001 edition.

Here’s an image of their rare six-column headline. They hadn’t ran that style since Pearl Harbor was attacked. The headlines — how do you cover a story that everyone knows about? — are instructive.

Meanwhile, our shared experience is becoming history. Here a teacher tells of his students with no memory of Sept. 11th. Too young. That changes things, doesn’t it? If you’re in college today you were probably 8- to 12-years-old. How does your generation perceive Sept. 11th? How has that perception changed in the last decade?

You’re welcome for free the story idea.

Quick hits: TV in the cloud, which gets to the heart of something mentioned here previously. This, too, will become a stratified industry as executives retrenches online. Here’s a bit more on the shifts in television distribution.

Finally, Professor Dan Gillmor said two interesting things on Twitter yesterday:

Journalists stopped being gatekeepers when they became stenographers, a long time ago.

The gatekeeper of the future is you. You will designate the people (and orgs) you trust to tell you what is going on.

That second statement is of great interest, both for you as a journalist and as a consumer. Which noun form do you suspect “you” takes there?

The issue advanced significantly on Friday with a stunning Federal Appeals Court ruling affirming the First Amendment right of citizens to photograph or create videos of police while they’re on duty. Police agencies in some communities were using an odd interpretation of wiretap laws to confiscate the camera phones of bystanders, and the court rightly found that to be unconstitutional.

The decision has far-reaching implications that go beyond the mere taking of pictures at crime, disturbance and accident scenes. By granting everyone this “right,” this ruling redefines “the press” in this country by shattering the myth of privilege associated with working for a so-called “legitimate” news organization. Some will cry that it opens Pandora’s Box, because a clearly defined “press” helps the machine of modernity function. This decision is potential chaotic, for example, to those cultural institutions who have a vested interest in keeping their “news” in the hands of a professional class (that can be manipulated). Think of an agency holding a press conference, for example. If press freedom applies to everybody, then that agency cannot restrict access to only those who work for a news organization.

The decision should make anybody in a traditional newsroom shutter. As we’ve been saying for years, the personal media revolution — what Jay Rosen calls “the Great Horizontal” — IS the second Gutenberg moment in Western civilization.

The full piece is worth a read.

Meanwhile, there’s great empirical evidence that public relations is doing more than coming of age. A New York Times reporter is quoted there, saying “the muscles of public relations are bulking up—as if they were on steroids.”

One of the buzzwords in the business is engagement. Old fashioned engagement still works, as this Canadian example demonstrates:

Not long ago, the Winnipeg Free Press’s social media editor hosted an online chat from her desk at the paper’s downtown news cafe. She had done it many times in recent months but something unexpected happened.

People had taken up the paper’s social media invitation to “join us” in a chat about Google+ with guests including GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram. But audience members started showing up at the cafe in person saying, “I’m here for the chat!”

“I looked at them and thought, ‘Oh…okay. That’s my mistake there. I didn’t promote this the right way,’ said Lindsey Wiebe. “But that’s also a good sign,” she added. “They’re thinking of this cafe as a hub where our events are held.”

Two speeches: This one by a Cronkite School of Journalism professor and news veteran, Tim McGuire, to the Society of Features Editors. He’s calling for a change of mindset in the industry. Baltimore Sun editor and Loyola professor discusses his first day of class speech. It’s a great read.

The Washington Post is closing all but two of their local bureaus. This is almost always a series of unfortunate events. Less coverage is never a good thing. The reasons why might surprise you.

I mentioned Mircosoft’s breakfast media table concept in this space yesterday. I tossed out a little flip line about competing against television. And now, today, there’s Google’s CEO:

“History shows that in the face of new technology, those who adapt their business models don’t just survive, they prosper. Technology advances, and no laws can preserve markets that have been passed by.” Google chairman Eric Schmidt may not have intended those remarks as a verbal grenade, but many in his audience of 2,000 television industry members took them that way.

Schmidt was speaking at the 2011 MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, where he gave the prestigious annual MacTaggart Lecture. The festival is attended by over 2,000 people with a business interest in television, including on-air talent, broadcasters, distributors, support services and digital innovators.

Schmidt was the first person invited to give the MacTaggart Lecture who was not in the television industry. His remarks therefore were tailored to address the interests of his audience, many of whom believe Google has a destructive effect on their business and a cavalier attitude toward copyright.

Viewing will shift, he predicts, and location will become a critically important contextual signal. There’s a lot in that story worth chewing on.

Howard Owens writes:

Every time a small town n’paper publisher puts up a paywall, a potential local indie publisher should hear cash registers ringing.

He should now. Who is Howard Owens? He’s publisher of The Batavian.

There’s a simple principle of economics at play here. Scarcity creates value. But. If you hide behind a paywall you make yourself scarce, at the risk of losing an audience willing to find their information elsewhere. As you might have noticed, information is often plentiful.

Remember, yesterday, when I mentioned either human or algorithm curation? Steffen Konrath found a story that quotes a prediction of 40% of large companies using context-aware computing projects in the next few years. Context motives content and interactivity. That engagement gets results. Forbes picks it up from there:

It’s often said that “content is king.” The ability to create high-quality content that attracts, engages, retains and converts visitors is still an important objective for every website. Content is indeed still the heart and soul of every site. But if content is king, context is its queen; and together they will rule the kingdom of audience engagement and of the corporate Web site experience.

Context is the key to providing Web experiences that deliver business results. Context shortens sales cycles and grows revenue. It increases customer engagement and loyalty. Gartner describes as “Context-Aware Computing,” and defines it as “the concept of leveraging information about the end user to improve the quality of the interaction.” Gartner goes on to note, “Emerging context-enriched services will use location, presence, social attributes and other environmental information to anticipate an end user’s immediate needs, offering more-sophisticated, situation-aware and usable functions.”

[...]

There is no excuse for ignoring context on the Web. Context is just as pervasive and just as available online as it is in the physical world. It comes in as many forms including preferences, behavior, location and social networks, there to be used by savvy marketers if they only would.

There’s that word again, location.

Quick hits: Mindy McAdams on getting that first job in journalism. Great advice. Another Apple employee, another bar, another lost iPhone. I’m beginning to think this is the soft-pedal link technique of choice at Cupertino. The Iron Bowl version of Stranger in a Strange Land. GQ comes down to try to figure it all out. (Hint: Fans can be overzealous.)

Finally, the finalists for the 2011 Online Journalism Awards are publicized. Tons of great material to examine there.