If you’re reading this, you probably get at least some of your news online. According to a couple of fairly recent reports, you are part of a smaller group than you might think.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project, in a report released a few months ago, found that only 23 percent of those questioned got news “yesterday” online. The printed newspaper fared better, with 38 percent while local TV was the “winner” with 59 percent.

The Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, meanwhile, released its own survey called the Future of News earlier this year and found some different numbers. Respondents said they get most of their news from local TV (65.5 percent), far more than from the newspaper (28.4 percent) and the internet (11.2 percent).

I’m surprised that local TV news remains so dominant. In Tacoma and Pierce County, where we don’t have a true local news station, the figures probably aren’t as high. (But that’s just a guess.)

The trend, of course, is what everyone’s looking at. I mention the above studies as a lead-in to the bad news here at the TNT today. Our print circulation dropped 5.7% (in preliminary reports) during the last six months. The combined national circulation of print newspapers dropped 2.8% during the same period.

Obviously, that’s a huge concern. The newspaper enjoyed six consecutive years of circulation growth from 1999-2004, bucking the national trend. But the magic has disappeared and there are editors and publishers all over the country working to figure out how to get it back.

Will the internet be our savior? Who knows. It’s one option we’re working hard to explore. Judging from the studies quoted above, maybe we’re better off building a TV station.

Do you still follow the news? If so, what's your preferred method - TV, print or online?

The Port of Seattle, which runs Sea-Tac Airport, paid a pretty penny to publish a nearly full-page ad in the local newspapers today. They had an urgent need to tell everyone that the main drive into the airport for arrivals will be closed for a few days next week.

It’s interesting to me that in this fully digital, Web 2.0 world we live in that a major entity such as the airport would need to spend thousands of dollars for print newspaper ads to communicate a simple message. (Note: my paycheck thanks the port for those ad dollars.)

The airport’s web site, which I previously discussed, does have a host of email alerts that would notify travelers of disruptions. And with the terror alerts and color coded warnings, you’d think frequent travelers would be tuned in to this kind of information.

The Port, I’m sure, wishes it could rely on web and email. Much more cost effective than print or broadcast advertising. But apparently the market’s not there yet.

On a side note, I appreciate the email I receive from Alaska Airlines the day before I travel. It reminds me of my itinerary (I’m famous for deleting that email when I book the trip weeks in advance), gives me one-click access to online check-in, and provides a weather forecast for the destination I’m traveling to. I don’t remember signing up for such a service, but I’ll keep the spam filters away from this one.

I’m traveling today to Oregon where I’m scheduled to speak at a meeting tomorrow sponsored by the Institute for Educational Inquiry. The name of the 3-day “study session” is Journalism, Education and the Public Good and the title of my presentation tomorrow is “The Promise of New Technologies.”

My goal is to demonstrate how innovations in web technologies are allowing disparate groups with similar interests to come together and communicate. An interesting example, and a great partnership model, can be found in St. Petersburg, Fla. where the local newspaper teamed up with several educators – including the superintendent for one of the districts in its coverage area – to publish a blog called The Classroom.

We attempted our own “education/journalism” project centered on the school closure issue in Tacoma. Unfortunately it hasn’t taken off like we’d hoped. There has been a definite lack of activity and discussion on the site, in part because our own reporters and editors have been idle in facilitating the discourse.

What would you do to bring journalism and education together in the interests of the public good?

I'd tell you I've been too busy to blog, but I can't stand it when people go on and on about how busy they are. (Do you know anyone who isn't busy these days?)

Bottom line is I haven't made time for the blog the past couple of days, but I'll have some new stuff today.

Thanks for staying tuned.

You’ve heard of Craigslist, right? The not-so-pretty, but oh-so-free classifieds web site. As of Saturday, the site is a little less free in the Seattle-Tacoma area.

Starting Oct. 22, Craigslist now charges $25 for job listings in four cities. This follows the policy of charging for employment ads in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. According to the site, “overposting, spam, ‘get rich quick’ schemes and other quality issues” drove the decision, which also affects Boston, Washington, D.C. and San Diego. For full background and message board, go here.

Meanwhile, at thenewstribune.com, we officially became part CareerBuilder over the weekend, the self-proclaimed largest employment listings web site in the U.S. All marketing aside, from what I hear it's a much better service than what we were offering previously. In fact, the site was a nominee for the 2006 Webby Awards.

We're launching another blog, but this one's from long distance.

In what we'll call a pilot project, we are publishing a local student who is studying abroad. Ryan Moss, a senior Environmental Studies major at UWT, is in Costa Rica for three months. He is staying at a remote wildlife refuge and he volunteered to share his writings and photos.

