It’s been a while since I’ve typed that. The holidays, kids home from college, catching up on work, yadda yadda. That’s all behind me, and I’ve actually had a chance to do some extracurricular reading.

Here’s the best stuff I came across this week:

A Narrowed Gaze (Columbia Journalism Review) – Former Wall Street Journal staffer Dean Starkman examines business journalism leading up to the financial crisis and asks – to paraphrase Jon Stewart of all people – “How could so many journalists covering a beat so closely miss something so big so completely?” Good question. Starkman is writing a book on the subject, The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: the Financial Crisis and the Financial Press, due out in fall 2012. Looking forward to it.

How One Bit of Stupidity Could Have Brought Down a Multi-million Dollar Media Company (Shankman.com) – Beware – or be aware of – airplane seatmates. On a plane ride from Florida to NYC, P.R. guy Peter Shankman sat next to a guy whose reading material for the flight was a prospectus for a well-known media company that’s apparently for sale. Shankman doesn’t say which one – but he got an eyeful, and even snapped photos of the prospectus, which he includes with the post (with incriminating material redacted). His lesson: when it comes to confidential information, don’t be stupid. My takeaway as a reporter: be aware of your surroundings, you never know when you might stumble onto the makings of a great scoop.

Unbroken - I’m finally getting around to reading Laura Hillenbrand’s biography of 1936 Olympic standout and World War II hero Louie Zamperini, her follow up to bestseller Seabiscuit. I’m about a third of the way through the book, which showcases the meticulous research and recreation of detail that has become Hillenbrand’s hallmark. Last night I left “Zamp” and two other men in shark-infested waters – can’t wait to see what happens next.

And some industry news:

Can newspapers be tech incubators? (GigaOm) – Why yes, they can, and are, Mathew Ingram writes. He cites the Philadelphia News Network, which just launched the Project Liberty incubator, and Digital First Media, which owns the Detroit News, Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News, which has created a venture capital arm to invest in media startups. Another example: the Oregonian announced today partnerships with 50 Oregon blogs, part of a year-old Oregon News Network community blog project. New bloggers run the gamut from birding to local economics.

NewsRight: a Game Changer for Online Journalism? (Mashable) - Associated Press, The New York Times Co., The Washington Post Co. and more than two dozen other news organizations have started a digital licensing service to “provide authorized access to the best original reporting and related analytics for convenient use across digital platforms.” According to Mashable’s report, the company’s technology will track “websites, blogs and other Internet aggregators to measure the spread of its participants’ content.” In other words, they’re making sure content aggregators, HuffPost and anybody else aren’t ripping off and using what isn’t theirs without paying for it (my analysis).

Tool of the week for journalists – ProPublica’s TimelineSetter (Journalism.co.uk) – A nifty tool for creating beautiful interactive timelines.

This week’s recommended reading is short. Very short. So short it’s just a hashtag on Twitter: #ONA10. If you’re a journalist lucky enough to be there, you know that’s the hashtag for the Online News Association annual conference that started today in Washington D.C. Or maybe you’ve seen it on Twitter and are already following along.

If you aren’t, you should be. Whether you’re in a newsroom somewhere or work as an independent writer, you should be keeping track of what’s happening. AOL President Tim Armstrong explained this morning about why Patch isn’t evil. Jonathan Harris, the data visualization mastermind behind the WordCount.org project, The Whale Hunt and the We Feel Fine book, talked about.

Go to TweetDeck or HootSuite or whatever you use to use Twitter and searc h for #ONA10, save it and follow it. The conference is going on through the weekend.

Do I write for Web content aggregators? No.

I write for magazines that publish stories in print and online. I write for business and trade magazines that publish some stories in print and some online. I write for e-zines, news sites and custom publishers that publish only online. I write for this blog.

I don’t need to write for content aggregators. After more years in the business than I care to share, I don’t have to. I know a good story when I see one. I can find sources. I’ve pulled court documents and interviewed relatives of homicide victims and dying children. I’ve combed through 10Ks and dissected proxy statements. I’ve walked the floors at trade shows and grilled CEOs. I know how to write a basic news story in the inverted pyramid style. I can write an essay, a feature, a Q&A, an op-ed, a column. I can write headlines, cutlines and pull quotes, charticles and “at a glance” fact boxes. I blog. I tweet. I can do simple HTML coding, add keyword tags and know the basics of SEO (sort of). I can take pictures, though I’ve yet to tackle video or podcasts.

