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To try to regulate Twitter, or shepherd people to the “best” source of information misses the real problem: ensuring that media consumers everywhere are media literate, and posses the tools to decide for themselves how to evaluate the trustworthiness of a source.

“Social platforms like Tumblr should be about growing a community. If a news organization is focused on growing their community first, they’ll find their numbers will grow eventually.”

Things to consider…

Content: Yes, these are topics that newspapers and magazines cover. We’re not talking about single articles though, but packages assembled with key target readers — by interest, of course, but also by age, gender, relative affluence, and more — in clear mind. For local publishers, their opportunity is mainly around local content knowledge, whether that’s the key sports teams, knowledge of the local wedding industry, or what makes home and garden different in Miami than Montreal.

While today we see only nascent activity in the new cafeteria, soon the app stores will be full of the stuff, and like digital information content overall, only the best will be paid for by readers and create new winning franchises.

Form and format: At this point, we’re all fumbling for words. An “ebook” defines these new digital products by their old world analogs, much as e-newspapers did in the ’90s (and e-editions struggle to do today). Yes, there are words, and there will increasingly be pictures, data, video, and touchscreen interactivity only now being invented. So it’s long-form narrative, it’s more-than-bits-and-bites journalism, and even “manifestos,” as The Domino Project’s Seth Godin calls his revolutionize-the-book industry imprint products. Godin’s Amazon-powered project is a big one to watch, bearing lots of model-busting and model-making meaning for the news industry (see my companion piece, laying those out in “Six Lessons for News Publishers from Seth Godin“). Let’s toss in the innovation of The Atavist, which David Carr rightly described as breakthrough thinking, as three guys in Brooklyn reinvent paid “long-form journalism” in mobile reading form.

One reason we see the Kindle format ascendant first: the company defined the new new here, when it announced Kindle Singles way back last October, telling us that the tyranny of package definitions — “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length” — no longer held in the modern age. We don’t yet have “iPad singles”, though publishers have been selling single magazine issues, including specials from American Media Inc., publisher of the National Enquirer and Star. Early on, it saw the potential, creating three custom-to-the-tablet products around fitness and health.

Another factor in format: cost. ProPublica’s Dick Tofel says it might take an “hour or so” to create an ebook given the easy repurposing technology. iPad single development, well done, will be costlier, but as in APA’s example, doable and scalable.

Dealing with Amazon’s and Apple’s policies: Lots of nuance here, but increasingly publishers will find ways to create new works (maybe derivative works in the old copyright sense) that take stuff that was available free on the web, add to it, segment it, and package it in ways that distinguish from repurposed web stuff. That should satisfy paying readers — most importantly — and Amazon and Apple, as they eagerly take their 30 cents of every dollar.

Sponsorship will drive revenue here as much as reader payment: Seth Godin’s second Domino book just picked up GE as a sponsor — and is making the book free to readerson April 20. Sponsors got in early on the iPad, propelling much unbudgeted (!) revenue for news companies in 2010. Big brand advertisers like associating with hot, new — and whole — products. It’s an identity thing, and should have legs as a business model. Importantly, here, two legs of revenue: reader and advertiser.

“If there was going to be a war in my generation, I wanted to cover it. And I wanted to cover it from as far forward as I could get,” Galloway said. “How you become a famous war or foreign correspondent is you go forward to where the action is and make friends with the second lieutenants and captains. Then you stay alive long enough for those friends to grow into colonels and generals.”

Pretty amazing and resourceful.

The key insight:

Disruptions caused by the Internet threaten to expose certain buried conflicts at the heart of modern journalism and a commercialized press.

Jolie O’Dell nails it.

“But journalists too often work inside an institutional culture which says to them, “Be inhuman.” Do not have opinions — and if you do, for God’s sake don’t share them. Do not attend protests or take stands on issues. Do not vote; or, if you do, don’t tell anyone whom you voted for.”