Today, it is Cloud Computing. “The Cloud” may indeed change computing forever, but no one really understands quite how yet. That doesn’t stop people from writing about it, however. Companies are again clamoring for people who can write about the nebulous technology. Publications want to be regarded as the most authoritative source of cloud news. (One editor told me: “We want to be known as the expert on all-things-cloud.”) And yet few really know what they are talking about. In most cases, it’s more like a Rorschach test, with companies projecting what they hope cloud will do for their business. They spend big on advertising to crow about how their products and services relate to the cloud. And they churn out a never-ending stream of white papers and “thought-leadership” articles to show that they understand what cloud computing is and how it will affect the industry.

It’s whistling past the graveyard. The basic idea of cloud computing – that someone else owns and runs the computer and you just buy the service (like Google Apps) – is scaring most hardware and software companies to their core. After all, what happens to their business model if most individuals and corporations no longer buy computers or applications? Better to talk loudly about how cloud actually creates a need for whatever they are selling.

For freelancers like me, who specialize in technology and business, cloud computing has been a boon. Last year, as companies started recovering from the economic body blow of 2008, they restored marketing departments’ budgets. After a very lean year in 2010, I suddenly had a wealth of assignments all about the cloud. Take any topic that I might otherwise have written a story about a couple of years ago – computer security, for example. Now it is a story about computer security in the cloud. Mainframe computers? How mainframes can be used to create clouds. Storage technology? How to store data in the cloud. At least 50 percent of my work last year was related to cloud. And so it seems to be going this year as well.

We journalists like to complain about the hype in the high tech industry. We sometimes accuse marketers of trying to create FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in order to sell their products. But, at least in this case, the FUD fallout from cloud is selling my product and paying my bills. Let it rain!

Full-time staff writers and editors also are out there promoting their brands. They post under their own name on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ to promote their articles. They also post professional items that are of interest to other journalists. And they post about their daily personal lives as well, just as I do.

We’re all trying to build up high numbers of high-quality connections, or “followers.” However, full-time employees are also promoting their employers. Employed journalists are expected to post stuff to promote certain articles in their publications and events sponsored by their publishers. So, whose followers are they? The writer’s or the employer’s?

That’s the question at the heart of a lawsuit brought against Noah Kravitz by his former employer. In 2010, Kravitz quit his job at Phonedog.com, a publisher of news on mobile devices and platforms, and took his 17,000 Twitter followers with him. The company is suing, saying the list of Twitter followers is a customer list, according to the New York Times.

There are some wrinkles here. Kravitz started the Twitter account and built up his followers while he was a full-time employee, under the Twitter handle Phonedog_Noah, according to the Times. When he left he changed his handle to NoahKravitz, but says that his employer agreed that he could take the followers if he twittered about the company from time to time. Apparently, though, there is nothing in writing.

Lawyers in several news reports say the Twitter handle is key to who’ll win the lawsuit. They imply that if he’d tweeted under his own name all along, then he would own the followers. But, would he? It’s one thing if the writer came to the job, bringing his followers with him, or if he had developed a following for tweeting about something besides his full-time employment. But what if he developed his expertise and his followers while at the employer? The employer may have a good argument for retaining the followers.

Freelancers may be a bit more aware of how our ability to attract an audience increases our value. My editors have told me they want me to write another story for them because of how many hits my stories get. I don’t have a particularly stellar social network, but most of my editors do want me to tweet and post about that story of mine that they are running this week. At writers’ conferences, I’ve heard book publishers say that they consider the number of Twitter followers and other social media numbers of the author when they are evaluating whether to publish a book. Who doesn’t want a ready-made readership? In fact, I won’t be surprised if that eventually becomes a standard question in job interviews.

So I’d like to poll my own social network on this topic. Does anyone know of other cases where a journalist left his job and tussled with his employer over his social network? For my full-time employed colleagues: do you think you’re more valuable to an employer because of your numerous followers? Does it help ensure your job security? Does it make you more attractive to your next employer? Freelancers: how helpful is your social network in impressing editors?

