Newspaper reporters are driven by the scoop. Their biggest thrill is finding out something that no one else knows and getting it in their paper first. The grizzled front page editor yells, “Stop the presses,” and next day, the newsboys hit the streets crying, “Extra, extra! Read all about it.” Somewhere an exhausted reporter smugly admires the byline and goes on to the next story.

Even the tightest deadline, the last-minute scoop has to feed into a system intended to ensure accuracy and as much fairness as humanly possible, however. There is editing — an often torturous process — fact checking, corroboration (everything has to have at least two sources), comments from the other side, design and layout, proof reading and finally printing and drying and folding or binding and mailing or shipping and delivery. The well-oiled machine that is the print industry actually does an amazing job of getting news to readers very quickly.

Not quickly enough, however. Anyone with a cell phone can be a reporter if in the right place at the right time. The safe landing of USAir flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009 is the most famous example of citizen journalists breaking a story ahead of the established press.

Listen to the podcast

No process was necessary; the facts showed up on the screen seconds after they happened. The late rounds of the 2010 World Cup brought Twitter to its knees several times; no one was waiting for tomorrow’s newspaper to find out who won on the other side of the world in a totally different time zone.

Magazines have a different challenge. It was never about getting the scoop, even for the news magazines. It was about delivering the audience. “Magazines were essentially founded as a collaboration between editors and publishers, editors and advertisers,” says Dick Babcock, editor of Chicago magazine. “For magazines, the economic model is to deliver a particular audience to advertisers.” Even with a rigorous separation of editorial and advertising — church and state — the financial underpinnings of a magazine still rest on that partnership. Today’s challenge for the magazine industry is “holding onto the audience,” Babcock says.

Advertisers will go where the audience goes or, in another permutation of the evolving ecosystem, join the booming custom publishing arena with their own publications in print or online.

What We’ve Always Wanted

As readers, we still want information we can believe from sources we trust. How do we know we’re not being punked by someone clever with a camera and a model airplane? Is Michael Jackson really dead or is someone winding us up online? We knew the difference between editorial and advertising, but when companies publish their own magazines, how much of the editorial is actually a sales pitch? When anyone can publish and anyone can report, what ensures accuracy and fairness?

Citizen journalists, from Wikipedia contributors to mommy bloggers, proliferated in the last 10 years. That boom is slowing, however. “Blogs are a confection of several things that do not necessarily have to go together,” according to The Economist, “easy-to-use publishing tools, reverse-chronological ordering, a breezy writing style and the ability to comment. But for maintaining an online journal or sharing links and photos with friends, services such as Facebook and Twitter are quicker and simpler.” The number of blogs is still growing but much more slowly and the number of moribund blogs, “like hastily abandoned cities,” is keeping pace.

Instead, would-be journalists are finding homes in the new ecosystem.

They have, says David Carr, “the same DNA” as their predecessors: the desire to communicate and facility with the necessary tools — writing, photography, editing, broadcast and entirely new skills such as interactive journalism and new media.

“People ask me what they should be studying, what they should be doing,” says Brian Boyer, who graduated from journalism school last year and is now a news applications editor for the Chicago Tribune. “I pitch data. Don’t learn multi-media. It’s good to know, good skills to have but if you want to build something lasting, you’ve got to know how to work with the data. There’s a lot of multi-media presentations — slide shows, audio, video — but I feel like the return on investment on that is pretty low. Whereas if you put a large piece of data online, it has a lot more content to it.”

Boyer and a team of four editors, all software developers, build the sort of applications around a story that help voters find polling stations, verify the safety of their grandmother’s nursing home, check the number of homicides in their neighborhood.

“Our strongest work tells the what-about-me part of the story,” he says. “In the newspaper, you can put in three or four anecdotes about stuff happening, but when you read the story, you think, crap, what about me?”

Search is both a skill and a potential revenue generator for online publications. “SEO is sort of a dark art,” Boyer says, “but the fact is once a story leaves the front page of the Chicago Tribune, it’s dead to the world unless it’s Google-able.”

