One of the points I make with my mass comm students is that they don’t have to wait until they’re “older” to change the world. Marconi, Farnsworth, Zuckerberg and Jobs were all college age when they created what turned into radio, TV, Facebook and Apple.

One assignment I gave them was to create the next mass communication phenomenon. It could be hardware, software, an app, a distribution device or, best of all, something no one has thought of. I asked that it be within the realm of possibility — no creation of time travel, for instance — but that it should be imaginative. We talked about finding a need and simplicity of use. I didn’t give them much time, and a few of the groups stretched “mass communication phenomenon” well beyond its meaning. I wish one of the groups had chosen to seize the opportunity of Internet penetration in the developing world or tackled the issues of digital privacy, both topics we discussed. But I am pleased with the results.

Clip It — A combination of Pinterest and YouTube in which a user can collect his or her favorite videos and “pin” them to a board giving the user easy access to their favorites. Initially, this is targeted to males who would be interested in saving sports highlights and then sharing them with friends. (An untapped market as Pinterest is primarily used by females.)

O.R. Not — aka Obscene Recognition Not. It is an algorithm that recognizes photos with pictured uses of alcohol, drugs and obscene gestures and tags them so that the subject in the photo can remove them from a social networking site if they want to. The target audience is high school and college students who might not want to be encumbered by drunken party photos. In negotiation is a contract with Photoshop to erase the offensive image from the photo.

Smart Cart — While watching television, if you see something on an ad or an enabled program that you’d like to have, you can use your remote to purchase it instantly. Like the Old Navy sweater in the ad? Click the remote and a drop down menu provides the price of everything for sale, and it will comparison shop for you. If you want to purchase, it will send you to check-out, all without leaving your favorite program.

Microfit — You know Proteus DIgital Health, right? Me neither. Basically, with this idea, you take a pill with an embedded microchip and it tracks your nutrients, body temperature, heart rate, etc. Combine with a healthy drink filled with fiber and proteins — produced by this new company — and it monitors all sorts of bodily functions. Imagine parents being able to monitor their children’s nutritional needs or children doing the same for their elderly parents.

Healthy You — Take a photo of your food and the camera will analyze portion size, nutrients, calories, etc. Would come with a pedometer app. Targeted to college students.

Sandy — aka Suri for the beach. A voice-activated device that keeps your smartphone out of the sun, sand and surf.  It attaches to your chair and you can speak to it to take photos, upload them to social networks, and call friends, all hands free.

An unnamed one — Music affects the body so why shouldn’t your body select music for you? This one creates a bracelet that uses your biological reactions to music to determine what you’d like to hear.

If you’re a venture capitalist and want to inquire further, let me know and I’ll get you in touch with the appropriate students. Be forewarned: they’re savvy.

Update: From Twitter and Facebook, I’ve heard interest in the unnamed one — “good for the deaf and hearing impaired” — and for Healthy You.

For the first time in more than a year of doing this Sunday feature, I have to say that there aren’t many papers that, judging from their front pages, I would buy. That doesn’t mean the content is bad. It simply means that as a non-resident, their front pages simply don’t provide anything particularly compelling. (Especially those that have the Boston bombing above the fold. Five minutes of TV watching gives your reader everything they need to know.)

But here we are so I’m going to highlight three papers.

First, Wilmington for writing about the highest paid public officials in the region. It’s a story that every paper should do annually because it’s interesting and, in some case, it’s outrageous. For instance, the UNCW basketball coach gets paid twice as much as the person in charge of the public school system.

And in continuing my campaign to get newspapers to write with perspective about what’s happening with state government, the Asheville Citizen-Times takes a run it, particularly examining the role the legislature seems to want to have taking control of municipal functions. From a day earlier, Rob Christensen at the News & Observer says that the General Assembly is run by “big government conservatives” dictating to local governments what they can and can’t do.

It is, of course, action that should embarrass every conservative. Unfortunately, it won’t.

Who would have thought that an explosion that killed at least 10 people and probably more, sent 160 people to the hospital, leveled dozens of homes and caused the evacuation of half of the town’s residents would be relegated to “other news” barely 24 hours after it happened.

But that’s what happened with the West, Texas, story because of the continuing dramatic events in Massachusetts.

