Before we start, I have to share a fear. Since I am writing about journalists and news, a real journalist may read this. That’s like playing golf with a PGA pro, except I can’t blame sentence structure on the wind. So now let’s start …

Even an icy morning did not stop a full room from gathering at The Harvard Club for The Future of News and Information panels presented as part of The Digital Breakfast series by Gotham Media. The first panel was a group of savvy news people that work in a day-to-day news creation role and the second panel featured a group that is using new publishing technologies and models to build, support, or maybe destroy (depends on your view) the news business as we see it today.

I’ll start by saying that I have always been a newspaper and magazine guy. I still subscribe to three newspapers, even during this “demise” of the newspaper business. In saying that, I know the problem because I was there at the beginning. When I lived in Boston, I would occasionally trek over to Out-of-Town News in Cambridge to load up on New York papers that covered Mets spring training or grab the Newark Star Ledger for job listings in New Jersey (forgive me, but I was young and wanted everyday to be a Wildwood summer day). The Internet ended that. I no longer had to buy the NY Daily News to read Lupica or The NY Post to read headline puns; I could do that online (or read the Boston Herald we used to line the parrot’s cage).

Back to the panels…The first panel was moderated by Andy Nibley, Chairman and CEO at Marsteller, and it included Tom Bettag, formally of Discovery and ABC News, Chrystia Freeland from Financial Times, and a brink-of-being-angry Martin Nisenholtz from NY Times Digital. Some points that they covered were that they felt you could charge for content, a model used by FT, but that content needed to be special and unique and it needed to add a level of value to the subscriber’s life, but what is that price point? Local news was unique, but had very low perceived value, whereas content that can help make or save the subscriber time or money could be packaged for a price. You can read more here from Kelly Samardak in the Online Minute.

The second panel featured new technology and services that could either enhance the news experience or provided a new means for building or aggregating an online presence. First up was Apture, and they offer a publishing tool that allows a publisher to link to supporting content that will display as on-domain content in a pop-up window. The idea is to keep the user on your site. It sounds very interesting, and I plan to investigate its free personal version very soon. Keith McAllister of Mochila outlined how they provided news publishers a chance to back fill their original content with news pulled from their syndication partners, such as Reuters, AP, Getty Images and many more. Andrea Spiegel of True/Slant (and formally down the hall from me at AOL where she had an office and I had a cube), explained that the yet-to-be-launched service focuses on aggregating content around a “Name” contributor, and then provide the contributor a chance to add their voice around the news of the day. They are looking for contributing specialists to fill out their line-up, so visit their site and submit your name. A couple of observations are that: 1) Mochilla seems like a perfect content supplier for Apture; 2) the old-school journalists in the office are very shaky when they saw Wikipedia being used and in discussions about identifying authoritative news sources, and 3) Unigo was the fourth company, but as a standalone publisher of a successful online college guide they are outside the scope of the other tools presented.

Tuesday night’s NY Tech Meetup was the first with new organizer Nate Westheimer in charge and the crowds still kept growing, filling the IAC lobby hall. After a brief intro from former NYTM organizer and still Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman, Nate took the “oath” of office by placing his right hand on a MacBook held by the original assistant organizer Dawn Barber. Funny, certainly geeky, but a good way to focus all those in attendance about the purpose of the NY Tech Meetup.

You don’t always love all the demos you see at the NYTM, but there are certainly times when you see something that rings a bell and may foster a new idea or application in your mind. Last night there were a couple of these, and I have linked off to Allen Stern’s Center Networks site where he has the video of the presentation.

Co-Tweet — The ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts by multiple people. I know this issue from trying to manage the tweets for my SoccerClub, TimMcGuinness and family tweets. This seems like great tool for agencies and client service groups that have this requirement. See video.

@shakeshack – Whitney McNamara presented a nifty piece of code allows you to send a reply twitter that then gets fed back to all that account followers. He downplayed it as not a big deal, but this is exactly what I want to put into play for Newport Online. Later, he graciously pointed me to where I could find the code on his blog.

Botanicalls – I can’t say I want to get tweets from my plants, but now Botanicalls makes that possible. However when you have a brother-in-law with networking and soldering skills that is involved in a new landscaping project, something like this comes into play. See video.

To throw in a personal story, my first NYTM was in September 2007 when I jumped straight into the fire by presenting the new Hakia browser toolbar. Having never attended a meet-up since I was new to NYC, imagine how scared I was when the first presentation order came out and I was first on the list. Thankfully, by the time of the meeting came around I was down to the #6 slot. However, right before me, was one of the NYC start-up world elite, Kevin Ryan along with Henry Blogget, who were announcing the launch of Silicon Alley Insider. You might say that was a tough act to follow, but I survived.

Oddly, the next time I was on stage to present it was a two-person panel that I happened to share with Nate at a NY Social Media Club gathering. Nate had just done an all nighter to release his BricaBox project. That night for me was special because I was given special permission to keep my phone on since our baby was due later that week. Talk about a new launch that keeps you up all night – Tim

SoccerClub.com

I’ve had my SoccerClub.com site since 1997. It started as plain HTML, then I taught myself Active Server Pages and converted it to a more user generated site. Not to be confused with UGC circa 2009, but UGC 1997 with forums and emailing functionality.

Back in November, I transformed it to a social network using the Ning platform. Using only Ning’s out-of-the-box features, it was pretty easy to do, but still took about a month of configuring and tweaking. From there I sent out invitations to the email addresses that I had collected over the last 3 years. The result was a quick 300 members, and since then the membership has grown to 580. I am very excited about that my goal is to push it to 1000 by the end of February.

What I have learned is the same story that the mega-billionaires have learned – there’s no money in social networking if you use the old ad model. Comparing the last two Decembers show so much. The 2007 was a standard website vs the 2008 social network.

2007 Standard vs 2008 Social Network:

• Page views are up +105%,
• Click revenue down -60%, and
• That makes eCPM is down -75%.

As a new parent of a teething child, I was in bed at 12:15 last night.

There are a couple plans that I jotted down:

• Be the best I can for my ladies
• Improve the value of my hat collection
• Take SoccerClub, Newport Online, and some new releases to the next level
• Work, success and happiness

Happy New Year.