I recently got a first-hand lesson in this. While preparing to pitch a story idea to an editor, I googled “mainframes and private cloud computing.” Not the most interesting topic in the world, and not one that’s been widely covered. So I wasn’t surprised when a story that I’d done earlier in the year popped up several times on the first page of the search results. (My publisher owns lots of magazines and buys the rights to run my stories in all of them.)

But I was looking for fresh information, so I went to the second and third page of the search results. I clicked on a link at a website purporting to cover all-things-cloud. As I read the article I found there, I had a strong feeling of déjà vu. Here was an executive at IBM being quoted saying the exact same things about mainframe computers that he had told me. I know these guys are often coached on their “messaging,” but these were specific comments to specific questions that I’d asked during our interview. It was clear that the writer had lifted them from my article. There was no mention of my article nor the publication in which it appeared. It sounded as if the author had interviewed the IBM executive himself.

I notified my editor of the plagiarism and she kicked it to her higher ups to see what to do. The answer: not much.

“At any given time hundreds (possibly thousands) of Web sites are republishing entire stories [from our publications] without our permission,” says the response that my editor e-mailed to me. “About 50% of the time, we wind up doing nothing.” The publisher will take action under several circumstances, including when it’s a professional publisher’s site, when the site is running ads alongside the content, or when the site is plagiarizing entire stories repeatedly. But most of the people who do this “are lay publishers who’ve never heard of the Fair Use law and have no understanding of search engine optimization. They often think they’re doing us a favor, in fact.”

In other words, many of these so-called publishers think plagiarism is OK. How depressing.

Nevertheless, my publisher suggests that editors contact the offending site and nicely ask them to remove the story or at least acknowledge and link to the original source.

In my case, there was no contact information on the website for the writer, nor the editor. In fact, there was no information on who was publishing or funding the website. Clicking the “about” tab told me only that the site was launched in 2009, is done with “a team of content creators from around the globe” and “is one of the fastest growing cloud computing media sites on the Web.” I clicked on “contact,” and got only a form to fill out. There was no address, phone number or e-mail. This is not uncommon. Even when a publisher wants to take legal action against plagiarism, the lawyers sometimes can’t find anyone to which they can address a cease and desist order.

My editor and I tracked down the writer through LinkedIn – he happens to be an MBA student at a major U.S. university – and sent him an e-mail about the offense. Within an hour, we received a response from his publisher:

“After reviewing the article and discussing with [the writer], we have no problems citing your article regarding the quote. [The writer] had mentioned that he did not realize that this was an exclusive. Eitherway [sic], we’ll make the change to the article citing [your publication] as a source of the quote. We’ve also indicated to [the writer] to clearly define the source of any future quotes.”

It was not signed by an actual person, but rather with the name of the website itself, so we still do not know who runs the operation. Likewise, the return e-mail was the generic email@thewebsite.com.

Lay publisher, indeed. The fact that this publisher thinks that it’s OK to use any content that is not marked as “exclusive” shows his lack of publishing experience, not to say his disrespect of copyright law.

This whole thing piqued my curiosity, so I used an online plagiarism detector, called Duplichecker, to search for other sites that might be lifting the same article. I put in the quote from the IBM guy, and found that the entire story had been lifted, verbatim, unattributed to me or the original publication, in a Middle East computer news site as well. Just as I was working up a slow burn, however, I realized that it was affiliated with a sister publication of the original publication. Of course, my original publisher has the right to republish my story all over the world in its own related publications.

As I start 2012, I’m making a New Year’s resolution to launch my own little battle against online plagiarism. I plan to regularly use Duplichecker or something similar (googling “online plagiarism detector” brings up several free ones) to see where pieces of my stories are popping up. I may not be able to stop it, but I can at least try to educate the offenders, one plagiarist at a time.