On any other day, the fertilizer plant explosion would lead the news for a few more days as investigators find more bodies and determine the cause, and reporters interview survivors and next of kin. But as it was, it didn’t even lead the national news Thursday evening. This morning in many North Carolina papers, the Boston story is the dominating headline.

There are a variety of reasons why: Boston’s story is continuing; it’s a crime vs. an apparent accident; Boston is a media capital and West, Texas, isn’t; Obama is in Boston.

And the news cycle lasts about 10 minutes now.

One of my jobs is to work with the Elon University Poll. In the relative calmness of last Friday, we released poll results on the approval ratings of President Obama, Gov. McCrory, Congress and the General Assembly. Those results were picked up by a dozen or so news outlets.

On Tuesday, we posted the results on more interesting and timely issues: How North Carolinians feel about teacher tenure and pay, early voting, helmet laws, divorce, abortion, death penalty, same-sex marriage and immigration. Timely because they are tied to issues the General Assembly is debating right now. They’ve been picked up by about five news outlets.

Why more interest last week than this? Boston and Texas have sucked the air out of the news cycle; reporters prefer horse race polling — “is he up or down?” — to issues polling; saving the data for later use, maybe.

On both stories, ultimately, it comes down to the vagaries of news judgment. Editors everywhere have always been second-guessed for their ranking of stories. But the pressure to get it right has never been greater. People’s attention spans are shorter. News is everywhere so it doesn’t take long for a story to saturate and get old. News orgs know they lose if they don’t grab audience attention and keep it.

For traditional news organizations, this is what the future looks like. As more people understand that interesting and important news and information is out there that is not being given sufficient attention by the mainstream media, they are going to develop ways to find it themselves. Many people know and do this already. New organizations have the skills to fill this need in digital spaces, but their response seems to be to build paywalls and present awkward mobile tools.

It is an opportunity awaiting.

Professional journalism isn’t cheap. It takes a lot of money to pay reporters and editors. It takes them time to chase stories that are important, that matter to people, that inform the public, that drive the public will.

For five or six years, I’ve been told that journalism has value and that posting it online for free is a fool’s errand, that it undercuts the traditional business model, that it will spell the end.

And now, after years of hesitation and debate, paywalls are going up on newspaper websites all over the nation.

OK. I get it. I don’t think it is a smart long-term strategy, but I understand that newspapers must make money from digital distribution to survive.

Last night, after seeing announcements that Boston and New York newspapers were temporarily taking down their paywalls so people could access their Marathon bombing coverage, I sent out this tweet:

“Newspapers say their content has value & they erect paywalls, only to take them down when the content TRULY has value. Do I have that right?”

It’s been retweeted more than 100 times. And many people have tried to explain to me the logic behind the practice of taking down the walls during times of breaking news. The arguments essentially break down two ways: It’s a public service, and it’s commodity news. Here are some of their tweets:

“In breaking news, people give away things of value during times of need.”

“It’s a public service that they’ve decided they can’t do all the time. Similarly, they donate some but not all profits.”

“Boston Globe info will not be any different than every other media outlet covering tragedy. No one will pay for it tonight.”

“good point on pay walls, but I think they are saying public service is a greater value at the moment.”

“Really? The Times and Globes did great, restrained coverage of a tragedy & gave it away. Maybe bemoan paywall politics tmrw”

To me, it points to an internal conflict that news organizations have that bursts into the open in times like these. The journalists believe their journalism serves the public good. (I do, too!) The business thinks journalism has value and should be purchased by the consumer. (I do, too!) Of course, it’s possible that the businesses see the lowering of the paywall as a public service and because they know, in this case, they will get millions of additional “drive-by” visitors.

I agree the bombing news is a commodity and can be had anywhere. But so is much of the day-to-day news that papers put behind a paywall. When you only get 10 stories a month free from, say, the Times, that leaves a lot of commodity news behind that paywall.

I agree, too, that the bombing news is a public service. But so is much of what a newspaper publishes every day. All communities have important news events that should be circulated far and wide. They may not be as urgent, dramatic or deadly, thank goodness, as the bombing, but they’re significant nonetheless. Paywalls aren’t taken down for them.

Once I saw the response, I followed my original tweet with this: “I fully support the public service value of lowering the paywall. I’m glad they did it. Just pointing out its inherent contradiction.”

