My inveterate friend Tom Foremski picked City Lights Bookstore at 6 pm for getting together. It seemed fitting. Tom and I are both writers whose styles and perspectives were shaped in the 60s and City Lights, is the last bastion of the stormy renaissance that is usually called "The Beat Era."

I finished my business in San Francisco earlier than expected. I arrived at City lights at 4:30 with abundant time to kill.  I strolled the shelves of poet-bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti's fabled bookstore. I had read a great many of the books being offered and I had read them long ago.

But I'm not big on nostalgia and after a short while I felt like I had been there and done that as far as City Lights was concerned. I had killed less than half an hour.

I wandered outside and watched the amazing diversity of the neighborhood, clicking a few street scene photos. The neighborhood is like a Coney Island of the mind.  City Lights is sort of a cultural island surrounded by diverse sections of San Francisco. You are just a few footsteps from the Financial District, Chinatown and the restaurants of North Beach.

It also abuts the strip joints and porn shops of San Francisco's small, seamy adult entertainment district. There, just a couple of doors down from a sex toy supermarket I caught a new marquee: The Beat Museum, and I wandered over.

It cost four bucks to get in and what a weird, strange trip it will deliver. If you were on the magic bus of the 60s, its a visit to memory lane. If you were were not, then it educates you that the Beat Generation was a period of enlightenment, a time to explore the hope of peace and tolerance. Yes it was about sex and drugs, but it was so much more than that.

It was a period of art and music, of poetry and challenging conventional truths. It was a period of people bypassing powerful institutions, conventional wisdom and tolerance. It was a time where people exchanged ideas, often with great passion attached to them.

Very quickly, The Beat Museum brings all that back. It looks at the usual nexus of the era: Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy and the others, but mostly it spotlights Jack Kerouac, but mostly it talks about Jack Kerouac, author of several groundbreaking books, the best-remembered being On the Road.

Kerouac, was my favorite. His style was fast and contemporary. It sounded at times like the bebop jazz that he loved. You felt like you got to know the people he wrote about because his conversations were so, well, naked.

There are so many ties between the roots of social media and the beat era. Many of the thinkers and technologists who have provided us with the tools were shaped in that era.

It seems to me that we of the social media movement are braided and bonded to those of the Beat Generation. We have a love of innovation. We have hope for a future that provides people greater health and safety. We believe that conversation will reveal much and resolve a few differences. We have a distrust of the all-powerful and the institutional. We reserve the right to question anything.

Kerouac used a manual typewriter and wrote books. If he were alive today, I'm sure he's still write books, but he would use the tools of our time. He would be unquestionably among the most prominent of our bloggers.

The style he pioneered is the style that succeeds the best in the blogosphere, whether you are talking for an enterprise or telling about a traveling adventure.

Yes, Kerouac would have tweeted as well. He probably would also have been prolific with a handheld camera. Kerouac understood, even in writing books, that it's dialog that matters. He captured conversations in his books.

Just think of what he could do with the tools we have today. Just think of the influence he would have on the young minds of today as he had on the young minds of the 60s.

Shortly before I decided to put book-writing aside and return to consulting, I very seriously thought of writing a book called iPhoneGate.  While the book would walk through the often unexciting saga of Gizmodo publishing unauthorized advance information on the iPhone4, I had bigger issues in mind.

First above all, was the issue of free press in the Information Age. Democracies are partly called that because it has a free press We expect a certain category of professionals to dig and bypass official government declarations and the utterances of company spokespeople to find other facts and perceptions of the truth.

History has found this to be a worthwhile protection because it has often led to freedom being protected and officials being fingered as rascals.

But the press itself has long been filled with lazy, slovenly, inaccurate bums, characterizing themselves as journalists as they report on aliens impregnating celebrities. James T Calender, who described his form of journalism as "scandal-mongering" was hired by Thomas Jefferson to assassinate the character of John Adams. William Randolph Hearst, spearheaded the Spanish-American War to sell newspapers.

So the press has never been this noble institution, of great and impartial minds who dug and risked personal freedom and safety to shed sunlight on the darkest of facts. The Woodwards and Bernsteins some of us came of age idolizing; the freelance reports on the My Lai Massacre by an unknown freelancer named Seymour Hersh, or even the remarkably well-informed essays of modern pamphleteer Izzy Stone were exceptions to what everyday reporters shoveled out during a period some people now call the Golden Age of Journalism.

