My problem is, there’s not one way on the page to notify the paper of the error. No comment option (seriously?), no way to email the writer or editor, not even an apparent link to a contact page. (My bad, it’s in 6-point font at the bottom if you scroll down all the way.) I don’t wanna write a gotcha comment; I just want to let a colleague know about something I noticed, so his error doesn’t stay up there for someone meaner to notice. That’s what you do; otherwise, it’s like letting someone walk around all day with a piece of lettuce between their teeth. You just don’t do that. So instead of sending a simple note to the reporter, I must resort to a blog post and hope it will register on their radar. (This shall be tagged appropriately.)

In addition to losing the precious insight of feedbacks, not making reader comments easy doesn’t make a paper look good. The Times doesn’t need another reason for someone to call them arrogant or disconnected.

To those for whom quality of journalism isn’t a primary concern (read, UM System Board of Curators), I would — on a side note — add that cheapening the Missourian is also a dangerous business move. If I didn’t think that working at the Missourian would bring more to my education than a stint at the student newspaper of any other university, I wouldn’t have picked the Missouri School of Journalism. I wouldn’t have buried myself in the Midwest, and neither would have hundreds of out-of-state, tuition-paying, $25,000-a-year students.

I mentioned innovation because it is precisely, I believe, the point of having the Missourian, a paper my friend Matt Wynn aptly called the “canary in the coal mine” of the newspaper industry. If the Missourian loses that distinctive feature, it will be just like any other 7,000-circulation, small town paper, except with staff in training. The Missourian is that paper that’s not afraid to “fall flat on its face,” again as Matt puts it, in the interest of advancing the industry. Asking the Trib’ to save us from financial ruin — I say “us” because, in case you hadn’t noticed, I have a deep attachment to the Missourian — would be just a crutch, a temporary band-aid over the bullet hole, if you pardon the cliché, that wouldn’t change a thing to the sad state of the newspaper industry, which the Trib’ will too, eventually, have to deal with. That is not what the Missourian is about.

That’s where Tom’s suggestion of going online mainly comes into play. Journalism innovators have so far only skimmed the surface of what the Internet can do for our industry. I won’t repeat my common tech-evangelist diatribe, but a quick enumeration will do: interactivity, social networking, participatory journalism, data, hyperlocal, mobile platforms, public service, crowd-sourcing, community forums, Twitter, plenty other things we haven’t yet found a word for… There’s plenty to keep the students busy. With over a hundred unpaid staff, the Missourian has a unique opportunity to experience with everything other newsrooms don’t have the time and resources to do. I’m sure students would rather have the opportunity to dig deep into the issues that will shape their careers, than do the same write a story/edit it they’ll get to do at every other summer internship. And that’ll be something different to talk about in the job interviews. So what if we fall flat on our faces?  Sure there will be growing pains, but who makes a difference: the guy limping on the crutch, or the guy who volunteers to test out the bionic leg?

Don’t get me wrong, I still value a well-written story and thorough reporting. Those should be the primary skills taught to every student. I particularly lament the loss of quality writing in many newspapers, reduced to columns to AP-style, inverted pyramids without style or merit; and to promote better storytelling, I strongly recommend keeping a print weekend edition full of narratives, strong photography and innovative designs. The Weekend Missourian is the best thing we do; don’t lose it!

The biggest challenge will be to figure out how to finance the same quality journalism without print revenues. No one’s figured that one out yet. There was also a time in history when no one had figured out the printing press or Google. Put enough motivated people together in a room, and it will happen. One way to make sure that happens is to promote not just editorial excellence, but also business sense. I know math and money are dirty words to many journalists, but we must face reality. Our industry has hundreds of talented writers, editors, designers, producers, photographers… What it needs now is entrepreneurs. The journalism school should be a business incubator and a think tank for our industry, building partnerships with the business school and private enterprises, staffing the business side with students (supervised) and encouraging careers in publishing and media business.

On the editorial side, too, this is no time for half-measures. Here is the thought I’ve occasionally let slip, reinventing the world at Flat Branch, a honey wheat in hand: merge the newsrooms, get rid of sequences. The J school, which I adore, has got one thing wrong: it still defines the journalism by the platform on which it is published. You got newspaper journalism, radio-television journalism, photojournalism, magazine journalism and convergence journalism (a failed experiment, as a sequence, which I hear is on the out, but at least they risked falling flat on their faces). Keep a sequence to the side for them PR folks (or slide them over to the business school) and merge everything else. I dream of a comprehensive newsroom where student-journalists would be trained across platforms (how I wish I had learned radio, too) and KOMU, Missourian & Co., KBIA and other outlets yet-to-be-created would be partners, not competitors (for media diversity, there’s still plenty around town); where stories would find their expression in whatever medium works best; where students would be encouraged to come up with personal projects, even books, documentaries and start-ups. A place where our work’s only definition is ‘we get the truth out,’ and the only absolute is the ethical standards we all value.

