There have been plenty of obituaries written for the newspaper business, most of which have a kernel of truth to them — but is journalism as we know it at risk as well? Dave Winer, a programming guru and visiting scholar at the New York University school of journalism, says it is. In a blog post on Friday, Winer argued that “journalism itself is becoming obsolete” because now anyone can do it. Is he right? In some ways, yes. One thing is for sure: Journalism is being transformed by the web and by real-time publishing networks and what Om calls the “democracy of distribution.” Whether that’s good or bad depends on your point of view.

Winer’s post was actually about the recent kerfuffle over TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington’s launch of a venture-capital fund, a topic that has received more than enough coverage already elsewhere. But in the process of talking about that issue — and how Arrington has never made any claims to be a journalist — Winer said that as far as he is concerned, journalism as we know it is becoming obsolete, in part because non-journalists can do it just as easily as journalists can. The bottom line, he says, is that journalism itself was “a response to publishing being expensive.”

It cost a lot of money to push bits around the net before there was a net. They had to have huge capital-intensive printing plants, fleets of trucks and delivery boys with paper routes. Now we can hear directly from the sources and build our own news networks. It’s still early days for this… but in a generation or two we won’t be employing people to gather news for us. It’ll work differently.

If it’s important, the news will find me

Winer is certainly right about the fact that the way we consume “news,” and even where that news comes from, has changed dramatically in just the last few years. For many people, as we’ve described before at GigaOM, news now comes from their social graph via Facebook, or through a Twitter stream — possibly read in a news-curation app like Flipboard or Zite, or through an aggregator like Techmeme or Memeorandum, which collects news hits published on blogs by people who may or may not even see themselves as journalists.

But is it right to say that journalism was a response to the fact that publishing was expensive? Not really. Newspapers and their whole business model, which involved becoming a mass medium in order to aggregate eyeballs and then sell them to advertisers, was a response to publishing being expensive. And many of the things that are most criticized about the newspaper approach to journalism — including what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere,” and the omniscient tone that many journalists take — are definitely an outgrowth of that model.

But none of those things are really journalism, which is why media theorist Clay Shirky says that rather than focus on saving newspapers, he would prefer to focus on saving journalism. And what is journalism? Everyone has their own definition, but I think it’s fundamentally about a spirit of inquiry, of curiosity, of wanting to make sense of things. It’s something like the spirit of scientific inquiry, as Matt Thompson noted recently in a post at the Poynter Institute. It has very little to do with specific tools or specific methods of publishing.

Random acts of journalism

Winer is right about journalism changing because anyone can do it, however, as we’ve also described a number of times. That trend, which has turned sources of news into publishers (allowing them to “go direct” as Winer likes to say) began with blogs and has continued with Twitter and Facebook and other tools. Andy Carvin, who has become a one-man newswire by curating news about the Arab Spring on Twitter, says he prefers to think of journalism as an act rather than a profession. So people like Sohaib Athar, a Pakistan resident who live-tweeted the raid on Osama bin Laden as it was happening, engaged in what Carvin calls a “random act of journalism.”

Instead of saying journalism is obsolete, I would rather say it as evolving and expanding — and I happen to believe that’s a good thing. What does it consist of now? Most of the things it used to, as well as some new ones: building connections with your reader community is a journalistic skill, and curation of the type Carvin does (and the NYT is experimenting with via its @NYTlive Twitter account) certainly is. And we still need people to confirm facts and ferret out misinformation when news is breaking, which is what makes Snopes one of my favorite non-journalistic journalism sites.

We need people who can interview other people and make sense of what they say — which is why Reddit has some aspects of journalism to it, and Quora does too (Winer recently asked why a newspaper like the New York Times hasn’t adopted an approach like Quora). All these skills and more are required — and the ability to aggregate things in a smart way, and the ability to understand and make sense of large amounts of data.

Will journalism as a whole suffer because some people engage in conflicts of interest or abuse anonymous sources or break any of the other so-called rules of journalism? Not really. Most of the popular newspapers and media outlets of the last 50 years have done all that and worse (yes, even worse than News Corp.’s phone hacking). Newspapers may come and go and bloggers may rise and fall, but journalism continues — not so much as an institution, but as a state of mind and a series of beliefs, and a way of behaving. There are just more ways to do it now, rightly or wrongly.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users ShironekoEuro and Zarko Drincic

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Updated: AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong this morning announced on stage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference that the web giant has purchased the technology blogging site for an undisclosed amount, a story Om broke last night. While we don’t know yet how much AOL paid for the blog network founded by Michael Arrington (at least one report says $25 million), we’re happy for him and his team (even though Arrington called Om his “nemesis” onstage at the Disrupt conference). We’ll update this post with more details as we get them, and in the meantime feel free to read the post penned by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong over at TechCrunch. Or read our original story from last night.