We’re in the midst of a national political obsession about creating jobs, but what exactly constitutes employment today? Fewer and fewer U.S. citizens hold a 9-to-5, 40-hour-a-week job with salary, healthcare, 401k plan and paid vacation. Even fewer will in the future, because what people do for a living, and how they do it, is changing.

As a freelancer, I work at home, set my own hours, try to get paid what I’m worth, buy my own health insurance, contribute to an IRA (no matching funds here) and make a reasonably good living. But some people still don’t consider that a real job. Including many freelancers. A colleague of mine, who was laid off from a magazine six months ago and is freelancing while looking for another position, still refers to herself as unemployed. My neighbor, who lost her job as an administrative assistant two years ago, is among the “long-term, chronically unemployed.” Despite her best efforts, she hasn’t been able to find another full-time administrative job. But she seems to stay fairly busy temping.

It’s not just full-time communications and administrative positions that are vanishing. As we buy more and more stuff online, we need fewer salespeople. And at my local grocery store, where I used to chat amiably with a cashier who got good pay and benefits, I now scan and bag my own groceries.

The truth is that much of what we call employment are jobs that were created by and structured for the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, they are no longer necessary. In the span of human history, most people worked for themselves (unless they were wealthy or enslaved), scratching out a living however they could. My grandparents, for example, were all farmers. In 1900, 41 percent of U.S. jobs were agricultural, according to government statistics.

Whatever you want to call it – – the contractor economy or free-agent nation – this new model of work requires individuals to have different skills and requires government to provide different services to support such a workforce. (National healthcare, anyone?) “People who are spending all their time trying to find that full-time job with benefits – some small portion will get them, but for the vast majority, these [freelance projects] are the jobs,” Sara Hororwitz, executive editor of the Freelancers Union, told Crain’s New York Business in an article earlier this year. (Note: Crain’s requires you to register for a free trial subscription.)

Yet our national leaders are looking backward, talking about creating last-century jobs, as if U.S. companies were going to start hiring full-time workers again. Even if the economy improves, corporations have learned that they don’t need employees. They only need contractors. In many cases, it’s going to be up to individuals to create their own jobs. That bodes well for those of us who have the skills and aptitude to become a company of one. For the rest of society, it’s time for the politicians and our government to face the realities of employment in the Digital Age and figure out how to nurture it.

Secondly, it plays into the fallacy that today’s corporate entities are loyal to any nation-state. Although companies love to drape themselves in the U.S. flag whenever they lobby the government, there is no Corporate America. There are just huge multinational corporations with operations and sales all over the world, whose only goal is to make money. They will invest wherever they get the best deal, period. And that’s usually not in the United States.

So, when Congress gives them these special deals, we need to pay more attention to what happens afterward. A recent study by a congressional subcommittee does this. The only reason this wonky report, covering an arcane tax provision from 2004, caught my eye was because the technology industry had lobbied hard for it back in 2004, when I was covering public policy for Electronic Business magazine. Following my inner wonk, I downloaded and read “Repatriating Offshore Funds: 2004 Tax Windfall for Select Multinationals,” by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. (You can download the report from this page on Senator Carl Levin’s website.)

By passing the American Jobs Act of 2004, Congress dropped the top corporate tax rate from 35 to 32 percent, which was largely symbolic because U.S. companies find ways to manipulate tax laws to significantly reduce their taxes. In fact, a 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office found that 55 percent of U.S. companies paid no federal income taxes during a least one year out of a seven-year period studied.

More significantly, the 2004 legislation created a tax holiday, cutting for one year the tax rate on foreign earnings brought back to the United States, from 35 percent to just 5.25 percent. U.S. companies are taxed twice – at least theoretically – on profits earned abroad: once by the country in which they are earned and then again by America when those earnings are brought back to the States. Companies had argued that this double-taxation kept them from bringing such revenues back home and investing in the United States.

