Across town, Jay Small at Scripps offers a long and thoughtful essay on how innovation happens (or doesn't) at news organizations headed for the online world. His audience is "newspaper operators" and, I would guess, newspaper designers and online staff members... or prospective ones... who would like to be part of something new in news.

Says Jay: "I hope it generates some discussion, questions, debates and disagreements. I need to keep noodling this myself, listening to others' opinions, and refining my own. Sometimes it feels as though arriving at a method and mindset for innovation is as much trial and error as the product development process itself."

That sounds a lot like something I heard from another online/design guru, Robb Montgomery, and a reader discussion, a couple of months ago -- about the need for news organizations and journalism educators to cultivate a "culture of innovation" in journalism... rather than just focus on adopting or teaching flavor-of-the-month innovations.

Back on campus, Innovation in College Media caught up with Rob Curley of the Washington Post, asking good questions about... well... innovation in college media -- including his suggestions for staff organization at a student newspaper's website.

(Our new/news site http://tennesseejournalist.com at UT uses the core software behind the sites Curley previously led in Lawrence, Kan., and Naples, Fla. The evening video newscasts at NaplesNews.com are definitely worth a look, both for production values and content.)

More food for innovative thought here:

• Curley's former Kansas colleague, Adrian Holovaty, now a Post colleague, points to his most recent programmer-journalist project, a database tracking Bill Clinton's speech income, to accompany this Post story.
• Apple's promo/profile of things the Washington Post is doing.
  
• Chris Lopez at newassignment.net (an innovation in its own right) summarized some interesting projects a few weeks ago.
  
• Mindy McAdams' slide show about transforming the journalism curriculum.
• My old neighbor Vin Crosbie's item last summer about the temptation of treating one innovation as a panacea
  
• Tim Porter's analysis of how "cookie-cutter thinking" can stifle new ideas at newspapers' Web sites.
• For a site that's apparently doing something right (one I haven't been reading), see this report on the Financial Times by Poynter's Rick Edmonds, after the paper's year of "integrated multimedia newsroom" development, which he compares to recent initiatives on this side of the pond
• In particular, Gannett's Information Center and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's recently announcednewsroom reorganization.
  

Student reminder: When I go a few days without a blog entry to read, feel free to poke around in my http://Del.icio.us/bstepno collection of bookmarks, many with bloglike comments.

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