In fact, throughout the history of the profession we call journalism, most of what was published was universally and indisputably crap.

That would all be beside the point. Except we are now entering a new and very complicated era. Our definition of what is the press is changing. The content is moving. The filtering systems are forever altered.

Gizmodo is part of the Gawker publishing group. Gawker likes to shock it's readers. Among its online publications is an indisputable piece of porn garbage. Everything that they have ever written about me has been unkind.

So, I am not the Gawker gang's best friend. But I believe that their rights are a gate between you, me and erosion of the freedoms that we share.

People point to this as a reason why Gizmodo should not be considered press. They talk of how the Gawker group caused a stunt, to make all CES HDTV screens go dark, allegedly because they were angry about having been scooped by a rival.

But iPhoneGate is not about Gizmodo quality. It is not about professionals acting like low-rent pranksters. It's not even about the ethical questions of paying to get a story, a practice that the New York Tines says it has sometimes used.

It is about the fact that freedom is supposed to be agnostic. Free religion is supposed to respect even those groups that you and I find offensive. Free speech protects the right to publish words and picture that we find repulsive.

It is about defending the rights of people who swim far below the ethical level where you will find Gizmodo scurrying around.

There are many unanswered questions in the iPhoneGate issue. What was Apple's role in the action of a law enforcement team they advise? What evidence did they have that the Gizmodo video could or would do immeasurable damage? If Apple already had the wayward iPhone back in it's possession and police knew who had taken it, just what evidence were police looking for? Are police still investigating? How long can they keep Jason Chen's computer equipment in a locked evidence room?

Other questions, you might consider are your rights and mine helped or hurt when Apple gets to ban a press member from a news conference, because they do not like their behavior? If Steve Jobs can do that to Gizmodo, why can't Barack Obama do that to Fox News, or for that matter, the BBC to most of the media in the world.

This is all been complicated enough. But it is more complicated now than it has ever been because media is migrating to the Web and it is more difficult than it has ever been to define who is a journalist and who is not.

No law enforcement official challenges Gizmodo is press. But what about you and me? Tom Foremski, the ex Financial Times Reporter who now writes Silicon Valley Watch keeps talking about every company being a media company. Well, that would mean that every employee is a journalist. For that matter, every customer who adds content to a compan site is too.

Where does it end? Des it end at all? Who among us is not protected by the same Shield Laws that protect Gizmodo and the New York Times/ Is that a good thing or bad?

Damned if I know.

Peter Horrocks, the BBC Global News Director has told his staff to make better use of social media  and to become more collaborative in producing stories.

The Guardian quotes him as saying, "This isn't just a kind of fad.... I'm afraid you're not doing your job if you can't do those things. It's not discretionary", he is quoted as saying in the BBC in-house weekly Ariel.

According to the Guardian, Twitter and RSS readers are to become essential tools for news reporters.

It's funny. This morning, I was writing a piece for my new book that social media, now about a decade old, is at the end of it's beginning phase, a phase that has caused great disruption to just about all institutions.

We are now at the beginning of a new phase, a phase of normalization, one in which the tools of social media  start being adapted by people just to do their jobs. We will stop using the tools to talk about the tools themselves, and just use them like we use telephones and computers, to do our work and communicate with others.

A decade ago, traditional media disdained social media, occasionally ridiculing it. They are laughing no more. In major events, where fast-breaking news has occurred social media has played an increasingly vital role: Haiti, Iran, Gaza, US Air 1549 on the Hudson, cops shooting a New Year's Eve reveller, the Sczhwan Earthquake.

At a time when the media is hobbled by 20 years of budget cuts that have fragmented their networks of stringers, correspondents and affiliates, citizen journalists with mobile devices have become the feet on the street of the world's news. We have, for the most part, been fast and accurate, in our reporting.

Yet we cannot replace traditional news institutions. They remain the professionals. We don't get invited to White House News Conferences. We don't get attached to infantry units in war zones. We do not have time nor inclination to dig into databases and record logs to uncover acts of corruption.