Just my thoughts, respectfully submitted to the higher authorities

Ken Paulson, editor of USA Today, was our graduation speaker. He had one quote to be remembered. I roughly remember it as this: “Everyone talks about ‘the media’ as though we all meet in one big room on Tuesday mornings and decide what the agenda for the week is gonna be. So not true. We meet on Fridays.”

Congratulations, Missouri School of Journalism class of ‘08! I have learned tons with you and met some of the most fascinating people I know. I truly cherish the memories and wish I could have still learned more, done more, met more. I’m taking Mizzou with me to Cambodia.

I am writing my midterm on the ethics of media blogging. Everyone and their mother has written about blogging ethics, but I am wondering particularly about the rules that apply to blogging about your own industry, the people you work with or might work with, even the very company you work for. How do you blog your honest opinion without burning yourself with future employers? How do you conciliate your journalist’s instinct to spit out all the information you have with your employer’s right to proprietary information? In general, how do you think news organizations are faring, when they praise transparency in the editorial process but are usually pretty defensive on disclosing their business practices, and what can/should bloggers do about it?

As you can tell, the topic is pretty wide. I’m only on the first draft, but I need help. Be kind, share your opinion and pass this request around to media bloggers you know.

Full disclosure: All comments will be sourced/attributed. This is for a footnoted paper that will serve as my ethics statement for my J-school senior assessment. It will be published on the portfolio section of this site, with a handful of industry insiders reading it (a 2-year-old’s handful, really). Excerpts might be used on this blog.

Item of note today: someone agrees with me. You might remember that I asked newspapers to stop shooting themselves in the foot by endorsing presidential candidates. (Jay Rosen rightly points out that the Times endorsed McCain while it was investigating his “ethical lapses,” and at the very least the publisher was in touch with both the editorial and the news sides.) Apparently, Time managing editor Rick Stengel is on my side.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is going ahead with his reform of France’s external media, which I could blog about for hours. He just named famed journalist Christine Ockrent to director of the holding France Monde, which will regroup France’s international radio network RFI, trilingual cable news channel France 24 and francophone channel TV5Monde. Journalism unions were quick to point out that Ockrent is the wife of Bernard Kouchner, France’s foreign affairs minister. Ockrent defended her journalism credentials (I won’t deny they’re impressive) and said today on radio that she’s tired of being reduced to her “wife of” label. “Frankly, I find that unfair and humiliating,” Ockrent said. I couldn’t agree more, but she’s missing the point. Her new job puts France’s diplomacy and our international public media in the hands of the same couple. Can you say conflict of interest?

And lastly, think your job is threatened by bloggers, citizen journalists and the evil empire of Rupert Murdoch? Try fending off an insect invasion to save your paycheck.

Our president Nicolas Sarkozy, who must love the media since he’s talking to it twice a day it seems, has proposed a media reform. He wants to create a parent company to bring together three public broadcasts: RFI, the France-based, worldwide, 19-language public radio network; TV5 Monde, a TV station that airs programming from French-language stations all over the world; and France 24, a 24-hour news channel airing in French, English and Arabic that was created in Dec. 2006, the brainchild of Sarkozy’s predecessor Jacques Chirac.

The project’s already got a name, France Monde, and guess what? It’s already got a wiki page.

The idea is far from stupid. It brings together the resources and advertising revenues of 3 major networks for a projected total budget of 400 million euros. The service could become more coherent, more comprehensive and the networks would share their audiences.

Wait, did I say “advertising revenue”? My mistake. That’s the other thing: Mr. Sarkozy wants to drop all advertising from public television to improve its quality, citing the BBC as a model. (Now that I think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen advertising on the BBC.)

Here, I should paint you a picture of France’s television landscape. It’s not like in the States where three major private networks battle it out, with cable on their heels, and the public service — though of great quality — gets the crumbs (political activists and public schools). French public television is a major contender; it’s channels 2, 3, 4 and 5 against the private channels 1 (TF1) and 6 (M6), which are partnered. That kind of competition takes major money. It hurts to make the Brits a compliment, but it’s true their public service is much better than ours. But couldn’t improvements be made without dropping advertising? Mr. Sarkozy proposes a tax on TV sets and something else to compensate the loss. Sure. I too thought it was too easy doing business in a country where 45 percent of the national income is redistributed through taxes. Let’s go for another percentage point.

I should also mention that Mr. Sarkozy is best buddy with Martin Bouygues, the owner of TF1, which stands to gain up to 400 millions euros in advertising transfers. Hard to believe in the sincerity of the proposal.