And I do believe in the public service value of the journalism being committed yesterday. I think paywalls are a short-term revenue infusion and there’s nothing wrong with cash. My fear is that paywalls further reinforce the perception of digital users that newspapers don’t get it. They reinforce the habit of not going to newspaper websites for news. Given that newspapers are slow on figuring out the mobile web, this only sends them down the wrong path. I hope I’m wrong.

It’s not black and white. We want to do good and we want to make enough money to pay for our work. Sometimes we dump the profit motive to help the community and sometimes we don’t because we can’t. I get it. It’s just an interesting conflict that I’d like to hear the publishers and owners kick around.

As I thought about these arguments last night, I wondered if any Wednesday newspapers would be distributed free. The same arguments seem to apply.

I didn’t tweet that, though.

For a couple weeks, I have suggested that journalists take a deeper, “see-the-forest-not-just-the-trees” look at what is happening in Raleigh.

The Charlotte Observer starts the ball rolling today with a piece by Elizabeth Leland (which quotes my Wednesday blog post. Thanks, Liz.) She lists many of the proposed pieces of legislation and quotes two partisans — one conservative, one liberal — saying the predictable sorts of things.

Columnists at the state’s three largest papers also have taken stands.

Fannie Flono at the Charlotte Observer takes dead aim and fires point blank: “This week some N.C. lawmakers are putting an exclamation point on the line from Forrest Gump: ‘Stupid is as stupid does.’” I would reprint the whole thing, it’s that good. Instead, I’ll simply reinforce her column with the penultimate paragraph: “Republican lawmakers don’t own the market on crazy ideas. But this year with GOP policymakers in control of both the legislature and the executive branch, some lawmakers are brazenly pushing through bills that are illegal, insensitive, unwise and just plain wacky. The state can survive being the butt of jokes, but its residents will struggle to survive the problems some of these proposals will bring.”

Allen Johnson at the News & Record follows Flono’s lead: “Now firmly in control of both houses of the General Assembly, plus the governo’s mansion, GOP lawmakers have flood the General Assembly with one wave after another of wacky legislation.” (I can’t find it online.)

Rob Christensen at the News & Observer takes a different view: “The popular narrative in recent days is the legislature had gone off the deep end. That is based on a spate of legislation declaring that North Carolina has a right to declare a state religion; require divorcing couples to wait two years; place new regulations on campus coed dorms; and take away tax deductions for parents whose kids vote at college, among other things. But here is a different view. I think things are beginning to settle down.”

These are good starts. (And there may be others. Please let me know of them.) I am still interested in a broader look at why this is happening: how the state is being perceived nationally, where the GOP leadership thinks this is taking the state — going beyond the toothless soundbite quotes they tend to give — and what the longer-term impact on North Carolina could be if some of this stuff passes. (Here are some of the news stories today about various aspects of what is happening in Raleigh.)

To be clear, I don’t think every proposal is harmful. I am not concerned if the Bible is an elective in North Carolina. I don’t care about hunting on Sundays. I don’t even care if motorcyclists don’t wear helmets; it’s their lives. But others are dramatic and, as Christensen points out in his column, will be difficult to overturn because legislators gerrymandered themselves safe seats.

So, thanks, journalistic watch dogs. Keep gnawing on that bone.

It’s a good day for the journalism on the front pages of North Carolina newspapers.

Many newspapers are featuring actions by the General Assembly. Greensboro tackles what some in the Legislature call education reform. High Point looks at what some call state tax reform will do to the city coffers. (Sorry, I can’t find the story online.) Monroe writes about charter schools and how the Legislature is doing things that the charter school association didn’t ask for. Shelby lets the councilman who wrote the resolution to establish an official state religion explain himself (His effort was misinterpreted, don’t you know.) Charlotte looks at bill that would prevent sheriffs from requesting the mental health records of applicants for concealed gun permits,

Given some of the things the folks in Raleigh are proposing, I applaud this type of journalism that reveals and informs. Meanwhile there are other things going on:

Asheville — The Citizen-Times looks at the four – and possibly six – fires set this month by arsonists. If the story doesn’t set it apart, the accompanying video does. (The ad that precedes it is a pain, though.)