The BBC is moving toward what I call Braided Journalism, the convergence of traditional and citizen journalism into something new and potentially superior for news coverage than anything that has preceded it.

Long ago, before we had a worldwide web and people communicated in a groundbreaking, but difficult format called Usenet, someone came up with an idea called "freeware." People soon determined that they preferred to get pretty good stuff over the Internet for free rather than more professional and polished stuff for money and that has caused a great deal of disruption as the Internet evolved to become a dominant force of content delivery.

Among the most obvious victims of freeware have been news-gathering organizations. Print publishers and broadcasters seemed well-suited to make the change at first. A print edition cost little more than pocket change and broadcast was almost totally free. In both cases, their real money came from advertisers who wanted access to those masses who followed that media.

Had media companies been willing to meet the challenges for change as they evolved  in the middle 90s, perhaps they would have been able to cross the chasm into current times; but they did not. They remained loyal to their subscription models for far too long. They underestimate the small damages like classified ads moving to Craig's List, until those little changes made big differences; many just thought that their professionalism; their access to prominent people and events would allow their old ways to endure new times and new forms of competition.

That brings us to Google, which in my view, has been the most disruptive of all forces on traditional news organizations. Google gives us all free access to content that historically was produced by professionals as a way to earn a living. The advertising that supported media has migrated to the Internet where Google has become the largest beneficiary.

And when media companies say that revenue derived from advertising that supports content they produced, Google has shrugged it's mighty do-no-evil shoulders, telling media companies they are free to not make their content available on Google anymore.

I am no great fan of the public companies that own news-based organizations. neither are the editors and reporters who have worked for them. But that loss of revenue has been the driving force in the brutal reduction in paid news professionals.

Now there are two factors that have entered center stage. The first is Bing, a very nice search engine developed by Microsoft that many users find to be just as good as Google, but not really better in most cases.

Then there's the decision by Rupert Murdoch. mean-spirited billionaire owner of NewsCorp, which is perhaps the world's leading producer of news content, including the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and myriad and diverse other brands.

Murdoch has been persistent in arguing that Google and other search engines should pay professional news organizations for their content inthe form of sharing ad revenues. Google has declined, saying Murdoch is free to withhold his content from Google Search results.

The online community of course sides with Google, which is generally regarded as an ultimately cool company. It's billionaire leadership is younger and far more charming than Murdoch, wh has been called "old school" and clueless in recent days.

Maybe it's a personal thing, but I believe when someone prospers from someone else's work, the original producer should share in that wealth. I think fair beats cool every day.

For those who think social media practitioners can replace all professionals, I'd ask you to think again.  A loss of professional news will not make the world safer, freer or better informed place.

For those of you who feel Google shareholders should be the overwhelming profit recipients of reporters hard work, I would ask you to rethink just what is fair and what is not.

In fact, now that I think about it, when Google and the search engines serve up my content-the content you are reading right now--and put an ad next to it, why should I not benefit from the revenue--or you--or anyone else?

Now, News Corp is forging an exclusive deal with Bing that would provide Microsoft's challenging search engine with content not available to people who just use Google. This complicates matters for users, but getting the News Corp content will still cost users nothing.

For those who argue that no news source has value because so many sources now produce news. This is partly true. Likewise, as we recently saw in Iran, on the Hudson River, in Gaza and Mumbai, citizens are very often producing the most valuable news content.

All true. But the world will not be a better or freer place without traditional news organizations. We are not close to the day when bloggers will be invited t attend White House news conferences. Nor will we very often be airdropped to cover wars or national disasters. Some citizen journalists may be digging into investigative efforts, but so far, nothing on the scale of Watergate has emerged.

Most people, myself I know, myself included, and some employed by the man, do not hold Rupert Murdock in a very high regard.

But let's not have that cloud the merits of his case for being compensated fairly for the reuse of NewsCorp content. And because others just happen to think Google is the coolest of Internet companies, one avowed to do no evil, should get away with prospering with intellectual property that others labored to produce.

I was in Seville, in a major city square where I saw the two, uniformed, armed policemen on little mopeds. I smiled at them & they smiled back until  took out my little pocket camera. Then there's hands went up and they moved toward me gesturing to put the camera away. I complied.

