The New York Times has been getting a lot of net.love for its beautiful project Snow Fall:
The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.

Forbes called it the "first of many" online news storytelling experiments. It's not. It's actually a welcome throwback to things that were attempted at the dawn of the Internet era, in the mid-1990s.

That was a time before automated content management systems and business imperatives mandated standards and templates and, notably missing from the NYT presentation, advertising to pay for it all.

In those days the few of us experimenting with online storytelling were poor in tools but rich in freedom to experiment. Some that I remember from the early days of Star Tribune Online: A virtual drive up Hwy. 61 on the North Shore of Lake Superior, produced by Rocky Agrawal. A visual tour of St. Paul's Como Park Conservatory, produced by Robyn Dochterman.

And Testing the Human Spirit, a huge, powerful, emotional multimedia tear-jerker about how AIDS devastated a Minnesota family. It was produced by Jackie Crosby, designed by Jamie Hutt, featuring photos by Brian Peterson and text by Kimberly Hayes Taylor, with editing by Ben Welter and audio work by Will Outlaw.

Not as big as the crew producing the Times project, but quite an investment for the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune.

The AIDS project is still online -- sort of. I won't link to it, as it's badly broken. Sadly, the images are missing and probably most of the other media assets as well, victims of time and bitrot and many system upgrades and migrations.

Most of us quit doing this sort of thing not because of a lack of enthusiasm but because of a lack of resources, especially time. Business realities haven't just decimated newspaper staffs; they've decimated online crews as well.

And projects these days require business justifications. "Strengthening the brand" can be one, but throwing a dozen designers and producers and coders at one story isn't something you can do very often, even if you're the New York Times.

If you haven't spent some time looking at Snow Fall, I strongly encourage you to do so. There's a lot to be learned and I look forward to some of its storytelling devices being more widely used.

Just don't go thinking we're going to pull all the advertising off our pages and hand-code projects as a routine part of production. Can't do it.

I'm cleaning out my office in prep for a move to Savannah, and finding stuff, as usual.

In the pile: A folder labeled "charging for content." And inside, printouts headlined "Web sites going free-to-fee," "Media General to charge for newspaper web sites; CEO calls free access 'dumb'," "Turning surfers into subscribers" and "If you post it, will they pay?"

The dates? 2000 and 2001.

So here we are nearly a dozen years later. In the interval there have been bitter battles between onliners and printies over charging for access. For all too long, it boiled down to absolutist declarations on both sides, uninformed charges of "original sin," warnings of doom, accusations that one side or the other was leading the way off a cliff.

This week we're launching an "All Access" program in Jacksonville. There's one well under way in Augusta. Other Morris markets, such as Savannah and Amarillo, are queued up.

This is happening across the industry with relatively little rancor and many indications of success.

What changed? The biggest change has been the widespread embrace of metered access, which is not a paywall. Meters offer a kinder, gentler approach that leaves casual users alone and targets heavy users for subscription signup pitches.

With the meter, there is no doom. Our reach has not been materially damaged. New users can sample our wares. Bloggers can link. Social links work as they should.

We began testing the metered-access concept nearly two years ago. The single loudest complaint from users? It's not "Why do you want me to pay for this?" It's "I'm already paying. You want me to pay twice?"

The All Access concept fixes that: if you're a print subscriber, you're a member, and you get it all. And more: member benefits including discounts from local businesses.

Or, if you want just the Web, or just the e-edition, or just the tablet/mobile stuff, those are separately available.

A lot of work has gone into the pricing and packaging of this, and it's work that could never happen in the bad old days of printies vs. onliners.

It's clear to all of us that digital is our growth card. It's clear that everything we do is temporary, that change is the only thing that's permanent. Nobody thinks charging readers is a silver-bullet solution for our business challenges.

Despite all the talk about downfall, the truth is that the newspaper industry still has a huge, loyal, habituated, paying audience. It is an asset that pure-play online competitors (and broadcasters) don't have. Moving ahead and returning to growth costs money. It would be foolish not to make the best use of that asset to leverage a leap to a digital future.

But we have to do exactly that: recognize it's a windfall, and make best user of it to build a future. This is the time to plant, not to harvest.

I don't know whether to be appalled or just amused at the reported quote from AP's Liz Sidoti that social media is a "time suck" threatening young journalists' understanding of reporting basics.

I didn't hear it myself; I think that comment came while I was across the street from the Seigenthaler Center, in the parking lot dealing with Vanderbilt police about vandalism and burglary of my truck (which is another story).

But I have a couple of things to say about it.

About an hour later Friday morning, I was on an APME panel with Jay Small and Frank Daniels III, moderated by Ellyn Angelotti, discussing social media. And what I told the editors is this: social media is at the core of why people use the Internet.

If you define yourself as a "newspaper," social media is bad for you. You are going to lose. There is no way around that. But if you frame your world differently, the scene changes.

Like the universe, journalism is expanding. AP plays a shrinking role in that universe, at the head end of the reporting process on primarily world and national news. Journalism used to be describable as "gather, order, and present" -- or reporting, writing and publishing. AP lives in the first two layers, disconnected from and sometimes baffled by the rest.

But that's not the process any more. Journalism doesn't end with publication of a story, or even necessarily begin with the reporter. Journalism now is a dynamic and continuous process that can begin with the "people formerly known as the audience" and continues after publication in a public, social interaction in which the community discusses, digests, processes, adds to, remixes and redistributes information.

One-way journalism was an illusion of the 20th century. It's over. Past tense. It was illusory anyway. Social processes existed even when we didn't see them.

Practicing journalism in this century requires social media literacy and engagement in all the layers. Yes, it's a time suck, along with everything else. As an old copy editor once told me, "that's why they call it work."

And while social media may be bad for "newspapers," it's bad for us only if we fail to grasp larger, more complex definitions of journalism, our products, and our business models. It's bad if we screw up. And the first, easiest way to screw up big-time is to imagine it's not important.

I didn't actually intend to take such a long vacation from blogging, but it happened. Perhaps it was a good thing to spare the world from hearing me repeat myself. I took a real-world vacation, too, and spent a couple of weeks in Bangkok and Phuket, Thailand, with my youngest daughter, now a high school senior. But the summer is over, the kids are back in school, and I intend to return to the keyboard.

I've also taken a bit of a vacation from conferences and seminars, but I am scheduled to be on a social media panel at the Associated Press Media Editors annual conference Sept. 19-21 at the John Seigenthaler Center on the Vanderbilt University campus in Nashville. I'm also scheduled to speak at the New England Newspaper & Press Association fall conference Oct. 11 in Natick, MA.