I would impose some guardrails so that the contributors don’t take the story too far from my vision. I’m sure I would reserve the right to reject changes, but I haven’t figured out how much poetic license I would give to contributors for the sake of the experiment.

A part of me recoils at the thought of putting myself out there over and over again. On the other hand, in the more traditional approach, I put years of blood and sweat on the line with just a handful of book editors. Do I want to be crushed all at once by experts, or tortured drip, drip, drip by readers? At least I would have readers.

A Boston Globe photographer, he pulls a broad range of assignments: from cupcake food shot to Haiti earthquake relief. It’s impressive: he captures exquisite moments, whether firing away on the run or directing a team of designers and assistants.

I knew Essdras when he was a photographer at the Rocky Mountain News and I was an editor there. A native of Panama, he is a force of nature. I see in his profile that he does photo workshops, practices martial arts and created a blend of yoga, martial arts and personal training. All that talent — and so good looking that even a hetero guy like me can’t help but remark about it.

Do yourself a favor and check the photo blog out — he gives a little back story to the photo shoots, plus some technical stuff. I have added him to my blog roll.

A marketing professor had a set of subjects memorize a 2-digit number and another set memorize a 7-digit number. All were told to go down the hall to the next room and recite the number. Along the way, though, they are offered a choice between chocolate cake or fruit.

Amazingly, the 7-digit memorizers overwhelmingly chose cake while the 2-digits chose fruit. The theory: two parts of the prefrontal cortex — a rational and an emotional — are in a tug of war. Occupy the rational one with a job like remembering a 7-digit number and the emotional part gets a free shot at calling the shots. The theory explains why when we’re tired, at the end of the day at work, we are more prone to yield to temptation of a snack or an extra martini.

You have to hear the Radiolab creators dramatize the war of the cortexes to appreciate this excellent example of news storytelling. I also like NPR’s rewriting of audio stories so that they are appropriate for the online reader. In this case, the Web account retains the humor but executes in a completely different way.

And I bet all of us quickly discover that we had severely underestimated the skills we developed in journalism. The realization may come when the CEO looks at the talking points you put together an hour after the meeting and says, “you’re a quick study. How did you get to the heart of it so quickly?” There are not many people in the corporate world who can drop into a discussion, tease out the essence, fill in knowledge gaps with further interviews and research, and then write it all in a way that a broad audience can understand. And those are just the basic skills a journalist brings into the corporate world. They also bring a different (if sometimes warped) perception and unconventional thinking.

Reformed journalists in the corporate world stand out in many ways. The first one I notice:

Knowing What To Do When You Don’t Get A Call-Back

That’s a stumper for so many who haven’t built their careers on getting around roadblocks.

Some other ways journalists stand out in the corporate environment:

• They say the crudest things at the oddest times.
• They maintain cool in the presence of VIPs.
• They keep asking “why is it so quiet around here?”
• Ex-reporters think bosses’ orders are suggestions; ex-editors are surprised when an utternace launches a thousand ships.
• They tap their toes a lot.
• They keep phoning in updates.
• They run to the scene of trouble.
• Snow closures throw them for a loop.

Feel free to add to the list.

She was paying good money for a product she didn’t use — and getting guilt-tripped in the process. She wouldn’t be a subscriber for much longer. Nor would many of the Baby Boomers we were talking to in the summer of 1990 as part of Knight Ridder’s 25/43 Project (named for the age range of Baby Boomers at the time). We were using focus groups to learn the stories behind the plunging circulation numbers. Watching through one-way glass as these readers, non-readers, and soon-to-be-non-readers talked about the Boca Raton News — my pride and joy — was startlingly insightful. These folks thought they had us figured out (“They don’t run the whole story on one page  because they want you to thumb through the ads”). They truly wanted to be informed, but they weren’t getting what they wanted from the local paper. News magazines sometimes. TV news most nights. Nearly all said they read so much work-related stuff that they just didn’t have time to devote to a newspaper.

We were competing for people’s time. We tried to be more relevant, creating a beat structure that focused on topics such as the environment, family and career, safety and security. We tried to be more succinct, eliminating jumps, converting information into graphics and devising ways to make stories more scannable and less linear. We even worked out a deal with Dominos that got you a paper along with your pizza (thinking, I guess, that the stale morning paper would go great with the fresh evening dinner). And always we went back to the focus groups to see how it was working. The News was making a stir in the community and circulation did grow. But the focus groups and the tinkering ended when the Knight Ridder project expired in 2002 (after two years and $2 million). I and the other carpetbaggers left town to take our tricks to other papers around the country.

So I read that the News folded the other day. The blogger writing the obituary sneered at the 25/43 Project’s focus groups. It figures. Newsrooms are notoriously deaf to their readers. Any other business selling a product uses focus groups and customer panels to find the tripwires that push people to buy. Not newspapers. The editors instinctively know what interests the average reader, even though they spend nearly every waking hour talking with un-average people (themselves, politicians, narcisitic celebrities, themselves, axe-grinders, themselves ….) It’s the reader’s fault if they quit consuming the content that they have deemed to be news. It’s TV’s fault for making them have to dumb-down the news. It’s the Internet’s fault for giving away news.

Newsies, listen to the reader. They still don’t have time to wade through your inverted pyramids and sterile storytelling. Their lives are more affected by bicycle thefts than by gang shootings. Their opinions are much more nuanced than the whack jobs who get dutifully quoted on each side of the shouting line. They do take in a lot of information, either written or multi-media. They’re not as dumb as you think.

You just need to figure out how to meet them where they are. That means you have to listen to them.

In this story, some of the 1,600 graduates talk about how they landed jobs — or how they plan to live a little before jumping into the labor pool. Does your heart good.

This morning, the Post reported that it plans to do just that. The article did not go into much detail. But Jim had an idea that I think the Post should consider: claim its niche as being a “hyper-local” news source. Local news is what it has that no other print source has (the weeklies notwithstanding — they don’t have the breadth of the Post). The lot of us who are getting our national and international news “free” online might put up a bit of change for the skinny on local government, business, and entertainment. That, together with in-depth sports coverage (I don’t think there’s a media market in the nation that has more sports writers per capita) and a couple of good columnists, and the Post has something worth charging for.

The Post article today also mentioned “bundling,” just as the cable companies are bundling TV and high-speed Internet. I already pay for two print subscriptions, one online subscription and a Kindle subscription to the Post. I’m more than ready for bundling.