I had a similar experience at the Rome Airport when I tried to photograph a heavily armed soldier smoking a cigarette outside security.

I would later find out that both countries had passed laws against taking pictures of law of officers and the military after very serious acts of terrorism had occurred. The thought of censorship in democracies had crossed my mind, but terrorism has certainly caused my own country to pass disturbing laws in the name of democracy that restricted some people's freedom.

Perhaps the laws are necessary. I have personal doubts. But those who know more about the tools that lead to machine gun fire in Italian Airports and bombs in Spanish planes and jets smashing into high-rise buildings are supposed to know more abut what is required than I do.

But then, the cases of over response in the name of freedom are long and well document. And the use of the camera is an instrument in revealing those abuses are even longer, as we have seen during Mumbai and the Iran election; in the record excessive use of force in a BART station on New Years Day this year and in the clubbing of Rodney King in LA back in 1991.

The camera has shown the truth when authorities entrusted to protect the public were in fact deceiving the public.

I write all this because the British have passed and are attempting to defend one of the most abusive and discriminatory laws I have heard of since maybe the Stamp Act in the time of the American Revolution.

It seems that in the name of freedom countries sometimes do the lamest things, as the US has so recently done in the case of Guantanamo. The British law is being explained by authorities as not being applicable to innocent tourists but will applied to people who appear as though they might be terrorist.

I assume that means white people in Western clothing can take pictures. Darker people in Eastern--or mid-Eastern-garb may be subject to arrest, interrogation or the mere confiscation of their cameras.

I really shouldn't have to tell you what's wrong with that. British citizen of all hues and clothing tastes shouldn't have to fight against such appalling, subjective discrimination. 

And in the name of fighting for freedom, freedom itself should not be so easily tromped upon by any government claiming to be a democracy.

[NOTE: I am running late to make a plane and I have not added quite a few pictures and links that may be useful when I get a chance. I assume it is still legal for me to post the pictures.]

I first heard about the the incidents two days after they started. William Herring,  tweeted me a link to the first of four videos I would see. Each gave the impression that police were using overwhelming force against an apparently small and nonviolent group of protesters in a park  near the University of Pittsburgh.

After I retweeted that, I would discover the protests were against the G20 assembly of top level leaders the world's 20 largest industrial and developing nations, a gathering that I overwhelmingly support, in the US city that has made the best comeback over the past half century.

Video such as this one disturbed me. It was sandwiched between slabs of street-protest rhetoric and was clearly edited. Yet it displayed pretty good evidence that police had been more than a little zealous in their disbursement tactics. It was also the first indication that police had been "federalized." Why had that not been reported in traditional media. When had they been federalized and what was the reason?

As a tweeter-blogger, I didn't know; nor did I feel free to call the US attorney general's office and say I was a blogging citizen journalist whose readers wanted answers.

So I stayed with the videos and I found them ugly. When I tweeted that there had not been anything like this in the US since the 1960, I was almost immediately corrected. The G20 meeting in Seattle in 1999 had caused havoc on the streets where avowed anarchists clashed with police, causing personal injury, property damage, and disruption to that city for almost a full week. Not much got accomplished inside the World Trade Organization summit of financial ministers.

At about that point, Perry Caldwell, a new Tweeter sent me a clip from KDKA, Pittsburgh's Channel 2 news site reporting many windows being broken and other minor damage. He condemned violence on both sides, but seemed to me to think police had acted properly.

I felt the KDKA story was  one-sided and did not explain the massive police action involving  tear gas, smoke grenade and new ultrasonic "sound cannons" that evoke a head-splitting noise that seemed suited for an Orwellian novel.

I have my own one-sided view as well. I was a protester against war and for civil rights in the 60s. I tasted tear gas and came very close to feel a policeman's club on my head. My attitudes have changed, but I'm generally skeptical of unlawful assembly charges because they fly in the face of American rights to assembly.

Then Ed Shah jumped in. Ed and I frequently talk in Twitterville. He impresses me as passionate as I am about human rights and police states. Ed pointed out that the US had an obligation to protect world leaders when the are assembled on American soil. He also speculated that the street noise could be a distraction for a more dangerous act of terrorism against the G20 and of course he is right.

