Jeff Jarvis speaks with participants.

More than 150 localbloggers, journalists, media execs, and academics gathered at the City University of New York (CUNY) grad school of journalism today for the third annual conference on new models for news, this year focusing on local news blogging.

"What we're seeing happening is entrepreneurship," said Prof. Jeff Jarvis, organizer of the conference, as he kicked off the morning session, "What that means is that journalism is going to be an ecosystem."

And for the next eight hours, the participants explored the ins and outs of that new ecosystem in a series of panels, discussions, and much informal best practice sharing. The scope ranged across presentations from Spot.us, who crowdfunded a story on the Pacific garbage patch in yesterday's NY Times to the founder of New Jersey's hyperlocal Baristanet, who talked about the social pressure her kids feel having a mom who's a localblogger.

Okay, okay, I can't do the news voice anymore. Go take a peek at the wicked robust Twittering from the conference.

This was just an awesome day, where everyone I talked to was doing *exactly what I was.* I mean, how cool is that?

And it reminded me that I've been going to this kind of conference for 20 years now. In the late 1980s, as hypertext was on the rise (and yes, Web folks, hypertext existed that long ago) the academic conferences were full of hand-wringing about the impact of the digital. Believe it or not, there was much worry about navigation and being "lost in hyperspace." Sounds charmingly naive now. Then, in the mid-1990s, there were conferences on digital narrative where people trembled about the disappearance of the author into the text. Been there, done that.

Now, the digital tsunami has finally made it to the last high ground, the sacred gray eminence of news. Only those who have not been paying attention see this as something sudden.

As Steven Colbert said in his show this evening, discussing the SF Chronicle's decision to go to glossy paper stock, "Print your newspaper on something you know people will buy," said Colbert. "Fried food."

Mmmm. Now THAT'S a new business model.

Update: Followups from Jeff Jarvis, Dorian Benkoil at Poynter.

Resources:
NewsInnovation.com
New Business Models
Baristanet
Larchmont Gazette
Spot.us
SFGate story on Chronicle paper
ColbertNation.com

Full disclosure: The conference was free for participants, but the imputed value is significant. This statement is intended to conform to (and parody) FTC disclosure requirements.