In early October, the Senate subcommittee published its report on what happened. Rather than creating U.S. jobs or increasing R&D spending, “the 2004 repatriation tax provision was followed by an increase in dollars spent on stock repurchases and executive compensation,” says the report. This, despite the fact that the law specifically prohibited the use of those funds for either of those expenditures. The tax break “provided a windfall for multinationals in a few industries without benefiting the U.S. economy as a whole.”

Of course, there’s no way to prove that the exact funds that these corporations repatriated were used to buy back stock or give CEOs huge raises. “Because money is fungible and corporations were not required to track expenditures of repatriated funds, it was impossible to determine if the surveyed corporations used their repatriated funds to increase planned expenditures for worker training and hiring in the United States or for R&D, or instead used the repatriated funds for expenses that had already been planned and would have been made in any event, and then used freed up funds to pay for prohibited purposes such as increased stock repurchases or executive compensation,” the report explains.

In my coverage back in 2004, I noted that the law required companies to draw up a “domestic reinvestment plan,” approved by the senior management and the board of directors, for how to spend the money. That plan could include worker hiring and training, infrastructure improvements, R&D, capital investments or “the financial stabilization of the corporation for purposes of job retention or creation.” I put that in because it sure sounded like a loophole. Indeed, I quoted a tax expert saying, “anyone in their right mind is going to make that plan as broad as possible” to cover all potential uses for the money.

The report shows that the repatriated profits most definitely did not go to investing in the United States. A total of 843 corporations repatriated $312 billion as a result of the tax break. The top 15 companies in terms of repatriated funds, which accounted for 52 percent of the total amount repatriated, included IBM, HP, Intel, Motorola, Microsoft and Oracle. Of those 15 companies, 66 percent recorded job losses from 2004 to 2007. Eighty percent increased their stock repurchases, by an average of 16 percent from 2004 to ‘05 and by an average of 38 percent from ‘05 to ‘06. Executive compensation at the 15 firms, which had increased 14 percent the year before the tax break, increased 27 percent in 2004-05 and another 30 percent in 2005-06.

Recently, the Republicans and big corporations have started another campaign to get taxes reduced or dropped on foreign earnings, using the same arguments as in 2004. I can only pray that our government and the American people look at the facts and the corporate track record this time around.

A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times ran a story on Narrative Science, a Chicago startup that has written software that takes data like sports stats or earnings numbers and churns out articles. Then last week, Slate.com, ran a series by Farhad Manjoo titled “Will Robots Steal Your Job?” The series describes how artificial intelligence is starting to do the work of highly-skilled professionals, including pharmacists, doctors and journalists. To top it all off, the New America Foundation here in D.C. just hosted a panel discussion, led by Manjoo, on the same topic.

At least two companies are developing such technology: Narrative Science and
Automated Insights in Durham, N.C. Both companies seem to be targeting the market for local sports reporting, such as high school football games. Publishers can use the software to turn game stats into news reports, effectively covering hundreds of local games that they never had the time or staff to cover before. It’s like a “robotic sports writer,” said Robbie Allen, Automated Insights CEO and founder, at the New America Foundation event.

The software could be a useful tool. I’ve done my share of stories on economic data, earnings numbers and market statistics. The work of sifting through all the numbers trying to identify the important trends is time-consuming, mind-numbing and depends on a certain amount of luck and intuition. Why not use this software to do in a split second what teams of journalists working for years could never do – analyze terabytes worth of numbers and identify trends and nuggets that are worth noting and digging into?

There’s plenty of data that publishers could feed into such software. In some cases, the publishers would get stories that would not otherwise get written. In other cases, they’d identify interesting trends that real journalists can use to develop in-depth articles.

In an example of the former, trade publisher Hanley Wood is using Narrative Science to provide monthly reports on hundreds of local housing markets on its website, something that it did not have the manpower to do before, according to the Times article.

As for generating story ideas, no one seems to be using the software for that, yet. In fact, these companies sometimes sound like they intend to put journalists out of business.