1. I quieted down and stepped back. There were lots of issues intertwining here. I really didn't know much about what was going on. Nor did I know much about the events building up to the confrontation on the streets.

I realized that I am not a news organization. The people with whom I connect to "report" on an issue are not a news network. We were stepping in to fill a void created by a media industry in atrophy but we really still lack the organization, leadership, legs and budget that the old dynasties had provided.

Had I been an editor, with budget and staff and Pittsburgh or the G20 had been part of our beat, here are a few things I would have done:

• I would have assigned and coordinated a handful of reporters, correspondents and stringers. I would have assigned one to interview the police chief, mayor, Pitt officials to get their side of the story. I would have a political correspondent speak with officials at Justice, State and maybe FBI. I would have that reporter write about the government thinking and decisions as well as what they knew that helped them reach the decisions.

• I would have assigned anther reporter to attach her or himself to the protesters, writing human interest pieces about them, where they were from, how they got to Pittsburgh and why as well as what they hoped to accomplish. I would have insisted the leaders be interviewed and their backgrounds checked out. I would have investigated where their money had come from.
• I would have had someone research both the protest movement against globalization as well as a brief history of US street protests and what they did or did not achieve.
• I would have had my art department draw maps showing the proximity or distance between protesters and the G20 Summit. I would have investigated the possible vulnerabilities caused by the protests.
• I would have spoken to local citizens and non participating eyewitnesses who could shed light on what they had seen.

And so on. But I am in no position to do any of those things. Unfortunately, it appears that neither is the press whose coverage of this protest has been thin at best and apparently written without having been there or seen anything firsthand.

This why I have become a proponent of what I call braided journalism, the coming together of tweeters like me with professional organizations like the New York Times. We have seen samples of this in the last 18 months; the Szechuan Earthquake, Mumbai, Gaza, Iran Elections, Station Fire and many other incidents.

When citizen and traditional journalism braid together the pubic is better served. We come closer to getting the whole story. The information provided tends to be more balanced. Our right to know allows us to form opinions on sufficient information.

G20 is now over. All parties will go home and share their thoughts with friends. Maybe some reflective commentary will appear online. But overall most people won't know what happened there because of a failure of braiding the information together and reporting on it.

Twitterville had a chapter called "Braided Journalism." It talks about the convergence of citizen and traditional journalism in a social media space.

A good example is the story of Janis Krums, who tweeted the photo of US Air Flight #1549 landing on the Hudson River. The guy just wanted to get to New Jersey, but by coincidence he became perhaps the most famous citizen journalist in modern times.

A sidebar is that Janis's jaw-dropping photo was used with abandon and without permission by traditional news outlets. The process slowed and got complicated when he started asking for royalty payments.

It seems to me that he braid of journalism I discussed in Twitterville was missing an important element--the monetization strand. We who provide content on blogs and at Flickr; we who have become passionate or have stumbled upon the power and potential of organizing citizen journalistic efforts need to eat.

Like traditional journalists through history, the passion put into reporting far exceeds the tangible rewards most of us have realized.

We have now entered into a massively transformational era, one in which most institutions are either being restructured or replaced. Evidence is pretty compelling that the era of mass marketing is being redirected into highly niched and/or localized marketing efforts, something I like to call mass micro marketing.

Nike, for example, has started a series of ads targeted at specific niches that range from Native Americans to swimmers to young adults in a specific urban neighborhood.  Niche marketing is far from new, but what is new is a refocus on its value as a core strategy for global merchants.

which also are nothing new. This of course coincides with the acceleration of hyperlocal journalistic efforts. As my friend Ryan Kuder, who has played in hyperlocal, recently tweeted, "hyperlocal has been just around the corner for the past 15 years."

But now there's compelling evidence that the corner is being turned. Big media is getting smaller and grassroots new media organizations are starting to fill the huge voids caused by the old guard's contractions. Veteran journalists who have lost their jobs are finding new homes in it. J-school students who may find the jobs they are being trained for do not exist, are gravitating to it. Not only that, but people like Janis Krums, just happen to be on the scene when news pops up unexpectedly.

