Tony Burman, CBC News' editor-in-chief, plucks out seven major trends identified in the State of the (U.S.) News Media report issued last month.

An excerpt:

The study identifies “seven new major trends”:

1. News organizations need to do more to think through the implications of shrinking ambitions.

As newsrooms get smaller, there is a move towards building audience around specialized ‘franchise’ areas of coverage instead of trying to provide everything. But this could ignore stories with widespread impact but little audience appeal. To what extent do journalists still have a role in creating a broad agenda of common knowledge?

2. The evidence is mounting that the news industry must become more aggressive about developing a new economic model.

Already the predictions of advertising growth on the Web are being scaled back. News organizations should consider broadening what they consider journalistic function to include online search and citizen media. Perhaps most importantly, they almost certainly must find a way to get consumers to pay for digital content. The notion that the Internet is ‘free’ is false. Those who report the news just aren’t sharing in the fees.

3. The key question is whether the investment community sees the news business as a declining industry or an emerging one in transition.

What is the ‘future of news?' As the primary public square where people gather with the central newsrooms in a community delivering that audience across different platforms? Or are the economics of news now broken with newsrooms continuing to shrink and the quality of journalism in the U.S. declining? If news companies don’t choose the former, and assert their own vision here including making a case and taking risks, their future will be defined by those less invested in and passionate about news.

4. There are growing questions about whether the dominant ownership model of the last generation, the public corporation, is suited to the transition newsrooms must now make.

Private markets in the U.S. now appear to value media properties more than Wall Street does. What is unknown is whether these potential new private owners are motivated by public interest, a vision of growth online or as an investment to be flipped for profit after aggressive cost-cutting.

5. The Argument Culture is giving way to something new, the Answer Culture.

The tendency of journalists to stage mock debates about issues on TV and in print — exemplified by the now-canceled ‘Crossfire’ program on CNN — appears to be over. A growing pattern has news outlets, programs and journalists offering up solutions, crusades, certainty and the impression of putting all the blur of information in clear order for people. And at the centre of this, in most cases, is the host.

6. Blogging is on the brink of a new phase that will probably include scandal, profitability for some, and a splintering into elites and non-elites over standards and ethics.

Blogs in both political and business spheres are becoming more important, and are evolving quickly. What gives blogging its authenticity and momentum — its open access — also makes it vulnerable to being used and manipulated. The paradox of professionalizing the medium to preserve its integrity as an independent citizen platform is the start of a new era in the evolution of the blogosphere.

7. While journalists are becoming more serious about the Web, no clear models of how to do journalism online really exist yet, and some qualities are still only marginally explored.

The study examined three dozen Web sites from a range of media. What they found was that the root media no longer strictly define a site’s character. The Web sites of the Washington Post and the New York Times, for example, are more dissimilar than the papers are in print. The field is still highly experimental, with an array of options. But it can be hard to discern what one site offers, in contrast to another, and some of the Web’s potential abilities seem less developed than others. Sites have done more, for instance, to exploit immediacy, but they have done less to exploit the potential for depth.

It's probably worth reading the original major trends section in the report.

Myself, I have a few quibbles.

The Answer Culture could be more properly described as the Blowhard Culture, since they use Fox News's Bill O'Reilly to illustrate the phenomenon.

There are people on barstools across this land who can pronounce on issues with the same knowledge and certainty of an O'Reilly. :)

Frankly, the Answer Culture doesn't appear to be on the rise in this country. Name the Canadian national equivalent to a Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs or Anderson Cooper? We don't seem to have many broadcasters/pundits who have managed to become famous by tapping in to some simmering vein of populist anger.

One exception might be the Toronto Star's poverty series. That effort not only outlined the problem but pressured for a solution, with the paper doing things like holding a public discussion on the issue. The Ontario provincial government announced the phasing-in of a $10-per-hour minimum wage, in response to the series and pressure from other sources.

The trend the report identifies in blogging -- the rise of a few who become profitable brands -- is pretty much inevitable. I would have found it more valuable had the report tried to identify whether the top bloggers became that way because they were doing some actual journalism on their blogs.

I admit to being almost totally confused by the report's findings about online journalism. What do they mean, "no clear models?" It then goes on to say, "The field is still highly experimental, with an array of options, but it can be hard to discern what one site offers, in contrast to another."

So the Eureka! moment will be when all news websites look and act the same? Please, somebody help me out!

As to depth, I would think that in the near term, news websites of traditional print organizations would do better to focus on delivering breaking news with their website (the 'what happened?') and use their print products to focus on the 'why' part of the news equation, then migrate that content onto the website to extend its life.

I've often thought that broadcasters' websites had an advantage in the early days of online news because they are much more comfortable with the notion of a continuous news cycle.

(Note: I work for CTV.ca News, which is part of CTV News, which is part of CTV, which is part of CTVglobemedia. The Globe and Mail newspaper, also part of the parent company, is a corporate cousin.)

I'll have to read the whole online news section, but I'd like to see more about this "depth" argument.

Another emerging paradigm -- one that Burman's 'letters from the editor' column attempts to address -- is the notion of "news as conversation." My understanding of the concept is that a news article is a starting point for back-and-forth discussion between the journalist and her audience, rather than an immutable stone tablet.

Globeandmail.com is probably most advanced in this regard among Canadian websites. Each news story is essentially a blog posting as readers can post comments directly to it.

The site has two types of moderation, semi-moderated, which uses an automated filter, and full automation. Look at the problems that can occur with semi-moderation, as evidenced by this story about Google's three top executives drawing a $1 per year salary:

    1. M D from Ottawa, Canada writes: Until the stock matures and the company starts to stagnate, then the executives line-up and usually start raping the capital out of the company.

      Good start for these fellows. Not all executives can claim to own such a large portion of their companies.
    2. Vickky Angstrom from Calgary, Canada writes: How are they paying their household bills? Oh oh. I hope they aren't doing like Lord Wannabee of Gross Hubris and letting the shareholders pay...
    3. JD Wood from Toronto, Canada writes: I would like to see Stephen Harper draw a salary of $1 per year to prove that he has the interests of Canadians first.
    4. H D from Calgary, Canada writes: Hey Wood - once your Fiberals give back the money they've stolen from the Canadian public over the last 50 years - particularly in the last 13 - we could all live on $1 a year salary. You're pathetic.
    5. Prashanta Dhakal from Canada writes: Globe and Mail should ban political/partisan comments from non-political articles.
    6. Jimmee J. from tecumseh, Canada writes: I am willing to bet that as a lower end middle class male, I pay more income tax than these three gentlemen combined and then some.
    7. H MCP from Toronto, Canada writes: JD Wood, you're a sick individual. I had to do a double take to see what the article was really talking about. It's Google and not Canadian issues isn't it?

It took exactly three posts for the conversation to go off topic.

It would be nice to see some research on whether adding reader comments actually enriches the news experience by allowing more sharing of information or by just providing people a chance to pop off (not a bad thing, but as you can see above, not very productive to wade through).

At globeandmail.com, I don't see many reporters, if any, taking part in the semi-moderated conversations. They tend to take part in fully moderated "chats" where they can pick and choose the questions and the questioner has no opportunity for response (although that's still more than most organizations do).

Again, I'll have to dig further into the report, but I would like to know more about how the news-as-conversation is evolving -- or if it's even on the radar.