Burlington — The Times-News reminds us that you can never have enough bullets. And that there is a sucker born every minute. “Some government critics have attributed shortages to federal purchases of bullets, accusing officials of trying to hoard a billion rounds and disarm the populace.”

One of the hitches whenever a business person is appointed to a political position is that they often don’t understand what it means to be a public servant. By that I mean that they understand the servant part of the job, and many of them do that quite well. But the public part? Well, they feel restricted by public records laws. They are used to the private sector, in which transparency of process is often a detriment to success.

Case in point is the Health and Human Services Secretary Aldona Woz.

According to the News & Observer, she was asked why her office has refused to turn over records. “I think the word transparency can get pretty dangerous. Because what does transparency mean? If transparency means that we’re in a planning process and you’re asking us, ‘Tell us all the things you’re planning,’ well, my goodness, allow us to work, and then we’ll give you everything that you want. But allow us the intellectual capacity just to do our job.”

She goes on to say that she is a great believer in transparency, which normally accompanies an explanation of why you aren’t going to be transparent.

Here is the full video.

Of course, state law differs with the secretary’s reading. As pointed out by N.C. Policy Watch: “The state’s public records law, however, makes government documents public ‘regardless of physical forms and characteristics’ and open to inspection ‘as promptly as possible’ to whoever asks to see them.”

To state the obvious, the purpose behind public records laws is to make the people’s business open — transparent, if you will — to the people. When public officials take action behind closed doors and want to keep their working papers under wraps, that’s fertile ground for shenanigans. Just today, the athletic director of Rutgers resigned/was fired for his handling of the men’s basketball coach’s behavior. Imagine if he had dealt with that openly rather than secretly. He’d still have his job.

Why, just down the street the Legislature is in the process of demanding openness and accountability from the state’s voters by requiring that they have a photo ID to vote. Doesn’t seem unreasonable for the state’s citizens to require the same openness from its employees.

Does openness hinder efficiency? Sometimes. Does it make a process more accountable, more publically acceptable and, often, better? Most of the time. Is it the law? Yes.

By the way, Woz, who is from Greensboro, is also the state official who has declined to explain what happened with the Dianna Lightfoot appointment.

Every time I read about a newspaper eliminating home delivery three or four days a week, I think about suicide. Readers are leaving newspapers in a steady stream, but the most loyal subscribers get the paper seven days a week. I suspect most of them have taken the paper their entire lives. They love the method of readership: the news judgment, the organization, the turning of the pages, the sharing of sections, the feel of it. It is their daily habit.

And even though it is happening with some level of frequency, it always surprises me when newspaper companies decide to give those loyal readers yet another reason to stop reading.

Today, it is the Cleveland Plain Dealer that is cutting back to three-day delivery. Of course, the company is doing this to better serve the community. The headline says so. I’m sure the subscribers appreciate that. Like all the newspapers before them, the publisher of the Plain Dealer promises to “drive innovation, capitalize on the tremendous strengths of our existing organizations, preserve high-quality journalism and marketing solutions, and provide greater efficiency and flexibility in serving Northeast Ohio through print and digital applications.”

(It is 5 p.m. The PD’s website doesn’t have an obvious mention of the changes announced today. Sound familiar?)

I’m well aware that newspapers have a revenue problem. That is, they aren’t making what they used to, and they aren’t making what their owners want them to make. They have responded by laying off people, cutting content from their pages and putting up paywalls on their websites. And, pretty much, readers have responded by continuing to  drift away.

Cutting out days of delivery is another way to cut costs. Mondays and Tuesday, for instance, often are loss leaders at many newspapers. The content is weak — not much news happens on Sundays — and advertising is weaker. While the publisher’s statement recognizes ”consumers’ demand for news and information when and where they want to receive it,” eliminating home delivery seems to contradict that sentiment.

My guess is that some of the readers who get home delivery on the four days that are being eliminated will go to the website. And along the way to the Plain Dealer, they will find that other websites will serve their news appetite, too. They will discover RSS feeds and Yahoo News. Some readers will simply turn on the television. Few, I suspect, will buy single copy. But what’s the big deal? Print is dying anyway, right?

I hope not. The newspaper industry will tell you that tens of millions of people still buy and read newspapers. I am well aware that younger generations aren’t part of that.  I don’t blame them, either. Computers, tablets and phones are wonderfully convenient ways to get the news. And for some — tens of millions — so are newspapers.