“In five years, a computer program will win a Pulitzer Prize — and I’ll be damned if it’s not our technology,” Kris Hammond, a founder of Narrative Science, told the Times. The comment is particularly disheartening because Hammond is a professor of journalism as well as computer science.

I doubt his claim. These products lack the creativity and imagination that professional journalists add to the equation. And I don’t think they’ll ever have that, because they are not human. People’s eyes glaze over when a story just reports numbers, even if those numbers are analyzed. Try reading an economic report from the federal government sometime.

This software may replace some reporters, and legitimately so, because some reporters don’t add any value. Writers, for example, who simply gather information, get a few comments from people and then regurgitate it onto the page, should probably start looking for another profession. As James W. Michaels, former editor of Forbes, was known to bellow: That is “not reporting, it’s stenography!”

These programs can even do sophisticated analysis that can match, or far surpass, our brain power when it comes to crunching numbers. “We can analyze and access more data than any one writer could ever do,” according to Allen.

What they cannot do, however, is include the human element. As every good journalist knows, a great story is just that – a story. About real people. Not about numbers. It includes the shades of gray that people must deal with in life. It illustrates their weakness and the pain of failure, the thrill and glory of achievement, the fear and depths of depression and disappointment.

The best business stories are not about how much profit a company made, but about the smart people that made the company so successful. The best sports writing is not about who won or lost the game, but how they did so and how the players and their fans reacted. Take a look at this piece from the Boston Globe, for example. Could a software program write this?

Can software conduct an effective interview? Good journalists ask probing questions and observe peoples’ reactions. They notice whether an interview subject is defensive, they sense when he may be lying or hiding something. They can get swept up by the excitement of an athlete describing how he pushed himself across the finish line, or feel the pain as a mother talks about how disease ravaged the health of her child. This affects not only what journalists write, but how they write it, in many subtle ways.

Maybe technology will ultimately be able to describe our complicated human condition as well as it crunches numbers. But for now, I think the journalism profession is relatively safe. Let’s welcome this software as another great tool in our toolbox, and use the extra time to concentrate on what we do best: telling great stories.

Many of us writers have pet peeves about punctuation and can cite ferocious battles with copy editors over things like semicolons, the serial comma and m-dashes. I’ve never been able to figure out the semicolon, for example. I know a few writers that use it, but why? Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style says, “If two or more clauses grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon.” It takes several readings and some concentrated brain power to even understand what the gods of grammar are saying there. They helpfully give these examples:

Stevenson’s romances are entertaining; they are full of exciting adventures.
It is nearly half past five; we cannot reach town before dark.

Then in the next breath, they add that it is “equally correct to write each of these as two sentences, replacing the semicolons with periods.”

My point, ahem, exactly. Just as Strunk & White advise us to “omit needless words,” I think we should omit needless punctuation. Overusing it is either pretentious, as in the semicolon, or obnoxious, like when people insist on emphasizing everything with exclamation points!!! (These are usually the same people who INSIST ON YELLING AT US BY USING UPPERCASE LETTERS FOR EVERYTHING. (!!!)

Although we journalists love to interview people, fewer quotes (and thus quotation marks) are almost always better. Many writers use quotes out of laziness. After all, if you just quote what everyone else told you, then you don’t have to write, or think, much. Inexperienced reporters often use quotes out of “insecurity.” They don’t have the “confidence” to rephrase ideas more “succinctly” or analyze what’s been said. Quotes should be like jewelry. Too much is gaudy. But a few very fine, well-placed pieces will make the whole story sparkle.

If you care enough about punctuation to tell someone that it’s is not the same as its, you may want to celebrate this Saturday. A few websites that can liven up the party:

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. I especially recommend the greatest hits in the lower right-hand column.

A blog that chronicles the ongoing misuse of apostrophes.

The National Punctuation Day website has a great list of resources on punctuation, grammar and editing.

And finally, watch this old clip of how Victor Borge and Dean Martin punctuate their singing.