Previously, we hosted a blog for PLU journalism professor Joanne Lisosky and her students when they spent time at the UN. We're looking for more students traveling internationally who are interested in blogging, so if you know someone, have them drop me a line.

Next month you can learn about the various initiatives to bring wireless internet access to our fine region with a meeting sponsored by the Tacoma Technology Consortium.

As I’ve written previously, there are several movements afoot to convert America’s “Most Wired City” into one that is deliciously wireless. If you’re interested, either as a blogger, a local business person, or technology freak, plan to hit this meeting.

Date: Thursday, Nov. 9th
Location: Simpson Community Room, Commerce Building, 11th & Pacific/950 Pacific Ave., Suite 300.
Time: 4 p.m.

If you are interested in attending, reservations need to be made in advance: RSVP to Heather Wright at Info@tacomachamber.org, or (253) 627-2175.

A few months back, I wished for a local crime mapping solution that would rival chicagocrime.org. Today, I and a handful of other TNT types presented just such an idea at a meeting of the executive board for the Law Enforcement Support Agency.

Our idea is inspired by chicagocrime.org and our goal is to provide Pierce County with a constantly updated, browsable mapped database of police and fire activity. The response from Mayor Bill Baarsma, Pierce County Sheriff Paul Pastor and others was mostly positive, but we have a few concerns to answer. Tom Orr, the director of LESA, has been most helpful in moving this project along and, with any luck, we’ll be launching something in the near future.

As we continue development, let me know what information you wish you had access to and I’ll see what we can do.

Those of us who live in the city of Tacoma are lucky to have a library system with a good web site. It was good enough to get noticed by the Webby Awards in the spring, and it keeps me coming back by making it easy to search for a reserve books when it’s convenient for me.

I have young kids who enjoy going to the library so I try to take them regularly. But when we go as a group, they need me to help them pick out books and videos – and stay quiet, and walk instead of running, and … you get the idea.

So if I want to check out books, I either have to make a separate trip or go online, and the latter is much more convenient. Using the library’s Topcat system and your library card number, you can find books at any of the system’s branches and have them trucked to the branch closest to you. The search isn’t the greatest, but used in combination with Amazon’s search and user reviews, it works pretty darn well.

You can also pay your library fines online and renew books that are due. The system even sends you an email a few days before materials are due as a reminder.

I’m hoping other library patrons outside of Tacoma have the same opportunities. A quick look at the Pierce County web site suggests that it has many of the same capabilities, using a system powered by Polaris.

Going to the library is such a 1950s kind of thing to do. But without some 21st century technology, it might have already gone the way of black and white TV.

UPDATE: As Kevin points out in a comment, this post on the Tacoma Library web site came with ironic timing: the Pierce County Library launched a new web site today. Sitecrafting, Kevin's employer, handled the re-build, which apparently launched soon after I visited it this morning.

My inspiration for the post, in case you're curious, came from my six books due today at a Tacoma branch.

That’s what the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation apparently thinks. The nonprofit has launched the 21 Century News Challenge and is putting up $5 million for “new ideas, pilot projects, commercial products and leadership initiatives that will improve the flow of information and news in the public interest.”

The money will apparently be disbursed by category but there doesn’t seem to be a breakdown of how much will go where. It appears the better ideas will receive more money.

How would you improve the flow of information and news in the public interest?

My last post was meant to show how arbitrary a rating system could be when applied to a topic as narrow as local blogs. Here’s another example: the top 100 newspaper web sites as ranked by site listings at Google News.

The News Tribune clocks in at an unimpressive No. 99, behind such “where’s that?” names as the Berkshire Eagle and the Daily Breeze. The TNT was No. 85 in print circulation in 2005, so the ranking is not completely off base if compared to the size of the print readership. But this ranking has nothing to do with online readership, just mentions on Google News (which, invariably, you would expect would drive readership).

Our friends to the north, meanwhile, fared much better. The Seattle P-I’s web site is ranked No. 7 overall, which is quite an accomplishment for a newspaper that was ranked No. 79 in print circulation in 2005. The Seattle Times is ranked No. 14 on Newsknife, but was No. 47 in print.

Does this matter? Probably not to the general news consumer. But to me, it suggests we need to figure out how to get more listings in Google News if we want more traffic.

Steve Rubel posted on a new way to measure the impact of blogs – a new tool called Blog Juice.

The site claims to compile data from Technorati, Alexa, Bloglines and more to produce a score from 0-10 that allows you to see how your favorite blog (or your blog) stacks up. Gizmodo tops the list with a 9.8.