Although neither Arrington nor Armstrong would comment on the details of the deal, the AOL CEO did say that it was important for the company that the TechCrunch founder stay with the blog network, and in a comment after the announcement, Arrington said that he “had a feeling” he would stick around at AOL “for at least three years, due to a number of incentives.” When asked for a Twitter-length comment about why he bought the blog network as he was running to catch a plane, Armstrong said TechCrunch was “the future brand of the Internet.” The AOL CEO also said in his comments on stage that the idea behind the acquisition was to “get TechCrunch content to as wide a readership as possible.”

Update: Arrington also raised the issue of editorial independence during his brief discussion with the AOL CEO after the two signed the agreement on stage, where they were joined by TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde. The TechCrunch founder said that he asked AOL what would happen if some internal company documents were leaked to the blog network, the way internal Twitter documents were last year: Would TechCrunch be free to publish them? According to Arrington, the terms of the deal with AOL provide “complete editorial freedom” for the blog network.

The TechCrunch founder has written a blog post about the rationale behind the deal, which he says was partly about getting access to AOL’s engineering and advertising resources but also about CEO Tim Armstrong’s vision for the company. Arrington also told Robert Scoble that maintaining an independent voice was part of the deal. Embedded below is a video of the signing of the agreement on stage at Disrupt.

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9. You went and got all tricked out.
I mean with your next business, not your fashion sense. But remember how you got your first hit — with a kindergarten-level UI that any neophyte could comprehend. Sure your friends called you Forrest Gump and sneered that you were lucky; that’s their problem. Trying to prove to your friends that you’re really, truly smart isn’t good business. Delivering a simple, usable concept that solves problems and makes money is.

8. VC meetings go a little too well.
During your first run, half the VCs shooed you out of their offices, while the other half spent as much time looking at their BlackBerrys as they did you during your presentation. But now VCs call you and when you do take a meeting, all you hear is praise. No matter that a VC doesn’t understand your pitch, you get a term sheet anyway. (And who can fault you for co-investing with OATV-Sequoia-KPCB?)

7. You have hobbies that require special outfits.
Your hobby used to be promoting your company six days a week. Now when anyone asks you what’s new, you talk toys, not shop. You’re proud that you “only paid” $1.4 million for that catamaran parked on Catalina Island, but there are hidden costs — like the time you spent shopping for it, and the clothes you doff while sitting on it (you can’t sail it, remember?). You know what they say about big boats: Every extra foot of length equates to another diminishing asset — your shareholders’ value.

6. Every weekend is a 3-day affair.
Your workweek used to be six days. Now you work four days because Mondays you have jetlag and Thursday nights you host pool parties. Cut your three-day weekends down to one per month.

5. You have an entirely new “crew.”
When your star was just starting to rise, hanging with other nerd founders and bloggers was your idea of a good time. Now you have a contact list filled with party hangers-on. Nothing says one-hit wonder like a circle of friends you don’t really know.

4. You sign the dinner bill without reading it.
At your first hit company you never even expensed airport parking, so concerned were you with impressing your investors by coming in under budget. Today you have a private car service and don’t even see the dinner bill. If you’re eating at Evvia’s table 50 twice a week, you’re hurtling toward one-hit wonderdom.

3. You confuse junkets with networking opportunities.
Experienced people know the difference between an authentic business-building event and just another excuse for a corporate-sponsored party. I can say this, because I go every year: The Super Bowl is not a networking event. Figure out which events are which. And if you can’t seem to do that, go find a cave where you can build your next arc reactor.

2. You’ve uttered any three of the following five lies:
That wasn’t my first startup.
Well, money’s not that important to me.
I have no regrets selling to [Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IDG or that PE firm].
I would never consider buying it back.
I’m going into venture capital to share my experience.

And the No. 1 indicator you’re at risk of becoming a one-hit wonder…

1. You’ve lost your stomach for mistakes.
Business in Startupville is defined by ebbs and flows — one step forward, two steps back. Now you’re so concerned with preserving your new success, you’ve lost the ability to tolerate the ebb of a negative blog post, a business model rehash, or the need to issue pink slips. Business success is the result of being able to adapt to and tolerate temporary failures.

Larry Chiang is the founder of duck9.com, which helps college students improve their credit ratings. He is a frequent contributor to Found|READ.

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By now it’s time to address the latest, and arguably the most powerful, networking tool in any founders’ arsenal: Twitter. It’s simple. If you’re not “tweeting,” you’re missing half the conversation. Just ask Sarah Lacy. (How different Lacy’s now-infamous SXSW interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg might have been had she been plugged into the tweets flying around the conference room floor!) Don’t know how to use Twitter? No sweat. Here are my 8 Tips for How to Work a Twitter Party.
(Photo credit: News.com. SXSW Tweeters celebrating before the ill-fated Zuckerberg interview.)

