I did just that in an analysis piece for today’s London Evening Standard.

I just profiled Mr. Zuckerberg, my College Terrace neighbor, for the London Evening Standard.  It seemed to me that until very recently Zuckerberg had not been taken very seriously by the media.  He may yet fail to make something of Facebook, but he’s done enough now to be treated with respect

Not so long ago I wrote about ghost tweeting as a growth market for writers.

So it was interesting to see that pretty much as soon as US Representative Joe Wilson made a national name for himself by heckling the President last week, he went out and hired himself a ghost, or professional, twitterer.

I’ve just found the set of radical ideas for improving journalism published by veteran Silicon Valley journalist Dan Gillmor last week.

If adopted, they’d truly create a very different-looking news experience.

One of the weird things about the  existential angst that’s currently afflicting journalism is how easily it’s become a debate about trying to save as much as we can of the old system — without acknowledging how the old system really hasn’t been serving readers as well as it can.

New technology is allowing news to be delivered in new ways.  If these new methods serve people better, I don’t see why they won’t pay for it.  And that, I think, suggests that we need to get away from the currently-dominant debate about how newspapers can survive in a world where people read their stories online for free and think more about how starting with a clean slate can create next-generation news organizations that serve us better than ever.

The solution won’t be simple.  Many of the changes Gillmor suggests would be easier to implement (and have more impact on readership and therefore revenue) at a local rather than a national level, for example.

But it will be people thinking like Gillmor, I suspect, who will be running the best and most successful news operations a decade from now.

Recently, I’ve written about the storm of bad PR that’s been hitting Craigslist, the pressure that children in Silicon Valley feel to appear ‘perfect,’ and the way in which suppliers tend to beat out prospectors when it comes to reaping long term gains from short term (gold) rushes.

Well, the NY Times beat me to it.  Sort of.

I’ve been meaning to write something on the consequences of celebrity tweeting for writers for weeks now.   I think there’s a whole new career path here.

It’s clear that while Tweeting adds considerable value to a celebrity’s profile, it’s also something he or she can get seriously wrong.

Intoxicated by the chance to share every moment of an unquestionably fascinating life (they’re a celebrity after all) said famous person can pretty swiftly reveal him or herself to be whiny, egotistical, entitled,crazy or — worst of all — utterly ordinary.

It’s what you could call rule one of celebrity tweeting: done wrong, celebrity tweeting destroys your brand.

Of course, a few rare folks can pull it off.  There’s Stephen Fry and The Real Shaq, whom Noam Coen mentions in the Times, both of who seem to have personalities perfectly suited to the form.  But for most famous people, being interesting many times a day is just plain hard.

Subscribe to a few celebrity feeds and it’s obvious that a lot of people are needing help.  And of those who have it, many clearly aren’t getting the help they need.  Have the wrong people write your tweets  and you quickly betray your twittering as phony PR.  What good is that?

The situation, it’s seemed to me for a while, calls for a new profession — the GhostTweeter.   And here’s the Times recognizing the same thing.

Coen is interested mostly in the fact of GhostTweeting.  I’m as curious about the mechanics.  What exactly is the job description for a celebrity GhostTweeter?

Here’s a try:

Writer needed to work with internationally known personality.  You’ll be:

• psychologically acute, able to understand what motivates both the famous individual and his/her many tens of thousands of diehard fans.
• a natural storyteller, able to take the facts of your employer’s day — whatever they are — and spin them into narrative gold, but always in the believable ‘voice’ of your employer.
• a high-performance, high-producing copywriter, able to translate that understanding into 10 or more engaging, entertaining and above all punchy 140 character tweets per day.  (You will also be expected to reply to at least 20 tweets sent to you be fans per day, to be written in the same engaging ‘voice’).
• available all hours, ready to be tweet for your celebrity wherever he/she is in the world (no, you will not be traveling with the celebrity.  You can do this from home).

Experience in brand management and creative writing is very much a plus.  Ability to work in a high pressure environment with emotional, ambitious people used to ‘high-touch’ assistance is essential.

How does sound?

My guess is this will be a rare growth industry for writers in the next few years.

