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.

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.

Meanwhile, after having watched the explosion of digital publishing over the last year, I’ve increasingly wondered whether I might be able to publish and sell my articles to readers directly.

After attending the Maryland Writers Association (MWA) annual meeting in early April, I’m convinced that at least some journalists could do this and make more money than the typical freelance fee for any given article. The MWA is primarily for fiction writers, and the panel discussions focused on book publishing, but what I heard there only reinforced my belief that an exciting new publishing and distribution model is opening up for writers of all kinds, including journalists.

More and more authors are publishing e-books through companies like Amazon and Smashwords, and making good money doing it. The poster girl for this is the young writer Amanda Hocking, who has made more than a million dollars publishing her short novels on the Kindle. After slowly creeping up on them for years, disintermediation has finally hit the “legacy publishers” (as the participants of one panel at the MWA meeting insisted on calling them) hard.

This entertaining (but very long) discussion of e-book publishing between authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath lays out the reasons behind the self-publishing stampede. You don’t have to read the entire 13,000 words on the business reasons, including an explanation of the revenue math, to be convinced that self-publishing is at least worth a try. These quotes reverberate in my head:

On distribution of stories: “Print is just a delivery system. It gets a story from the writer to the reader. For centuries, publishers controlled this system, because they did the printing, and they were plugged into distribution. But with retailers like Amazon, B&N [Barnes & Noble], and Smashwords, the story can get to the reader in a faster, cheaper way.”

On the worth of writers, aka content producers: “We provide the content that is printed and distributed. For hundreds of years, writers couldn’t reach readers without publishers. We needed them. Now, suddenly, we don’t. But publishers don’t seem to be taking this Very Important Fact into account.”

I heard variations of these themes all over the MWA conference. One panelist predicted that within five years, more than 50 percent of all books will be e-books. How much journalism is already consumed digitally today? Probably well over half. And with the iPad and other tablets starting to breathe visual life into digital newspaper and magazine stories, it should increase astronomically.

Why not package and sell single articles? I’m aware of at least one experiment in selling digital long-form journalism singles: the Atavist. The articles are by well-known journalists, of course, to appeal to the general public and attract as many buyers as possible.

Would this work in trade journalism? One of the literary agents at the MWA meeting, Jessica Sinsheimer of the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency, encouraged authors to aim for niches rather than the mass market. The more narrowly defined the market, she said, the easier it is to sell the story. That’s the whole idea behind trade publishing: niche audiences – CEOs of technology companies, for example – want articles that deal with the issues and events that are most important to them.

Would they pay for that? What if a journalist wrote an article of 5,000 words that brought them new, useful information that could make a real difference in their life, career or company? Going the traditional route, that journalist might expect to make $5,000 to $7,500 for that story. What if she published her own e-story and charged $10 a pop? Based on Konrath’s figures that an author can keep 70 percent of the revenue when publishing on Kindle, she’d have to sell at least 1,000 copies to reach that $7,500. Just as important, however, is the fact that she would retain the rights to that article. Maybe she could later sell it to a couple of “legacy publishers,” or publish it as part of a longer book.

Effective social networking could be the key. If a writer is to have any hope of selling her own stories, she has to have developed a personal readership – people who know her and want to read her stuff. Another publishing agent on the panel, Jason Allen Ashlock of Movable Type Literary Group, stressed how important it is for writers to build and grow their reputation and relationship with readers. Not only does it help promote the writer, but it also feeds the writer good ideas for future stories. By communicating with readers, a writer can learn what her audience wants. And if her stories deliver what her audience wants, she should be able to sell more of them. It becomes a virtuous cycle. When readers are being overwhelmed by the vast universe of digital information, hitting a reader’s sweet spot becomes very valuable. “Where there’s an abundance of content, then quality content becomes your marketing strategy,” said Ashlock. “Business models can be built around good content.”

The next few years will tell whether and to what extent individual journalists will be able to profit more directly from their work. Regardless of what happens, the “freelance” in freelance journalism is starting to take on a whole new meaning.

Middle-aged U.S. engineers have been howling, and suing, about this for decades. Employers argue that some older engineers just don’t keep up their technology skills. Workers argue that the employer just wants younger employees, who cost less. Just last year, a 54-year-old engineer brought an age-discrimination lawsuit against Google. At the trial, the engineer alleged that, despite good performance reviews, he was told that his opinions were obsolete and out of date. He was called slow, fuzzy, sluggish and an “old fuddy-duddy” by younger colleagues, he alleged. He was replaced with managers 15 to 20 years younger, transferred to a position of less responsibility and ultimately fired.