First things first: For founders, the goal of Twittering isn’t to tell people what we ate for lunch, but to get technology influencers — like Dave McClure, Mike Arrington or Guy Kawasaki — to read and respond to our Twitter feeds. In Twitter nomenclature, this is called “following.”

1. Don’t be afraid to Tweet above your head. McClure is an Alpha Tweeter. One tweet from Dave is like a TechCrunch link two years ago. But you’re no one, so you’ll have to tweet Dave five times to get him to reciprocate, and do something really interesting for him to “follow” your feed. Reciprocity is also a must. Guy Kawasaki, a top Twitter-er, takes this to the extreme, following every Tweeter who follows him. So do I. Use text message updates to keep tabs on those tweeting you.

2. Watch your Twitter ratios. Spammers have a bad follower-to-following ratio, so don’t randomly follow 20, 200 or 2,000 people without some Twittering under your belt. Similarly if you’re twittering a little too substantively, or have a banal topic, then expect to have a horrible updates-to-follower ratio. (my updates-to-followers ratio is bad because I tweet about FICO scores, a topic so dull that my “ABC News” segment on YouTube only has 12 views.)

3. Leverage what’s going on. If you knew HP would buy EDS a week ago or a month ago, then tweet and claim credit. I’m not joking, people. Do this. Did you walk in on a powerSet 2.0 pitch at Peet’s on University Ave.? Twitter that too.

4. Move your Twitter conversation(s) off-line. Good meet-ups can start with Twitter marketing. Good examples include Startup School or Sarah’s book-signing in San Francisco. Twitter loves Y Combinator and vice versa! Tweet your friends to organize a pre-party (like a breakfast at Fraiche) and voila! One day prior to your event, and the RSVP list on Facebook is 50 percent over capacity.

5. Migrate your real-world conversation to Twitter. At ad-tech, I was with Oren Michels, Scott Rafer, Owen Thomas and others. During post-conference parties, people tweeted back-and-forth other constantly. What does this do? It stimulates more face-to-face conversation! Indeed, working the Twitter party makes the real party you’re at better, bigger and better-documented.

6. Time your tweets. A great man once told me: “Be a vacation in your interactions with people.” He meant: “Don’t tax your conversation partners.” Is reading your Twitter feed a part-time job, or a little beach break that people can take from right inside their cube at work? For maximum impact, release your tweets with the time of day in mind. News-related tweets fly in the morning. Post-lunch tweets should be on the lighter side.

7. Pre-write some of your material. There is nothing wrong with pre-composing a few impromtu tweets. Think improv comedians don’t prepare? So don’t post stream of consciousness to your Twitter. And whatever you do, don’t tweet with a buzz on.

8. Work the Twitter Room for product development. A product manager for pbWiki, Kris, was recently using Twitter to collect ideas for product tweaks. So I chimed in with a tweet requesting that updates to my company’s 400 pbWiki pages be distributed via email, but only to those who’ve actually edited those pages. Hey Dave Weekly (founder of pbWiki), did you know your employees work the Twitter Party for your benefit?

Written by Larry Chiang, founder of duck9.com, which helps college students improve their credit ratings. He is also a frequent contributor to Found|READ.

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Question of the Day: Do social networks exploit their user-content generators?

I don’t know if you saw Billy Bragg’s Op-Ed yesterday, The Royalty Scam, but it’s worth reading as a criticism of social media business models that leverage the intellectual and artistic capital of users to build a traffic base that can be monetized — and then don’t share the wealth.

Specifically, singer/songwriter Bragg is griping about Bebo, which he argues built its 40 million-strong user base in just 2 years, in part, because indie artists allowed Bebo to showcase their music for free and that this helped Bebo snag its $850 million sale price from AOL last week.

Bragg writes:
“The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend…
The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?”

In Bragg’s camp, Nick Carr calls this exploitation. Mike Arrington thinks the musicians should be so lucky to have their art exposed on such a large platform. But then there is a chicken & egg dilemma here: did the draw of free music help build the Bebo community/platform the musicians now benefit from, and do the musicians deserve credit for this?

So the debate forms our Question of the Day:

Is it time for social network business models to evolve?</strong
* Is user generated content equivalent to work product?
* Are users’ contributions in building a community site equal to sweat equity?
* Should social networks compensate user-generators for either?
* Should this come in the form of sharing advertising revenue with user-generators?
* Or, should Bebo’s founders and VCs distribute some of their $850 million equity windfall with Bebo’s content-generators?

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