I thought such fights were a quaint thing of the past, now that print has waned. But along comes Maya Angelou to not only renew the war, but also raise it to the level of national debate.

After the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial opened on the National Mall in late August, Angelou threw an editorial fit. The monument includes 15 inscriptions, quotes taken from King’s most famous speeches. Turns out the memorial’s architect thought he had artistic license to edit one of the quotes so it would better fit the design.

Here’s the original quote from King’s 1968 speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church: “Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”

Here’s how the inscription on the monument reads: “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”

The edited version “makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit,” said Angelou. It changes the meaning to the exact opposite of what King intended as a statement of humility.

The architect was rather testy when interviewed by NPR shortly after the unveiling of the monument. His arguments echoed what I’ve heard many times from art directors. The overall design of the piece dictated certain constraints on the words. Besides, if you look at the big picture, the entire package including the statue of King and the 14 other quotes all made sense. (You can read and listen to the NPR interview here.)

“When we are faced [with] design decisions we have to do so with respect to a number of factors: size, shape, distance, perspective height, depth, width, size of letters, font style,” said the architect, Ed Jackson Jr. He couldn’t resist taking a subtle jab at how Angelou’s words may have been edited to fit certain constraints in other contexts. “I am a fan of Maya Angelou,” he said. “I have several of her books. I buy her Hallmark cards.”

I’m on the side of the poet here. (Big surprise.). The edited quote not only sounds like bragging, it fails to reflect the beautiful cadence of Dr. King’s speech. It is not authentic, and I think it will irritate people for time immemorial. I salute Angelou for making her point loud and clear, even though it won’t do any good. (I never won an argument against my art director, either.) In this case, in particular, things are literally set in stone. Then again, we did have an historic earthquake in D.C. just days before the opening of the memorial. Hmm – God’s way of saying “get me rewrite?”

I was amazed. The National Press Club is an insular place, but when I saw the provocative title of the presentation, I thought I might hear some interesting ideas. Instead, I heard last-century journalists preaching to the choir about how their industry was not dying. And how did they know this? They asked newspaper editors.

When the Q&A started, no one challenged the idea that you could get an accurate diagnosis from the patient. No one pointed out that the journalists in this case had not even attempted to get a balanced story. It’s obvious that those with a vested interest in the status quo are going to defend it. In fact, the president of the American Press Institute was the first to raise his hand, stand and defend the health of the industry. He proclaimed that the newspaper business is a $35-billion industry, while in the same breath admitting that only four years ago it was a $70-billion industry. No one batted an eye.

In fact, the latest figures I could find (by doing a quick Google search) reported that more than 15,000 newspaper jobs were cut in 2009 alone. That’s undoubtedly accelerated. A 2009 report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put publishing and printing among the job categories with the biggest declines. Newspapers, periodicals and books are projected to lose 120,000 jobs between 2008 and 2018. The printing business is projected to lose 95,000 jobs.

The people at the Press Club meeting insisted that newspapers would survive, but I doubt that. The news will survive, but how the public consumes news has already changed radically. Certain news organizations may survive, if they can adapt to the new technologies and find new business models. Some will; some won’t. But news organizations have to get beyond the old assumptions that went along with the “print tradition.”

I asked one question during the Q&A session, pointing out how young people do not read newspapers (at least in paper form) and asking whether/how that threatens what’s left of the future of newspapers. Their answer meandered around the issue but didn’t address it. Frankly, I was reluctant to be more aggressive. No one else was asking any challenging questions, including the college journalism students sitting behind me. (After the meeting they told me they do read newspapers, but almost exclusively online.)

The experience reminded me of an essay in The Economist last month titled “Think again: Your competition is not who you think they are.” The author, tech entrepreneur Naveen Jain, points out that executives are often so busy fretting about what’s going on in their own industries that they are blindsided by larger forces at work in the world. “We live in transformative times, and we can thank exponentially powerful technology for this development,” he says.

