Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, recently explained that the newspaper is now as much a technology company as a journalism company.

This year’s South by South West Interactive (SxSWi) indicates he’s not the only one thinking that way. When the conference started 16 years ago, it was strictly tech, a convening of engineers, software developers and coders. But this year, everywhere you turned, it seemed, there was another journalist and or media organizations. And there were many panels about technology and the future of news.

It demonstrates how far media organizations have come in embracing technology and using it in “digitally native” ways to inform and engage their communities.

-- By Jose Zamora, Journalism Program Associate, Knight Foundation

Report from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Convention, where my panel discussed business models… The most popular new models were niche advertisements, paid content, public contributions and foundation support.

The panel was moderated by Frances Robles, foreign correspondent for The Miami Herald. Among the panelists were Patricio G. Espinoza, an Emmy Award winning journalist who runs espiMedia.com; Eduardo Hauser, CEO of DailyMe.com; and Calvin Sims, Program Officer at The Ford Foundation.

Patricio Espinoza talked about niche digital media as a new business model. He caters to niche audiences in specific neighborhoods and finds local merchants who want to reach them. Bartering is also a good way to enter local advertising markets, he says. Content is vital, but so is a great sales person.

Eduardo Hauser explained the importance of knowing who is interested in the content you want to produce and figuring out who is willing to pay for it.

Calvin Sims explained that Ford Foundation is interested in projects that fill a void in reporting and have impact. As an example he talked about Ford's efforts in supporting foreign reporting.

I explained how Knight Foundation is experimenting with different models through the journalism program and the Knight News Challenge to find out which models works best. Knight is experimenting with nonprofit models, like voiceofsandiego.com and ProPublica.Other models include niche publications, hyper-local blog aggregators and reverse publishing like EveryBlock.com, Placeblogger, Printcasting and VillageSoup.com. And there are hybrid models between journalism schools and media organizations like the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and with crowd-funding through Spot.US.

If you have a project that combines new models with news and information for specific geographic communities, please apply to the Knight News Challenge. The contest opens again Sept. 1, 2009. And if you are interested in learning more about these and other projects keep tuned to Knight Blog.

Ford and Knight Foundation partnered to support the participation of 76 journalists and students at The National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) convention.

Recognizing that the media landscape is in flux, the theme of the 27th annual NAHJ conference was: "Evolve.  Embrace. Reinvent." And the focus was on multimedia and digital journalism.

The program was designed to help journalists acquire the multimedia and technological skills they need to keep their jobs, find new ones or grow professionally.

There were thirty-three sessions offering multimedia skills that ranged from how to Blog and use Twitter to how to Podcast, stream live video and create Mashups.

The Knight Digital Media Center held a Multimedia Bootcamp, where conference attendees could learn the basic skills needed for multimedia storytelling and get hands-on training on how to record audio, take photos and shoot videos for the Web.

David Ardia, the director of the Citizen Media Law Project, moderated a panel on online media law and ethics that focused on legal issues that might arise from the daily practice of online journalism to legal and ethical issues related to user generated content and the bloggosphere.

If you are interested in learning digital media skills and on getting hands-on training, please start by visiting:

Knight Digital Media Center

J-Lab - The Institute for Interactive Journalism

Knight Citizen News Network

Citizen Media Law Project

Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

Wednesday evening brought a plenary called "Nerds, News, and Nabes" with Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibarguen, Henry Jenkins, principal investigator for M.I.T.'s Center for Future Civic Media (C4FCM), and N.Y.U. Professor Eric Klinenberg.

At Thursday morning's plenary session, Chris Csikszenmihalyi, co-direcotr of the C4FCM, talked about bringing communities near natural gas fields the news and information they need to preserve their communities and their health, and M.I.T. grad student Ben Fry helped us visulaize data.

One example of data visualization from Martin Wattenberg was Wordle, a program that generates images based on word frequency. The more times a word appears in a given text or blog, the larger it is in the image generated. Here's one for a press release on the KNC winners.

On Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, KNC winners and M.I.T. grad students and employees explained their digital media projects. Notable demos included Virtual Gaza, Sourcemap.org (in beta version) and a digital community storytelling effort.

Friday morning, we all voted on the best idea for collaboration among KNC winners developed over the course of the conference using Selectricity. TweetBill, a project linking constituents to one another and alerting them to bills and their representatives' contact info, won the $3,000 first prize.

Check out live tweets from the conference at #kncmit, #knc09, and #fncm09. Other information is available on the conference's wiki.

“In the future there will be a new breed of journalists who can do all this (multimedia journalism) and it’s second nature to them,” said Travis Fox last Friday at this year’s International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

Fox is the Emmy Award-winning video producer for WashingtonPost.com. He was explaining that in contrast to the past, when online news sites used video to generate interest in their sites and to get extra revenue from video ads, in the future, video will be used to generate multiple revenue streams, because video/multimedia material can be used for any medium.