Curious, I plugged in several of the more well-known local blogs, some from the TNT and some from our neighbors to the north. Here’s the completely unscientific scorecard of rankings by "juice."

=> Read more!

Have you played the Google Image Labeler game? It's pretty cool and is designed to improve the search giant's image search accuracy. You get matched with a partner and asked to label an image. If you and your partner come up with the same label, you score points (and, presumably, Google takes note of the agreement).

One round lasts 90 seconds. Give it a shot.

If you like photo-sharing sites, you've seen Flickr. But have you seen PBase? It's user interface isn't as polished as some of the better-known sites, but the photos seem to be much higher in quality. Visit the site and search for "tacoma" or "Rainier" and see what you find.

(Thanks to Dave Zeeck for the tip.)

A post on the Poynter Institute’s web site last week asked a provocative question (Poynter is a journalism think tank/continuing education shop in Florida). Most people who frequent news web sites could probably compile a long list of stuff that regularly drives them nuts. Even though my bread is buttered by the industry, I agree. In fact there is stuff on the TNT web site that I’m not crazy about. (But I like my job, so I'm keeping that to myself.)

My No. 1 pet peeve on news web sites? Hidden contact information. Any site that is trying to build community online as a news and information source had better make it extremely easy to contact staff at the news organization. On the TNT site there is a link at the bottom of every page that reads “Contact Us.” And there’s another link under the “About Us” menu on the navigation at the top of the page. Is that enough? You tell me.

What’s your pet peeve with online news sites (including ours)? Post a comment or send me an email.

UPDATE: Amy has added another pet peeve to the Poynter sites: online video in anything but Flash.

With YouTube in the news these days, CNET recycled a feature I missed the first time around that you will want to catch. Ten tech-related YouTube clips features some funny stuff from John Stewart, the famous Mentos experiment, and other classics. See it now.

Whoever said there is no such thing as a free lunch said it before the web came of age. Free software downloads account for at least half of the programs that I use on a daily basis.

Earlier today one of our staff bloggers needed to resize a photo for his blog. He didn’t have Photoshop, which is the industry standard for image production but costs several hundred dollars. No problem – I called up snipshot.com and cropped and re-sized the photo in a few seconds for him.

Snipshot is one of dozens of free programs that you can download and use free of charge to assist in your blogging or other web production. For a list of the best 46, go here. (I have no idea what the number 46 signifies.)

The combination of the breaking news version the day it happened (31,656 page views) and the second-day story that ran in print (19,773) make Karen Hucks' account of the court appearance by triple murderer Ulysses Handy the most-read story on our site in 2006.

Here are the top 10 most popular stories for September:

1. Murderer tells victims’ families to ‘get over it’ (Hucks)
2. Murderer to families” ‘Get over it’ (Hucks)
3. New Stryker boasts plenty of firepower (Gilbert)
4. Inexperienced worker dies when tree falls on him (Montes)
5. Sonics, Lewis place negotiations on hold (Hughes)
6. Alexander hopes to play this week (Sando)
7. Historic high school repoening after two-year rennovation (Abe)
8. Was Branch trade simply a “Gotcha?” (McGrath)
9. Millions gone with the tide (Gordon)
10. Alexander’s hurting, Hawks won’t be (Boling)

If you've heard of the "net neutrality" issue but haven't found the time or energy to dive into this bureaucratic morass, here's an option. Especially if you like your news delivered with wit and snark, a la John Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

Check out www.weownthenet.com where a fictitious CEO explains how his giant global telecom will benefit if government allows it to gain more control over the internet.

As the introduction states: Who better to control a 21st century technology than a 19th century monopoly?

If you participate in or follow Web 2.0 technologies, you understand the concept of tagging. (If not, visit Flickr or del.ic.ious and click around on their tags and you’ll figure it out pretty quick.)

But what about a lens? Only users of a site called Squidoo would recognize that term.

Squidoo allows users to create a lens so that others interested in the same “focus” on a particular topic can share in their view. “The Web ought to accelerate and even replicate that word of mouth phenomenon that works so well in the real world,” the Squidoo About page reads. “There ought to be a way to leverage the power of personal recommendation online.”

And that, the builders propose, is why they built Squidoo.

A local “Lensmaster” named skoonus has already created a lens called Having Fun in Tacoma. It is a list of web site links and feeds that add up to give you a pretty good one-page source of how to find something to do in and around town. It’s not editable like Wikipedia (at least I couldn’t figure out how to edit), so I couldn’t change the feed from our Soundlife section and have it point to our A&E content.

So if you think you see a slice of the world differently and that view might be of assistance to others? Might be time to start your own lens. Or just clean your glasses.