Since I was writing recently about the Bay Area’s unique creative culture, it’s interesting (to me at least) to note that Ready Made magazine is moving from Berkeley to Des Moines, Iowa.  There was a thoughtful dissection of what that might mean for the magazine in last Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

“The move raises the question of how the change will affect Ready Made’s hip editorial sensibilites,” says the Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli.

Garofoli also notes that none of the magazine’s six staff have chosen to go with the magazine to Des Moines.  I think that pretty much answers his question.

So this week I wrote about Silicon Valley’s new Singularity University.

And last week the topic was the wider Bay Area’s creative culture, of which the Valley’s own culture of creation is very much a part.

I’m thinking I should post my weekly Evening Standard column here, just in case anyone is interested.

So here is last week’s, about Twitter.

And here is the one from the week before, about the Crunchie awards.

I’ve been following with time-sucking intensity the debate on the future of journalism now playing in locales as disparate as the New York Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, various technology blogs and back-and-forth ripostes between individuals with skin in the game on twitter.

The bare bones of the issue is that traditional advertising-based models of media financing are collapsing.  People still want high-quality news content, only they would rather just grab it online — and they’re not fussy about who serves it to them, be they the content’s owners or not.

So how to offer expensive-to-create material in a marketplace where people won’t pay for it and still make money?  No-one’s yet worked out the trick.  In the meantime, old media outfits are slashing jobs, leaving old-guard journalists to lament the passing of the good old days.  And many successful new media sites are building their success on directing people, ultimately, to content created back in the old (and ever more fragile) system.

Who knows where we’re headed.  Maybe to a world of crowd-funded content, or micro-niche journalism written by poorly-paid writers who may or may not care about facts, ethics, or the art of a good lede (not to mention reporting on days when they feel like doing something else or on subjects that happen not to interest them).

While we’re wondering, though, here’s a very old-world example to throw into the mix: the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

This rural print weekly serves an inland chunk of Mendocino County, CA.  It does the job of informing area citizens of local events, news, sports results, legal notices and, as the name suggests, of shopping opportunities in local retail establishments.

It also bears the clear imprint of its editor and main reporter, Bruce Anderson, who’s owned the paper for most of the last twenty years.  The paper, like Anderson, is passionate, pugnacious,and politically engaged, and, thanks to Anderson, the Advertiser is frequently a delight to read.  Take his lead article in the most recent issue about cult-leader Jim Jones’ early years in Mendocino.  It’s blockbuster piece of non-fiction prose — too bad he’s not chosen to put it online yet, otherwise I’d link to it.  Maybe he needs us to buy his paper (as I did at City Lights in San Francisco last weekend) to keep him writing, heaven forefend.

Anderson’s own work is not exactly classic, quote-both-sides-of-the-issue reporting.  But neither is it pure editorializing or unsourced blather.  Anderson knows his stuff.  As an editor, too, he gets the basics of the job down, but leaves plenty of room for character to shine through.  Beyond showing us how enjoyable a local news weekly can be when it’s well run, though, could Anderson also exemplify what a seriously good ‘citizen journalist’ of the future might look like?

“Many newspapers are dead men walking. They’re going to be replaced by smaller, nimbler, multiple Internet-centric kinds of things such as what I’m pioneering,” news publisher James Macpherson of Pasadena tells Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.  Macpherson outsources the writing of his local stories to Bangalore, where he can get writers to give him 1,000 words for $7.50.

Maybe that’s the future.  But what Macpherson offers is a bastardized product.  It’s serviceable, perhaps, but not better than what it’s replacing.  There’s only so much reporting you can do about Pasadena on the phone or online from India.  We need another solution.

Expecting your readers be your writers is no solution, either.  It’s simply a gift to community blowhards, egoists, conspiracy theorists and axe-grinders.  Check out online reader-generated posts and discussions of local issues — they generate so much more heat than light that they become an undue burden to read.

We need good journalism like we need a good judiciary or honest elections.  We need deeply knowledgeable writers and editors covering news that matters to us (and very much to them) in clear, punchy prose.   And we need them to get paid for doing it – for years and years and years.

If news keeps migrating online, there’s still the huge issue of money to resolve.  But if journalists, editors and proprietors are looking for a role model of the kind of personality most likely to thrive in the brave new years ahead, maybe they’ll find it already exists in that most venerable of American print media — the writer/owner/editor of small-town local weekly news.