There is a natural opportunity for big branders to start looking more closely at hyperlocal organizations. There is also a huge opportunity for a large, fragmented and usually overlooked advertiser in the local merchant.

You local restaurant, dry cleaner or retailer has been filtered out of most marketing systems for years, drowned out by louder voices with bigger budgets who often enjoy lower ad rates by buying volume.

Your local dry cleaner, or plumber has limited options in social media, even from the perspective of a social media zealot like me. She or he used to put ads in local Yellow Pages, but they have gone; hometown radio stations lost in consolidations; bus panel advertising until much of society stopped using public transit. They used to have the hometown weekly newspapers but they too have dried up.

But now there's hyperlocal and the opportunity for the local merchant to sponsor coverage of a local street fair or soccer game, or clean up campaign or sponsoring a safe streets campaign.

In the past few months I have become less frightened by the large writing on cyberwalls that declares traditional media is dead and more heartened by the fact that something new, monetizable is emerging that will fulfill many aspects of the public's need to know what is happening in their neighborhoods and on their planet.

I see many pieces floating around, occasionally bumping against each other and sometimes converging. It will take time. For the past 60 years or so, nearly all marketing, branding, communications and advertising professionals have been trained to think big, to send one message or image that impacts masses of people.

Now there is a need to reverse the strategy, to think small, to get personal, to relate to either a physical or global neighborhood. This will take time, some successful practitioners in both media and marketing will not make the change successfully.

But in the end, I see a braid of journalism and marketing that will thrive. It will look very differently than the products that prevailed in the Broadcast Era. There will be much greater audience participation. News services will be more fragmented and decentralized than they have been in perhaps a hundred years.

But the braiding of new marketing with new journalism will occur there is a need on the parts of all parties concerned, particularly the public. The people who provide the content will begin o see the rewards. The merchants who have been shut out will be allowed back in. And the smartest mass marketers will discover the value of thinking local.

[Roland Bryan, Director of Strategy, Associated Northcliffe Digital.Photo by Shel]

Richard Titus, a serial entrepreneur, was a co-founder of Razorfish, the legendary ad agency that introduced, for better or worse, interactive advertising to the internet. It got sold to Microsoft and Richard walked away quite comfortably.

A couple of years back he and I served on the board of directors for YourTrumanShow, a video blogging startup that didn't survive the current recession. Richard, a Californian living in London has been an executive at BBC for the past few years, until he recently got recruited away to become CEO of Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND), the online component of A&N Media, the UK's second largest media company in the UK.

A&N is best known as publisher of the Mail and Metro, but in all it has about 120 British tabloids, a significant number of radio stations and other holdings.

Richard has been in the US with Roland Bryan, AND's director of strategy and John Harmsworth [Lord Rothermere], who heads A&N. They were in the States so that Titus could introduce them to people they knew in the technology community, particularly where it could be useful to building online community platforms.

At dinner, I found myself sitting next to John who shared with me that he understands the dubious future of newspapers moving forward. He really needs not look much further than down the hall of his own home where neither of his two sons looks at newspapers. Instead, they spend their time on Facebook and MySpace. He said he doubted that these two possible heirs to this media empire would ever turn away from online spaces and onto newspaper pages.

Most of my conversation was with Roland who started LocalPeople a couple of months ago. It sounded to me to be a most promising implementation of hyperlocal journalism when we talked last night.

I just spent an hour with it and it seems to me even more promising now. When you look at it, you'll recognize the functionality from platforms you've probably seen such as Twitter, Yelp,Flickr and maybe a shade of Facebook. Video is coming soon and will have similarities, of course, with YouTube.

The key difference between LocalPeople and most hyperlocal efforts I've come across such as the New York Times special section covering the innards of two Brooklyn neighborhoods, is that the AND effort looks and sounds like local people talking to each other in a cafe or over a backyard fence. The Times looks and feels like, well, the Times.

LocalPeople reads and feels more like Twitter than it does a newspaper, but unlike Twitter it is organized into geographic, rather than global neighborhoods. Roland emphasized there is no news in LocalPeople. If real news broke in one of these communities, the media company would dispatch a tabloid reporter. But now, the color and nuance of the local story can be greatly enhanced by LocalPeople.