This is a tough problem, for both the employee and the employer. It’s not fair to be pushed aside when you reach 50, even though you’ve been a loyal employee and done a consistently good job. On the other hand, technology moves fast and the skills needed for particular jobs are changing. In today’s competitive environment, an employer needs to have the sharpest employees with the latest hot skills. And getting them for the least amount of money . . . well – that’s capitalism.

I’ve been on both sides of this problem. In the mid-1990s, when I was in my 30s, I supervised a writer who was in his 50s. We were revamping a magazine, taking it in a new editorial direction, and this employee just couldn’t get it. He seemed unable to produce the kind of work we needed. We worked with him for about a year, but to no avail. So, we fired him.

Today, I’m 51. I’m not as savvy as younger journalists in terms of the latest technology. My skills in using social media, producing multimedia stories or even texting are not as sharp as a 30-year-old’s. Sometimes, I just don’t “get it.”

So, my experience in tech journalism isn’t so different from those engineers. In fact, as technology pervades various types of jobs throughout our economy, the same age-related employment problems about which engineers have long complained will pop up in all sorts of careers. It’s been happening in journalism for a while. Reuters has been outsourcing at least some low-level journalism jobs to India for years. I don’t see many H1B visa-holders replacing U.S. journalists, but I do see plenty of senior editorial staff losing their jobs, although it’s more often because their publication has died than because they are being replaced. And the staff and management of new media companies and online publications? I bet most are in their 20s and early 30s.

In our Internet-flattened world, this will happen to a lot of us boomers. Even lawyers. We have to figure out how to deal with it. My plan is to keep moving up the value chain, doing more sophisticated reporting and writing that requires experience, perspective and in-depth knowledge. At the same time, I try to keep up with the latest developments in the media business and try to incorporate new skills that will keep me relevant in this changing market. I’m lucky to be a freelancer who works primarily by phone and Internet. It means that my employers judge me by my work, not by my age, not by my appearance nor even by my ability to text (at least not yet). To rephrase that iconic New Yorker cartoon, on the Internet nobody knows you’re over 50. I hope I can keep it that way.

If those questions alarm you, then check out the News Literacy Project, a program that tries to teach students “the critical thinking skills to sort fact from fiction in the digital age.” Indeed, the organization’s tag line – “how to know what to believe” – sums up its mission succinctly.

The worry: that in the age of Google, Wikipedia and seemingly limitless online information young people are losing the important skill of discernment, that they view all information – regardless of source or bias – as equal in value, and that they will therefore be incapable of making well-informed decisions. Not only will journalism suffer, but such a citizenry could damage, even ultimately destroy, our democratic society.

I had never heard of the organization, even though it has a pilot program at a local school – Walt Whitman Senior High School in Bethesda, Md. I discovered it when a fellow journalist forwarded me an e-mail announcing that the project was sponsoring a panel discussion at Whitman on “The Future of Journalism in the Digital Age.” That would be my future, so of course I went to hear what they had to say.

On the panel were seasoned journalist Ray Suarez, senior correspondent of the PBS NewsHour, and the heads of two major news organizations – Vivian Schiller, president and CEO of NPR, and Katharine Weymouth, publisher of The Washington Post. Although they talked about journalism’s present and future, they didn’t say anything we in the profession haven’t heard before or experienced first-hand. Ironically, the panel served as an exercise in critical, analytical thinking for those of us in the audience. The News Literacy Project teaches kids to question what they read (or hear) and to consider the bias of the source. Both Schiller and Weymouth insisted on extolling the virtues of the digital age of journalism, while refusing to discuss the downside, such as how it has decimated the staffs at most news organizations. Suarez, the moderator, tried to raise these issues, but got nowhere. In fact, they flat-out ignored a question from an audience member about whether either of them planned to farm out research and basic reporting to workers in India, as some news organizations have already.

They kept stressing the importance of quality journalism, the value of good reporting and the crucial need for students to appreciate these values and learn how to pick the wheat from the chaff. All the while I kept thinking, “OK, but who’s going to pay for that quality?” I could barely contain a chortle when the Post’s Weymouth said she tells aspiring young journalists that the most valuable skill is “to be a good reporter.” The Post has laid off hundreds of staff in the last few years. It essentially killed its business section last year. I’m pretty sure they were all good reporters.