So content aggregators hold no appeal.

But writing online, that’s attractive. At one point, I freelanced for some of the biggest newspapers in the country, the biggest tech magazines and the largest financial wire service in the world.

Today, 90 percent of my stories show up online right away and 100 percent eventually.  And I’m well paid for the work – in fact, extremely very well paid.

If that makes me a Web content writer, so be it. Because in another year or two, even more news stories, essays, columns, blog posts and charticles from established media companies and publishers yet to be born will go directly online.

I’ll be ready.

On writing:

• How do you learn to write – From a literary agent, writer and book editor.
• 5 tips for citizen journalism from ProPublica’s new ‘crowdsorcerer’
• 16 things you learn in j-school – Journalism basics
• You don’t have to be a journalist to be a journalist – Advice from a young journalist.
• The end of newspapers, in chart form – Newspaper classified ads fall off the deep end.

On blogging and online media:

• WordPress tutorials on YouTube – How to move a blog from one domain name to another and more.
• Why ebooks look so ugly
• 55 extremely useful online generators for designers

On Twitter:

• 10 must-have productivity tools for Twitter – The usual suspects (TweetDeck, TwitPics) and more.
• A directory of book trade people on Twitter – Publishers, agents, publicists, booksellers, etc.
• Twitter in the newsroom – Podcast of print and broadcast journalists talking about using Twitter.

CJR on NY Times’ online holdings – The cover story of the July/August issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Sulzberger at the Barricades: Can Arthur Sulzberger Jr. transform The New York Times for the digital age? reveals the paper’s digital business is gaining traction despite continuing financial woes on the print side. According to author Douglas McCollam, the Times’ digital-only properties, including About.com, the search service the paper purchased in 2005, still account for only 3 percent of its annual revenue. However, revenue from all digital media operations grew 10 percent in 2007, to $330 million, topping an 8 percent jump the previous year, according to McCollam. Still, McCollam asks:

“When will gains online realistically make up for losses on the print side? “We don’t know when digital revenues will offset the decline in print,” (Publisher Arthur) Sulzberger wrote in an email, adding that “this is a question we often ask ourselves.”

Ironically, the article isn’t available on CJR’s Website yet, so if you’re not a subscriber you’ll have to find a copy or wait until it appears online. 7/16 UPDATE: The story is now online, and I added the link above.

Glaser on the demise of OJR – As I previously discussed on these pages, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications recently shut down the Online Journalism Review, which had been charting the course of online news for more than a decade. This week, Mark Glaser used his MediaShift column at PBS to “dig deeper” into the story, revealing that with a new dean and director of the journalism program, the school is in transition and rethinking where OJR fits in. Glaser raises a couple excellent points: can a school without faculty devoted to teaching online news support a Website devoted to the subject, and when all news is moving online, is the idea of an academic journal devoted to online news outdated? Read more here.

PaidContent purchased for $30 million – It’s not every day a single blogger turns a passion for reporting on the online news business into a sustainable enterprise and then gets bought out for a reported $30 million. But that’s what happened to Rafat Ali, founder of PaidContent, a six-year-old news site covering all types of paid-content business models, which he sold last week to Guardian News and Media, a British newspaper publisher. By Ali’s account, Guardian will run ContentNext, the parent company Ali started to run PaidContent and several related blogs, as a stand-alone business. Read all the details here.

Well, that’s nothing compared with the changes happening in the news business now. Print is out. Digital is in. Newspapers are suffering, online publications flourishing.

While some people lament these changes, others see opportunity. One of them is John S. Carroll, former editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times. Carroll spoke of the changes facing the news business to journalism students at the University of Kentucky on April 1, 2008, saying, “The current period in journalism is, in fact, historic. It is epochal. It is remarkable, perhaps even unprecedented. I’m speaking, of course, of the passage of journalism into the digital age.”

He told journalism students that they’ll be working with tools unlike any imagined by earlier generations:

“You will have new tools for finding things out, and tools to send your stories to the entire world at the speed of light,” he says. “Journalism has always been a one-way bulletin from journalist to public. Now it is a conversation with millions of participants, which gives us access to new facts and new ideas.”

And he expressed hope that new media will continue in the journalistic tradition of:

“enriching the national conversation, keeping the old media honest and creating entirely new languages of journalism. I also hope that they’ll find ways to make more money and thereby to employ reporters in meaningful numbers.”

Read the complete text of John Carroll’s speech here.