This of course gets me jumping up and down gleefully. This is a form a braided journalism, one of my personal passion spots. Braided Journalism is about traditional and citizen journalism coming together, intertwining and emerging into something new, superior and enduring from what we have today.

The "enduring" part has been elusive as I have looked around at various new media news activities. Roland understands that if you want to attract local merchants the language and complexities of CPMs and Clickthroughs needs to be abandoned.

Local ad deals are quite simple. AND asks merchants what measurable results they want to achieve over the next year, and then calculates what LocalPeople would have to do to achieve it. Then they charge it and the merchant can very simply measure results.

"All we really have to do is be more valuable than the Yellow Pages," he said.

I see enormous promise in LocalPeople. The platform allows a great deal of self management and self organization. I think local merchants will immediately "get" the desirability of moving into venues where their customers have already migrated.

I'm going to keep my eye on this one.

About a week ago, traditional publishing giant McGraw Hill announced it wanted to sell or spin BusinessWeek, one of the most venerable of all American business publications. The news, I am told, stunned most of the editors and reporters still there.

So far, almost no one has pointed to a possible acquirer and almost everyone close to the matter believes BusinessWeek is going to have to change business models if it is to survive. So far, at least two well-known BusinessWeek writers have suggested possible solutions. Design writer Bruce Nussbaum suggested two new models; the first being sort of an ongoing forum on selected business topics and the second by Stephen Baker, who covers social media suggests converting a portion of the publication into a wiki.

In 2005, while I was writing Naked Conversations, Baker really irked me by implying that somehow journalistic standards for blogging were inferior to those required to write for BusinessWeek. For a while I nursed an idea of taking him on in my book, until on the third or fourth revision of the book, I realized that Baker had a valid point.

As a blogger, I often post content on one draft. As readers remind me, I often miss obvious and blatant typos. I have no editor questioning and filtering what I have to say. I have no colleagues sharing an anecdote or insight that will make my story better. When writing books, I undergo much more editorial scrutiny, but even there, it is not the hard-nosed, Devil's Advocate style of a quality news editor who has general authority over the content provider.

This is true, not just for me. It is true for most social media writers who provide original content. Few of us are parts of a team and only a tiny handful of online social publications have our copy scrutinized and challenged by editors.

Yet, in recent years, we are the ones who are finding--and telling--an increasing portion of the world's stories. A 19-year-old, Dutch kid named Casper Oppenhuis de Jong, tweeted the first news of the Szechuan Earthquake to the west, where traditional media picked it up; Janis Krums was just trying to get to New Jersey, when a plane landed on the Hudson River when he took a TwitPic of a plane landing. The increasing role of people with cameras and connected devices in Mumbai, Gaza and Tehran have driven the point home with drama and flair in the last year. Traditional media have turned to people on the streets of the world to get the information of the world and share it with subscribers.

And yet there is an ambivalence about it, I imagine at places like BusinessWeek. We on the streets are unknown factors. We do not always report with accuracy. Sometimes, as is the case currently in Iran, we won't even reveal who we are or what sources we have. Many, like Casper or Janis, had no plans to contribute to citizen journalism. Casper was in a bookstore so he could Skype home to his folks in Amsterdam. Janis parked in New Jersey because it was cheaper than driving into Manhattan. And yet they both changed the information the world needed--and wanted.

Stephen Baker, talks about the "last 5%," that extra effort many elite publications take with pride to get the precise words that make a story more accurate and polished. He's right. Very few social media writers have time, desire or talent to do that.

The world will not be a better place, however, if the salvation of BusinessWeek is in snipping off that last 5% of quality. And the world will not be a better place if the extremely talented team that is BusinessWeek succumbs to the extreme challenges that traditional media organizations face today.

It seems to me that most people see the value of both the disciplines of old media and the speed and breadth of new media. It seems to me that the news organization of the future will need to braid these two camps of traditional and citizen journalists into something that emerges into something new and different; something that does not yet exist but needs to; something that can cut the costs of printing inefficiencies while increasing the speed in which information is distributed.