Nevertheless, the News Literacy Project seems a worthwhile endeavor. It may not save our jobs, but it may save our society. To learn more, take a look at this video.

When I was reporting for newspapers, editors started asking me to gather art as well as information. Ask your sources for mug shots, they’d say. It was the 1980s, and USA Today had defied the critics who called it a cartoon newspaper, making the then-unfamiliar concept of infographics popular. Suddenly editors were demanding that I get statistics the art department could use to make fancy, colorful charts. I, and my reporter colleagues, considered it a burden.

I didn’t learn the value of art until I became a magazine editor. And it didn’t come easily. I butted heads with more than one art director who demanded we sacrifice text in order to make room for a photo spread, illustration or graphic. In the art director’s mind, a picture literally was worth a thousand words. The worst was when he wanted neither words nor pictures – he wanted aesthetically pleasing white space. To me, white space was nothing more than a hole that needed to be filled, preferably with words.

Gradually and grudgingly, I began to appreciate the role art can play in journalism. I became the dreaded editor who demanded that reporters gather good art material along with the facts and quotes for their stories. Some great art directors taught me how important the presentation of a story can be. They showed me how art can heighten the impact of a hard-hitting piece of investigative reporting. How a good custom photo of a CEO can reveal character and pique interest, thus pulling the reader into the article. How a well-designed graphic can convey more information than paragraphs full of tedious statistics. How unusual typography can convey the mood of a story. I even started to like white space.

By the time I left that magazine, I was a complete convert. I had grown to love art and respect the creativity of art directors. One of the favorite parts of my job was the art meeting for each issue, where we brainstormed what kind of art to develop for each feature and what we should do on the cover.

That type of collaboration – the union of great writing with great artwork – seems rare today. For one thing, there aren’t many magazines left that can afford to invest in expensive photos or illustrations. Second, as print has waned and the Web waxed, tasteful art designed to support the story seems to have fallen into the background. Indeed, on the Web the layout of stories is still awkward, much less artistic. I rarely see anything comparable to a two-page magazine spread that pops out at readers and demands their attention. (Although Gannett’s experimental online magazine, The Bold Italic, is an interesting attempt.) And magazine covers? Sort of an anachronism, although publishers still reproduce on the Web what they’ve done in print.

But as more online magazines experiment with multimedia, that’s starting to change. Designers are using new types of art, including video and audio, to illustrate stories. (Hmmm, I can think of lots of different sounds and music that could accompany a story on, say, the BP oil spill, but what about an article on the latest wireless technology?)

Editors are asking for podcasts and even videocasts of interviews. With all this new technology, journalism is going to become much more than just reporting and writing. We journalists are going to have to loosen our exclusive reliance on the written word and learn how to use other media creatively. For those who do, journalism will become more art than craft. And for some of us, it just might become more fun than work.

That was the happy message at the “Future of Freelancing” conference held last week at Stanford University. Several sessions served to inspire the 120-plus mid-career freelancers in attendance, telling us to stay brave and persistent in pursuing our craft. I was heartened by a panel of assigning editors from Popular Science, The Washington Post, Wired and The New Yorker, as they talked about the wonders of long-form journalism, a “crying need for narrative” and their hunger for new ideas from freelancers.

Everything else, however, is changing fast: the platform on which we publish our stories, the tools we use to tell our stories, and who controls how we tell those stories and to whom. While the changes are daunting at best, for freelancers they can be an opportunity to become the vanguard of a new age of journalism.

It’s news to nobody that publishing platforms are changing. While paper isn’t going away, other platforms have proliferated. The Web is already as popular as paper, for reading short items at least. The e-reader and iPad are becoming increasingly popular as ways to deliver news and magazine stories. Writers need to be on all these platforms, or they’ll miss part of their potential audience.

As these platforms change, they open up new ways to tell our stories. Ways that we should all learn. Although the editors at most sessions wouldn’t go so far as to say they’d pick a freelancer with video and audio skills over one with just writing skills – all other things being equal – it was clear to me that writers without audio and video in their toolbox will limit their opportunities. The most practical and useful session of the conference was given by Richard Koci Hernandez, a Ford Foundation Multimedia Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, who inspired us with his belief that today “is the golden age of storytelling,” excited us with the prospect of “reaching a global audience with one click” and gave us practical advice on how to acquire audio and video skills.