Fox explained how the script and stills from his video can be used for an article in the newspaper and the online edition of the daily, while the sound file can supply radio content, and the video itself can be used for a television story.

This was part of the discussion at a panel I moderated about multimedia storytelling and the future of online journalism at this year’s symposium, which gathered 298 journalists and new media experts from around the world.

The other presentations for this panel were made by María Teresa Ronderos, Editor, Semana.com (Colombia); Fred Ritchin, Director, PixelPress; David LaFontaine, Partner, Artesian Media and Managing Editor, Newspaper Association of America’s Audience Planbook; Bill Gentile, Journalist-in-Residence, American University; and Travis Fox, Video Producer, WashingtonPost.com.

We are interested in your thoughts. Please comment below.

150 enterprising Washington DC news people talked about using social media to connect with citizens and work with former rivals … this from the day-long NewsVision symposium March 30, Knight Conference Center, Newseum … in this video, innovators from the Orlando Sentinel, USA TODAY, Publish 2 and the University of Maryland looked at new ways networking can improve journalism … panel slides here (the first and last are the funniest).

The Newspaper Guild , the Knight Foundation , and the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism , sponsored NewsVision in partnership with ONA and the Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Good quote: "This is a crisis we will not waste. The answer for us is not to retrench and just to go back to what we do best ... we have to innovate." -- NPR CEO Vivian Schiller … NPR is retraining in partnership with the Knight Digital Media Center . Videos of Politico’s John Harris , others are at the NewsVision site… also a new survey of online journalists.

Knight News Challenge winner, Tony Shawcross and the staff of Denver Open Media, had a session titled "NonProfit & Your Startup" at the SWSW Interactive Festival in Austin, TX.

The main focus of the session was to discuss why they thought structuring projects as a 501(c)(3) was the best choice for anyone doing online publishing. The main reason for DOM was that a nonprofit organization is organized to achieve a purpose other than generating profit.

That is one good reason for structuring your enterprise as a nonprofit, but there are many more considerations that have to be made when deciding how to incorporate your online publishing project. The legal structure chosen will have an impact on the organization's liability for defamation and other legal claims. It will also have an impact on the organization's tax obligations, its assets and its management.

Many of today's digital journalism sites have structured their operation as a nonprofit. Examples of this are ProPublica, MinnPost.com, Voice of San Diego, St. Louis Beacon and Chi-Town Daily News.

Choosing a legal structure for your online publishing site is important. You can learn more about how to set-up the legal framework for your organization on the Creating a Business page on the Citizen Media Law Project Web site.

If you prefer one business structure over another, please tell us why and comment below.

The graphic below is a visualization of this post. It was created using a program called many eyes.

More video and images will be available over the next few days. From the keynote session at noon, some video below from Knight President and CEO Alberto Ibarguen and Gwen Ifill, moderator and managing editor of "Washington Week" and senior correspondent for "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer", just spoke about her new book, The Breakthrough: Politics in the Age of Obama.

Gwen Ifill on how she sees her role:

Gwen Ifill on how she felt about the criticism before the debate:

Alberto Ibargüen on the citizen power of digital access:

Last night, there were twenty or so demonstrations of current work from MIT students. Below, video from Benjamin Mako Hill on Selectricity and Christina of the extrACT project.

This afternoon there were multiple options for locative gaming in Cambridge, a game workshop at MIT, and sessions around issues like finding technical developers for projects.

To follow along, MediaShift blogger Mark Glaser is liveblogging the conference.

More conference blog posts are on Idea Lab, the group blog for all News Challenge winners that began last year and is updated with entries daily.

Persephone Miel also liveblogged today's sessions here.

You can also join the Facebook group, look for images on Flickr (a popular online photo-sharing site) and Twitter (a microblogging site) with the tag #futurecivic (for Twitter #futurecivic tagging, try Summize). The Flickr pool of photos is here.

And, there's the conference wiki, site, and the back channel from last night's panel session.

In its third year, the NetSquared conference tightly programs two days of sessions on how to use social media tools like Flickr, the popular photo-sharing service, along with the real draw: twenty-one project presentations competing to be voted into the top three, with award money and the prestige of "winning" NetSquared.

The twenty-one projects are organized into broadly thematic panels (mapping, aggregation tools), and trends this year included specific asks to extend existing sites and databases with geolocative details, mobile interfaces, and formatted public data.

Most impressively, between sessions and in the hallways, conversation exploded. Presenting to an audience of their peers, the panelists fielded smart questions and excitedly announced finding technical help, calling out other conference attendees and thanking them. After panels, longer and more technical conversations often continued into the hack room, which became the Second Life Mixed Reality event on the second day.

This is a video I took between sessions and between conversations:

Bravo to the NetSquared team for creating a brief incubation of sorts where all projects could hone their ideas and grow from the interested and invested community gathered.

For more, see the conference agenda, blog entries, Twitter account.