Lots of changes, and more on the way.

Not because it’s adversarial. Because it’s a false promise.

Revolutions replace the institutions they destroy. And revolutions end.

“This is 1776″ — that was the unspoken theme of Joe Smith’s flag-wrapped commentaries. We’re here to preserve the values of Jefferson, he said. We’re going to solve all this business about the Internet by using a democratic process to build consensus around the best solution to our problem. And once we’ve created a Big Awesome New Institution, we’ll be on the other side of this. Everything will be okay.

But that’s not how the media business works these days. It’s not even (dare I say?) how the Left works these days.

Maybe there’s a chance that a big new institution like the one Ron Buel envisioned would be sustainable. But the odds are very low. As Tim Barkow points out, we’re more likely to succeed if we let a thousand flowers bloom: if we find ways to lower the barriers to entry in the journalism business, like Libby Tucker’s proposal for a “content-neutral incubator.”

Eventually, I hope, we can kluge these startups together into a durable network of interdependent journalists. Maybe we can’t. But nothing in the future will be as stable as the past.

The tech-savvier people at the conference grasped this intuitively, I think. But the huge, unrealistic expectations of the conference organizers were seductive. We all want to believe in easy answers. And when our little Continental Congress fell apart, the recriminations started. I was guilty, too.

A few days later, I think we’re all ready to look forward again. Like Steve said, there’s more than one way to skin this cat. Like Carol said, it’ll require listening to each other.

Like Becca said, let’s do this thing.

I see another danger … that not-for-profit ventures will delay or even choke off for-profit, sustainable entrepreneurship in news. I would prefer to see various of the many funders who gave funds to not-for-profit endeavors – note $5 million give to a new not-for-profit entity in the Bay area – instead had invested in for-profit companies that can build companies that support and sustain themselves rather than rely on hand-outs. That is God’s work.

Jarvis intends this as a paean to capitalism. But he’s got a weirdly non-capitalist way of thinking about nonprofits.

Jarvis’s notion that nonprofits are an anomaly in the market system — and therefore less “sustainable” — forgets the fact that nonprofits produce goods and function within the market system like anybody else.

Sometimes they produce public services for governments. Sometimes they produce warm fuzzies for rich donors.

Wherever the money comes from, a successful nonprofit has found a market for whatever it’s producing. That’s God’s work, too.

“Among the assumptions I wanted to test … was the idea that news consumers really are looking for context rather than merely the latest news. After all, during years of working in online newsrooms, I’d seen plenty of deep, contextual news packages ignored by our site users in favor of weather updates and crime reports.

“The financial crisis provided an early test of this assumption. At the time, news about the crisis was ubiquitous. All at once, every news organization was unearthing news about a different aspect of the meltdown—the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the role of the Community Reinvestment Act, the status of the bailout plan wending its way through Congress. Amidst all this news, would people choose context?

“The answer was yes. The breakthrough news item of the year wasn’t an investigation that yielded some hot new scoop, it was a piece of on-the-record explanatory reporting by ‘This American Life’ and National Public Radio that went wildly viral. ‘The Giant Pool of Money’ went on to become the most downloaded episode in the history of ‘This American Life,’ garnering the award trifecta of a duPont, Peabody and Polk for its producers. Many listeners said they’d been tuning out all those crisis-related headlines until they heard the episode. For them, ‘The Giant Pool of Money’ was like a decoder ring for this news story. And once you heard it, you wanted more.”

Here’s one of four core principles for today’s media market: these days, talk is cheap.

It’s a simple idea. Take a lesson from Uncle Buffett and his acolytes at Morningstar: your castle is only as good as its moat. If others can easily invade your market, it’s a bad business.

Expressing an interesting opinion is relatively easy. It requires intelligence and skill, but not a lot of work or time. Yesterday, therefore, it was doled out as a reward to people who had already put in lots of work and time.

Today, no such aristocracy exists. The cleverest, hardest-working opinion makers rise rapidly to the top.

This, of course, is why TimesSelect didn’t work: interesting opinions aren’t scarce. And it’s the oldest cliche in the Valley of the Newsosaurs: blogs are interesting but empty.

Hey, most of them are.

But here’s something that many commentators don’t appreciate about local information markets, as opposed to national ones: local information is useful. Local information tells me where to apply for a job, where to go for fun and where not to walk after dark.

In a world where only the most relevant information gets read, media outlets need to be useful.

Usefulness requires work and time. The work can be in filtering, packaging or reporting. But whether you’re an ink-stained newspaper reporter or a greasy-shirted blogger, work and time are almost certainly going to be your moat.

Here’s one of my four core principles for today’s media market: these days, relevance is mandatory.

I’m not talking about some of your content. I’m talking about all of your content.

If you’re not scared yet, you should be.

