These are days of experimentation in journalism. It's really our scientific moment. Without experimentation and an openness to thinking "outside the box," traditional media will get stuck doing the same thing they've always done. Just how many new journalism labs are there? It's getting difficult to count them all, but here are a few prominent ones:

• J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism, at American University
• Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) at the University of Missouri, which was founded to "develop and test ways to improve journalism through new technology and improved processes"
• New York Times' Research & Development Group, an R&D testing lab that lives right inside the newspaper
• Nieman Journalism Lab, a website that covers the digital experiments happening at traditional media outlets
• PBS Idealab, a website I run where community news innovators who received grants from the Knight Foundation, describe their projects

That's not my rule; it came straight from new media pundit (and traditional media veteran) Jeff Jarvis. The idea is to concentrate reporting resources on things that the news organization does best. Maybe that's local news, local politics or colorful entertainment reporting. Whatever it is, that's where the editorial budget should go. Not into non-core subjects like national news, international disasters or movie reviews. Instead, "link to the rest," or aggregate the other content by pointing to the best sources out there.

As Jarvis wrote, "Newspapers are getting more comfortable with linking out even to competitors. This takes it farther. It says that the best service you can perform for yourself and your readers is to link instead of trying to do everything. And once you really open yourself up to this, then it also means that you can link to more people gathering more coverage of news."

That could mean a blog post with links, a wire story, or a content deal with another news organization. Which leads to...

It used to be that various news outlets would compete against each other and never consider working together. But that mentality has changed completely. "Collaboration" has become a big buzzword, especially in U.S. public media and in the rising number of non-profit local media outlets. For example, there was "The Climate Desk," a project to cover climate change, which included work by The Atlantic magazine, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Mother Jones, Slate, Wired and PBS' "Need to Know" TV show.

Even journalism schools in America have begun to collaborate with mainstream media to help them cover hyper-local news. For instance, the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley is working with the non-profit Bay Citizen site to cover the San Francisco Bay Area. And both New York University and the City University of New York are working with the New York Times to produce hyper-local sites for the newspaper company.

For too long, journalists and TV anchors believed that they were the only source for news in a community.They should immediately figure out ways to bring in more voices, and turn news into a conversation that includes the community. That means getting feedback from the community on which stories to pursue, letting citizens report on what's happening around them, collaborating with the community to get facts right, and following up on stories when the community demands more. Rather than take an approach of looking down at the community - or giving the community total control in an open online forum - there should be a filtering and moderation function performed by journalists to help get the most out of community input.

More and more newspaper sites in the U.S. and U.K. believe that putting up a pay wall will solve their economic issues. By charging people to access all the content on their site, they believe they'll get a steady stream of revenues so they don't have to rely on advertising. The problem is that people will often go to other sources online for that information. In order to charge a premium for content, publishers will need to have content that is unique and can't be found elsewhere. That might mean very niche content (like inside information about a sports team), or business content (like data tailored to a specific business vertical), or content for the public good (like public media asking for donations). Without that unique value, paid content strategies are doomed to failure.


Mark Glaser is executive editor of PBS MediaShift and PBS Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.