Information registry for real-time blogging?

where to begin?

Tim Porter’s piece “Explode the Newsroom: Six Ways to Rebuild the System” rocks, although I posted a comment disparaging Ways Nos. 2 and 3 at the site. The trick is to find the right people to run this new newsroom. My humble suggestion: Look amongst the ranks of those veterans who opted out of the old system.

Second, I had a great exchange today with my brilliant former co-worker Andy Rhinehart. There is more there than can be described in short here, but it did lead to what I thought was an interesting idea about creating a system that cataloged bits of new media information (and perhaps, someday, ideas?), allowing me or you to track whatever is being said about a topic in real time.

In such a system, I could point my aggregator to find everything that is being blogged about the Rice confirmation hearings, and every blog that had self-reported a post on the subject would show up. Andy, who is a new-media guru in South Carolina, didn’t immediately laugh at my idea, which I considered a good start.

Then we talked about fantasy football.

Why is it that I suspect that most of the “journalism professors” who write about “new media” have a bug up their ass? Like a lot of working reporters, I have come to distrust many of the voices from the journalism academy. They’re the sort of people who come through pitch snake-oil solutions to circulation problems, and we just figure they’re out to make a name for themselves.

Is my skepticism misplaced?