Finally, the old gatekeepers of publishing are losing their grip on the creative product. Remember the term “disintermediation,” which was popular in the 1990s when the Web had just burst onto the scene? It’s gaining speed in publishing. Authors are publishing books themselves rather than going through traditional channels. Why can’t journalists publish their stories directly on the Kindle? Journalist Damon Brown recently published a guide to the iPad on the Kindle, for example. It’s priced at $1.99.

For those journalists with an entrepreneurial bent, in particular, the future could be interesting indeed. This conference was a one-time deal, the project of Christine Larson, a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford. She deserves an award for having the idea and pulling it off. We freelancers – indeed all journalists – need more conferences like this. I hope the immense amount of positive feedback I heard at the conference turns into action by all attendees to make sure we get them.

I’m convinced it does. But it’s going to be so different from what we’re used to that we aren’t even capable of conceiving it yet. A source for one of my stories on digital publishing points out that when the automobile first came out, people called it the horseless carriage. The only way they could define these early cars was by relating them to a familiar mode of transportation. That’s the kind of disconnect we have in the publishing business. The whole world has changed, and we don’t understand the new world well enough yet to see where and how we’ll fit in. And many of us are terrified that we are selling buggy whips.

The terror has been building steadily this year. A couple of months ago, I participated in a lively LinkedIn discussion. The thread was started by a post by freelance colleague Polly Traylor, who lamented the state of the freelance business on her blog. It didn’t take long for many of us to chime in – and the opinions ranged from: it’s a brand new world and “those who learn to adapt and embrace the change may actually find a lot of opportunity in it” to “freelance journalism is dead” and all that’s left to do is “put fresh flowers on its grave.” (You can read the discussion here.)

It’s clear that no one – including the biggest media companies – has a clue. Consider these two news reports from just this week. First, News Corp. announced strategic moves toward its promised strategy of charging readers for online content. It bought Skiff LLC , which makes an e-reader and a digital publishing platform. News Corp. also invested in Journalism Online, a startup by Steven Brill and other media executives that aims to offer a way for publishers to charge readers for online news.

In contrast, Forbes.com is going in the other direction, apparently planning to use thousands of unpaid contributors instead of professional journalists, according to a report by Paul Carr on TechCrunch. At a recent staff meeting Lewis Dvorkin, who oversees Forbes editorial, said that “Forbes editors will increasingly become curators of talent,” according to Carr. As my colleague Howard Baldwin has pointed out, that comment makes us freelancers feel like we belong in a museum. (Getting old is a theme for Howard. See his blog, “Middle-Age Cranky.”)

Meanwhile, social media consultant Paul Gillin recently passed along this trailer to an upcoming documentary, “Fit to Print,” on the dying news business. While melodramatic, what this clip does not exaggerate is the level of fear among professional journalists.

It’s the end of the journalism world as we know it. The big question is: what’s next? I hope this conference gives me at least some possible answers. Tune in next week to find out.

A client of mine was bought by another publishing company early this year. My editor warned me a few weeks ago that the publication would be transitioning to a new Web platform and that my stories would be temporarily inaccessible. I thought it would take maybe a couple of days. It’s been at least two weeks now, and my stories – hundreds of them – are nowhere to be found. They aren’t on the client’s site; they aren’t on the Web. I wouldn’t be worried, except that this particular client has no “print edition.” My stories existed only on the Web. Now, when potential clients click these links on my website, they are sent to a page that says the story was not found.

My stories are gone. And I’m not sure when they’ll be back.

Meanwhile, another client gated its website and started charging a subscription for its online version. I’m not sure how long ago it did this – it didn’t tell me – so I don’t know how many of my potential customers clicked on a link, only to get a pitch to sign up for a subscription rather than my story.

A third client nearly disappeared entirely, taking my stories along with it. It was going out of business, but ended up being saved at the eleventh hour.

Of course, I’ve removed these bad links from my website. I’m hoping to have at least some of them back up soon. But the experience has taught me to grab a copy of my stories as soon as they are published on the Web, because their existence is tenuous. And yet, a copy pulled off the Web doesn’t seem as professional, or even legitimate, as a printed clip or a PDF of a magazine layout. The purpose of traditional clips was two-fold. They not only showed samples of the writer’s work, but also proved that the writer had been published by a reputable news or literary organization. A collection of clips was permanent; a collection of clicks is ephemeral. As the paper age of publishing disappears, writers need to figure out how to preserve their published work.