Back to the France Monde plan. Mr. Sarkozy is getting a lot of heat for it from other world leaders; he may have forgotten in his plan that TV5 is a joint venture with Canada, Belgium and Switzerland, and he doesn’t get to make all the decisions. They’re not so keen on funding programming that would come almost entirely from France.

But while I could see good points to all these proposals so far, there is one that just gets my ranting going. A member of the committee that drafted the France Monde project called it, in a Le Monde article back in November, an “alternative to CNN and Al-Jazeera.” It’s about putting France on the map of international news networks. Wonderful. Note that it’s exactly what France 24 was created for.

That’s all great, but how do you plan on doing that when Mr. Sarkozy has declared that France Monde should only air in French?!

“With taxpayers’ money, I am not prepared to broadcast a channel that does not speak French,” Sarkozy told journalists at a press conference earlier this month. (The Guardian)

That’s right. Bu-bye RFI’s 19 languages, France 24’s ambitious 3-language launch. Should we also drop the Quebec accent on TV5? Ridiculous. We’re not back in 1680, and all the elites of the world do not speak French fluently. Even an English-only network would be short-sighted if you ask me. RFI has a great program to teach French in all the countries it covers, with news bulletin in simplified French and lessons on the air. But how do you turn people on to learning French if you don’t first get to them in their own language?

Full disclosure: I just applied for an internship with France 24, and I’d rather not that my advantage of being fully bilingual become moot. I’d also rather not that thousands of multi-lingual correspondents around the world become unemployed. But beyond that, I’d rather not that my own country close up like a shell and multiply the demagogic, defensive actions against the supposed barbaric hordes at its doorstep. It is this very fear that shows our decline.

And Mr. Sarkozy, if really you want to defend the French Word, I’m still waiting on a French as a Second Language program in all public schools.

So, mea culpa my dear Times, at least partly. And you announced the launch of a text messaging service. Now, that’s up-and-coming technology.

By now you must have heard since you’re all wired journalists; the New York Times editorial board announced earlier today its picks for the presidential nominations. Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, and for the Republicans John McCaine (a name that cracks up everyone back home, where McCaine is a famous brand of ready-made French fries, not a senator.)

Wow, NYT, I am so surprised. You made me jump in my seat. Seriously.

Ok, so maybe it’s not the role of the New York Times to support a Joe Biden-Ron Paul race, but I had wished for a little more originality. I know we’re talking about the gray lady but come on, get me excited. Please. Your Web site videos are already light years behind the Post, and your podcasts never keep my attention.

Sure, the reporting blows me away on a regular basis. I also have a lot of respect for a copy desk that can write the most cryptic headlines and still get people to click on the hyperlinks. But the most exciting thing the Times has brought me lately was a private walk through its Pulitzer hallway in the old newsroom last spring; that’s not something you share with the rest of the readers.

I want to be excited like when I was awaiting EveryBlock’s launch. I want to be surprised. What have you got coming up? (Rumor has it, it’s good.)

7- New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2007: I haven’t read a single one, but it feels smart to know I know of them. A couple are on my to read list, especially “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.”  

6- Time’s 50 Top 10 lists: Get your craving satisfied. Among the noteworthy, the Top 10 Awkward Moments (hello, Britney), the Top 10 Man-Made Disasters (global warming, duh) and the Top 10 Green Ideas (Walmart and the U.S., really?). 

5- Ask.com’s Top 10 Search Words: MySpace is the top search (you’d think people could just type in myspace.com in the address field). Also the top 10 presidential candidate searches (Barack Obama at the top), 10 top TV show searches (Hannah Montana, seriously?) and the pregnant celeb watch, if that’s your thing. 

4- Wired’s Top 10 Startups Worth Watching in 2008: It makes me feel smart that I actually know (and use) three out of 10. 

3- OJR’s Top 5 Lessons for Online Journalism: Learn the 5 things to do with your news site right now, including “4) Ask readers for information, not articles.” Amen. 

2- Editor and Publisher’s Top 10 Newspaper Industry Stories of 2007: Of course, Murdoch and WSJ had to top the list. 

1- Foreign Policy’s Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2007: Scary to think I follow the news closely daily and I hadn’t heard of a single one of those major developments. The epidemic of dengue fever is one of the more worrisome ones: my brother got dengue when we lived in the Caribbean islands, and it’s not pleasant.  

I like how Tom puts it: “It’s not like I’m leaving because I was dying to do this, but I am really excited about it,” he said in the Sentinel’s story. A new job is exciting, but really, if he had his say… Tom also mentions in the Sentinel story that he’s expecting other cuts in the newsroom and thought his move might prevent a couple. The jury’s still out on that.

But, no, I will not yield to the sayers of dooms and glooms. And I will NOT take a job in PR. (Talk to me in 20 years, I guess.)