This new, "braided" BusinessWeek, would of course move to online only. It would abandon the antiquated concept of news being released once weekly. It would do almost everything that the organization is already doing at BusinessWeek.com, but it would become a much more social platform, incorporating functionality from independent blogs, tweets, YouTube and podcasts.

In my [undetailed] vision for an braided BusinessWeek, the organization would use content submitted by social media people. It would not be instantly published. Editors would revise, challenge and polish. The news would be posted as quickly as possible.

There would also be some form of revenue sharing. Instead of just giving a blogger a stringer's pittance, the social media person and the publication would revenue share any advertising. BusinessWeek would cover local business news and offer advertising to local and regional advertisers.

I hope it's not too late for BusinessWeek. If it is, I hope some other publication will look at this concept of braiding traditional and citizen journalism in a social media venue as an enduring solution to an chronic problem.

[ Flight 1549 lands on the Hudson, a fine Braided Journalism moment. Photo by Janis Krums]

As I've mentioned, my favorite Twitterville chapter is called "Braided Journalism." The chapter covers Twitter's role in Mumbai, Gaza, the Szechwan Earthquake, the landing of US Air Flight 1549 on the Hudson, the video recorded New Year's Day BART shooting and a good many other instances where citizen and traditional journalism have converged in social media spaces.

The book was locked up on June 12, the day of the Iran Elections, an incident which showed how fast new events eclipse the old in this category. The concluding point of the chapter is that traditional and citizen journalism are converging. "We have become the feet on the streets of the world when news breaks," I wrote.

Yet, most reasonable people realize the world will not be a better place, if the discipline, ethics and professionalism of traditional media disappears. I may no longer see a purpose for a daily newspaper delivered to my door by a fossil burning vehicle, but I most certainly see a value for the New York Times and its long-established standards for excellence. I look at the former Christian Science Monitor, whose slow death as a tangible newspaper was followed by the welcomed excellence of the CSMonitor.com which has risen like a phoenix from the newspaper's ashes.

This thing that I call braided journalism seems to be emerging everywhere in a variety of forms styles and focuses.

One of my favorites has little to do with events of the scope and importance of say Iran or Mumbai. Take for example, girl's basketball. A former NBA sports reporter grew passionate about his sport finding it less tainted than even boys sports. So he started a blog site called Hoopgurlz as a citizen journalism project. He got some sponsorship and then ESPN acquired it where it is now flourishing as is he, I assume.

Some laid off Baltimore Sun reporters regrouped and started BaltimoreBrew, a sponsored blog dedicated to "stirring up news and views," and has started getting sponsorship to allow them to do work the Baltimore Sun apparently can no longer afford to do. On a global level, ProPublica, established in part by ex-LA Times reporters is a volunteer network of investigative reporters who were concerned that the kind of digging that made journalism different and superior to the fluff that fills so many surviving news columns, was becoming a luxury during tough economic times. There news is often the stuff the Pulitzers should be made of such as their recent look at nurses whose criminal records go undetected.

The NY Times, has taken a different route and weaves the locals on the street with pro journalists with something called "The Local." It is breaking new ground with a braided journalism experiment covering two largely ignored Brooklyn neighborhoods, giving the type of hometown, dig-under-the-fingernails coverage he every community deserves.

I could not go very far in any direction related to braided journalism, without stumbling across the Miami-based Knight Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to the betterment of journalism, started in 1950 with some of the considerable profits gleaned by the formerly venerable Knight-Ridder newspaper empire.

Since 1950, the Knight Foundation, "dedicated to excellence in journalism," has helped in the education of over 100,000 journalists and has contributed north of $1 billion toward the betterment of information quality at the community level.

In recent years more and more of Knight's efforts have gone toward projects that are based online. There's little doubt their efforts will change. They seem to be in a catbird position for the emergence of a new generation of Web-based media that will incorporate new media with time-established ethics and practices.

This is an area of emerging interest to me, and I think importance to how people will get their information in the coming decades. I will revisit some of the organizations mentioned here and I would love to hear from you if you can point to evidence of convergence between traditional and citizen journalism in social media venues.

I am always on the outlook for a next book possibility and Braided Journalism is among those that captures my personal passion. Bt whether it becomes a book or not, depends on what I find and to an almost equal degree, what people tell me here and on Twitter.