That’s true in spades for the newspaper business. Unless newspaper executives broaden their perspective, they “may not see the stealth innovators who are quietly harnessing technology advances to displace your business,” writes Jain. While publishers fret about the future of newspapers, companies like Google and Apple are figuring out profitable business models for distributing information. In fact, during the Press Club meeting someone mentioned how Craigslist has decimated classified advertising. There was no discussion of how or why.

To overcome this insularity, news organizations and journalists should follow three suggestions by Jain. (I’ve taken the liberty of adding my own interpretation for the newspaper industry.)

• “Expand the circle of events you attend, or experts you consult, far outside of your market space. When you listen to the buzz only within your industry, you tend to hear about the same businesses and innovations over and over again.” Translation: pay more attention to how technology is changing the world. While you fret about how long real paper will be used to distribute the news, the smartphone and iPad are eating your lunch.

• “Go to visionary events that look at innovation from many different angles, and don’t restrict the discussion to a specific industry.” Translation: Stop focusing on how changes are hurting your business. Rather, look for new ideas and fresh minds that will broaden your perspective.

• “When you expose yourself to new concepts, think hard about how you can make them work for you.” Translation: New technology can be your friend. The biggest threat from technology comes from dismissing it or ignoring it.

Granted, the print business model is still producing revenue, in most cases more revenue than online advertising. But that’s ultimately irrelevant when the entire business model is dying. If news organizations want to survive, they need to reinvent themselves. The Knight Foundation is one place to look for examples in innovation. At Knightgarage, you can hear about the projects of the 2011 John S. Knight Fellows. In particular, I recommend the talk by Jeremy Adam Smith, who explains how individual journalists (many of whom were laid off after years with newspapers) are becoming publishing entrepreneurs.

How ironic that journalists who’ve been booted out of the newspaper industry are at the forefront of the New Age of Journalism. And they are doing it without the paper.

OK, so maybe I’m not much of a data point. After all, my audience of 100 or so family, friends and colleagues would probably still read my blog even if it made no sense and was stuffed with keywords like “Viagra.” In fact, I’m pretty sure a couple of them might even read it more.

The point is that Google has succeeded, at least temporarily, in kicking the content farms down a few notches in search results. That’s a good thing for anyone who cares about good editorial. Demand Media admits that Google’s new algorithm hurt its search rankings. In a conference call to discuss the company’s quarterly results in May, CEO Richard Rosenblatt said search engine referrals for eHow were down 20 percent. The company is also still losing money, reporting a first-quarter loss of $5.6 million. As of May 18, Demand Media’s share price was down to less than $15, from a high of just over $24.

In explaining the changes to its algorithm, Google is trying to encourage higher quality. While it won’t reveal details on the new algorithm, since that would defeat the whole point of confounding the content farms, Google did explain the company’s thinking on its Webmaster Central Blog. It presented a list of questions, most of which any good editor would use to judge the quality of her website, magazine or newspaper. Among them:

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend or recommend?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

“We hope the questions above give some insight into how we try to write algorithms that distinguish higher-quality sites from lower-quality sites,” wrote Amit Singhal, Google Fellow.

In apparent reaction, Demand Media announced that it will hire “feature writers” to write 850-word-plus articles based on actual reporting.

“The feature writer role is designed to bring highly experienced writers into our studio to develop lifestyle features around topical ideas, with compelling story lines and original quotes from known industry experts,” said Jeremy Reed, senior vice president of editorial at Demand Media.

What a novel idea. Almost sounds like journalism.

And what will they pay these writers, who are required to have 5 to 10 years of experience writing or reporting for a major daily newspaper or equivalent experience as a regular contributor to a major magazine? Up to $350 per article. Yes sir, three hundred and fifty big ones.

And how many of those 850-plus words are going to have to be certain keywords? Somehow, I don’t think this move will do much for Demand Media’s search engine ranking. Quality is something that just doesn’t fit into its business model.