Yesterday, distribution costs were high, which made information scarce. The only way to distribute information was to spend lots of capital on a printing press or a broadcast tower. The only way to make this investment pay off was to make everyone interested in your content.

But the things that interest everyone, like the workings of government, don’t interest anyone very much. What does interest people a lot? Their pets. Gardening. Figure skating. But each of these only appeals a lot to a few people … and it wasn’t worth distributing content at great expense to a few. There weren’t enough figure skating fans in a single media market to pay for their content.

So publishers focused on things that interested everyone a little bit.

Today, distribution costs are low, which makes information plentiful. But that’s not all: relevant information is now plentiful. There’s now an international market online for the free distribution of figure-skating-related content, and those of us who care about figure skating can finally do what we always wanted: read about figure skating for an hour every day.

Aha! That’s the catch. Information is now plentiful, but time remains scarce. When people prioritize their time, of course they always start by consuming the available information that’s most relevant to them, gradually moving to less and less relevant information.

Here’s what’s new: things that interest everyone a little bit aren’t anywhere near the top of that list any more. Newspapers’ problem, therefore, is not that people have become less interested in City Hall. It’s that we’ve always been interested in lots of things other than City Hall, and now those other, more intense interests can be fed.

I’d love to read about City Hall, but I’ve got no time. I just spent an hour reading about figure skating.

In economic terms, less-relevant information has not fallen in absolute value. But the people who spend time consuming it are facing rising opportunity costs.

Therefore, news startups should pick a niche — a niche that a few people care about quite a lot. Or several niches, if they go together for some reason. But for God’s sake, don’t get caught out in the open, peddling a product that everybody cares about a little bit.

Newspapers already tried it.

Your startup will only thrive if things are changing; if nothing’s been changing, somebody already tried it. So, how is today’s news market different from yesterday’s?

Here are four principles for today’s media market, each of them with a commandment for aspiring entrepreneurs to keep in mind. They’re the guiding assumptions of this blog.

I’ll discuss each in a coming series of posts, and each of these will eventually get a landing page of its own that includes the latest news on the subject.

• relevance is mandatory, so pick a niche
• talk is cheap, so be useful
• tomorrow’s audience is watching, so make work last
• small works, so outsource everything

But let’s get serious about the usefulness of crowdsourced hard-news reporting at the local level.

Every example of how Twitter, etc., is theoretically changing journalism seems to rely on extremely unusual tragedies, disasters or sensations.

I don’t know about your hometown paper, but in the one I work for, almost all of what you’d call “breaking news” (aside from the sports and arts coverage) falls into one of four areas:

1. Cops and courts — situations known only to a tiny group of private, deeply interested and unreliable individuals.
2. Political actions — city and county governments doing stuff, known only to a handful of deeply interested and unreliable people present.
3. Studies, findings and reports — released by governments, nonprofits and businesses.
4. Pseudo-events — announced press conferences, etc.

It’s hard to imagine “social journalism” being at all reliable in (1) or (2), and it’s hard to imagine it being much more effective in (3) or (4) than simply picking up the phone, firing up the Internet or going to the damn press event.

In situations like document dumps or earnings reports, putting many eyes on the problem can be an effective way of finding hidden gems or coming up with provocative questions.

But in almost every other local reporting situation, what’s really happening is that a reporter is composing a hypothesis, testing it with facts that haven’t yet been brought to light or widely shared, then explaining why they’re important. Though the social Web can be a tool for soliciting predefined information — “have you relocated because of the recession?” — composing hypotheses is not a task crowds do well.

Anybody who thinks floods, fires and ferry accidents are what local reporting is all about should look more often at his or her local newspaper.

Update 7/28: I’ve added links to Scott Karp’s related post at Publish2. I’ve been a Karp fan for years, and I’ve got mad respect for his whole team, but today they make useful villains.

a) Products that rely on the idea that people will simply be too dumb to figure out an alternative. These products rely only on informational barriers: once you know the better way to do things, it’s no trouble to do things the better way.

Like a car mechanic who preys on ignorance in order to sell more air filters, these products breed resentment.

and

b) Products that rely on the idea that people don’t have the time or effort to pursue an alternative. These products rely on procedural barriers: even if you spent the time to figure out an alternative, you’d need to alter your behavior to take advantage of it.

Like a car mechanic who pokes around in earnest for possible mechanical problems you haven’t yet noticed, these products breed loyalty.

A few other part-time interns and I should each be posting once a week.

I expect this gig to consume most of my creative energy through September, but I’ll be cross-posting here each week to add a few reflections on my reported pieces.

If you have any suggestions of startups, startup plans or startup trends that need covering, I’ll be scrambling for good ideas, so please shoot an email to mike (dot) andersen (at) Gmail or leave a comment below.