Magazines can monetize their service journalism content, Babcock says, by taking last year’s cover story on, for instance, the best camera shops and making it searchable online. Readers will pay for the information and advertisers will pay both for the audience and the lead generation.

Publications also now need social media experts to engage users in new ways on new platforms. “If people just want to interact with us on Facebook and not subscribe to the magazine, that’s OK. If you just want to come to our events, that’s OK too,” says Julian Posada, founder and CEO of Café Media, a start-up company targeting English-dominant Hispanics. “It’s my job to make sure there’s awareness, but I don’t want to force them to choose.”

Posada’s timing could not have been worse; Café Media launched in September 2008, the same month the recession started. “We’re a start-up. We’re just trying to make it,” he says. Social media is one way he can get the user feedback necessary to shape his editorial voice, to create relevant, valuable content, and to prove to advertisers that he can capture a highly desirable audience —30 years old on average with a household income of $70,000. Social media, the strategic use of SEO and email segmentation — none of them part of the publishing ecosystem only a few years ago — help him capture that audience and deliver it to advertisers.

24/7 Journalism

When there was one place to publish the information and enough money to pay for a full editorial staff, a journalist’s days were long, as long as it took to get the story, but the support system was in place. Multiple platforms and quickly disappearing revenue streams mean that the workload has doubled, possibly tripled.

“I used to write longer investigative pieces and explanatory journalism, which took months to produce,” says Greg Burns, senior business and economics correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. “About a year and a half ago, I became a columnist, which is a lot quicker turnaround and much more visible. I probably do 200 broadcast segments a year; I’m on TV and radio quite a bit. Probably did about 200 blog entries a year in addition to the column.”

Newspaper reporters now write for the Web first, print second. “The data flow for e-livering Austin social news goes from Gowalla to Twitter to Facebook to blog to print, says Michael Barnes, columnist for the Austin-American Statesman. Everything journalists do is also pushed out on social media platforms. Carr has almost 259,000 followers on Twitter and follows 365, many of them other news organizations. Newsrooms have merged. The print and digital newsrooms at USA Today merged into one in 2006, and although Webber believes that “print newspapers will continue to be part of our lives for the foreseeable future,” the entire company is “becoming more digitally focused.”

At the same time reporters who used to go out with a pen and a notebook now must also tote a voice recorder, a camera and possibly a video camera of some size. The ability to write is no longer enough on its own; journalists must think across media in order to tell their stories. Something, of course, has to give. Quality of the words or the images or the total published package is less than it would be if trained professionals handled individual pieces of the whole.

The quality question, however, is misplaced, according to Boyer. “Movie theaters are a better experience for watching film but people still watch VHS,” he says. “Quality solves a different need. You might lose the high resolution screen but the video is maybe more to the point or faster. It’s there. If you’re reporting on a story and you have to wait for the photographer to get there, you might miss the photo. But if the reporter has a camera in his back pocket, that will be good enough. Good enough is important. It’s what we should be aiming for.”

All of this “has created a strain on the classical definition of what a journalist is,” Posada says, a strain that is palpable in newsrooms and publishing companies.

“It’s easy for me to talk about this,” says Carr, “because I still have a job.”

“There’s a lot fewer of us,” Burns says. “I think it’s something like 30% to 40% of journalists have lost their jobs in the last couple of years. On the plus side, there’s plenty for us to do, those of us who are still at it. There’s a lot less competition for the stories that are out there.”

The leanness and inventiveness of the whole enterprise is striking. Posada publishes a bi-monthly print magazine, a daily website, an e-newsletter, manages all the social media channels and produces events year round with a staff of 12.

The Tribune is, like several other publishing companies, in bankruptcy. “We’re willing to try almost anything that doesn’t compromise the quality,” Burns says. “There’s nothing that’s off the table. We’ve done more experimenting in the last two years than we did in the previous 10.”