I hope that the Plain Dealer’s plan works. I hope that New Orleans and Detroit and Harrisburg and Ann Arbor all are properous. If they succeed, perhaps other newspapers will understand better how to transition their business to meet the digital needs of their citizens. Those town need strong, feisty, ass-kicking journalists to serve the public good.

I just fear that not providing a product to loyal customers “when and where they want it” is one more step toward irrelevance, if not suicide.

You know in Hollywood disaster movies there is always some lone person — usually ignored — who senses the early tremors of the earthquake or the distant sighting of the meteor or the readouts of the soon-to-be erupting volcano or the first wave of a tsunami? If I were a reporter in North Carolina — or a reporter for a national news organization — I would try to be that person. I would be pitching a story about what’s happening in Raleigh. With the GOP takeover of the legislature and the governor’s office, the world as we North Carolinians know it is up for grabs.

Maybe some people think that’s good. I don’t, but that’s irrelevant. There is still one helluva story to tell.

Consider the past two weeks of legislation introduced in the General Assembly:

* A bill that allows North Carolina to declare an official religion, which is in violation of the Bill of Rights. It also would nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide. Seriously. The Daily Show here we come. Again.

* A bill that extends the one-year waiting period for a divorce to go through to two years. In addition, it requires the couple to go through conflict resolution counseling. Naturally, it’s call the Healthy Marriage Act, as opposed to the She’s/He’s-Driving-Me-Seriously-Crazy Act. The sponsors justifies this by saying the state has made divorce too easy, and he wants to force people to stay together, whether they want to or not.

* A bill that would carry a tax penalty for parents whose children register to vote at their college address. From WRAL’s report: “But it could effectively cut student voting in counties like Watauga and Orange, where college voters have  been a key part of the Democratic party’s dominance.”

* Two bills that would make it more inconvenient to vote, cutting the early voting period in half, eliminating early voting on Sunday, dropping same-day registration and getting rid of straight-ticket voting. Of course, all of these options are popular with people and help people find the time to vote. And also of course, the sponsors say with straight faces that they aren’t meant to be partisan. ”I think Sundays just should be – some things you just shouldn’t do on  Sundays, so I am just opposed to voting on Sunday,” one of the sponsors said. Will he try to bring back the blue laws next?

* A bill to ”muzzle the Public Staff of the state Utilities Commission grew out of an email exchange between a staff attorney and noted climate change denier John Droz.”

* A bill to override UNC-Chapel Hill’s gender-neutral policy which would permit students of the opposite sex to share bathrooms and common living areas next fall. The policy was adopted by the schools Board of Trustees last year. Why meddle where they aren’t needed or wanted? “The purpose of this bill is to help the UNC system regain its focus on the core mission of educating young people and helping them find meaningful employment in our state,” Sen. David  Curtis, R-Lincoln said. I say that perhaps the Legislature should focus on helping to create meaningful employment in this state so that those young people have jobs to get.h

That’s all I’m listing because it’s enough…but it’s not all. It doesn’t mention the repeal of the helmet law or any of the other legislation that happened earlier in the legislative session.

As my friend Guy Lucas pointed out on Facebook, just because a bill has been introduced doesn’t mean it becomes law, which, of course, is true. Historically, the meat grinder that is the legislative process tends to throw off much of the fat and gristle. But North Carolina hasn’t seen this permutation of Republican-controlled government before. There is a sense that the GOP is trying to turn the clock back quickly and efficiently while they feel they have a legislative mandate.

And that’s where the journalists must come in. There are enough trees being planted and growing tall that a forest is forming. It’s time to help citizens see the forest. The Charlotte Observer did it last week on the state’s intrusion — my word — onto county and municipality authority. There is just so much more opportunity. As Mark Binker, an investigative reporter for WRAL, where the above links originate, said: It’s a target rich environment.

Indeed.

Update: Twenty minutes after posting this, I found this post from Indy Week. It does a great job of collecting the good and the bad bills. (They should have listed the ugly ones, too, but perhaps that movie reference is too old.) But my challenge below is to go beyond that and examine why the GOP is doing this, how many will get through the legislative sieve and what the longer-term consequences might be.