So Kodak, the company that invented amateur photography in the 19th century and invented digital photography in the 20th, is on the ropes. There are obvious lessons for newspapers and newsrooms. Here are a few of them.

Your business isn't what you think it is. Kodak at its peak looked like a photography company, but it was really a giant chemical manufacturing company. Digital tech rendered the entire chemical photography business irrelevant. By comparison, newspapers looked like news and information companies, but they were really expensive commercial advertisement printing and delivery systems. If you have borrowed heavily to build and maintain capital-intensive processes that are suddenly rendered irrelevant, you're in deep trouble no matter how smart you are and no matter what you do. Printing isn't yet irrelevant, but it's trending that way. This is not to the time to invest in a new three-around compact press line.

Brands decay. When I started in photography, Kodak was the trusted source. (Sound familiar, newspaper people?) We might flirt with funky European Agfa and exotic Asian Fuji, but when it was time to get serious, it was Kodak Tri-X and Kodak paper and Kodak Dektol. In a digital world, Kodak's brand means little. And if you think your newspaper's brand is a huge asset, you probably need to get out and talk to some young people now and then.

Early to market doesn't mean you win. When some of you kids were still in diapers and I was still in Minneapolis, we set up an early Kodak digital camera (I think it might have been a DC40) on a tripod at the State Fair. People queued up around the building to get their pictures taken and published online. Kodak was an early mover. So were newspapers, which had online products before the Web existed. Look how that turned out.

Disruption doesn't happen just once. On the digital side, Kodak initially pivoted quite well, creating the "Easyshare" concept and reconquering digital photography from the Japanese tech companies. By the middle of the last decade, Kodak was the market leader. But suddenly smartphone cameras have autofocus lenses, 8-megapixel sensors and HDTV video capability. Result: the low-end market is toast, and Kodak isn't taken seriously in the high end, where Canon and Nikon reign. Newspapers have seen a similar thing happen with classified advertising, which in the late 1990s was an online cash cow. Real estate agents and car dealers now run their own publishing operations.

All of this may seem like a downer, but it doesn't need to be. If you clear out the assumptions, what's left may be easier to understand. Businesses still need convey offers to consumers, and if anything, digital technology has chopped the audience up in to little pieces and distributed it all over the universe. Pulling audiences back together creates value. Make that your goal, and don't let up for a second.

Here's a New Year's resolution I'd like to see made, and kept, by all tech journalists:

Report first, then think, then write. Don't skip the first two steps, and don't get them out of order.

Computer, networking and mobile technology is changing all of human society. Journalism about tech is important. But tech journalism today is a vast wasteland of plagiarism, rumormongering, empty snark, fanboiism, trolling, unfounded assumptions and whole-cloth invention.

It's damned hard to find any actual reporting. Actual facts, when they are to be found, usually from PR handouts and spec sheets. That's not journalism. It's churnalism.

These failures are not unique to tech journalism, of course. Mainstream journalism, especially cable TV news, falls into the same traps. But you should have learned by third grade that "everybody else does it" is no excuse.

There's a small, private get-together under way in Phoenix this weekend called #NewsFoo that is catching some flak on Twitter as being exclusionary and elitist. Same thing happened last year, and I think also the year before. It's not public. It's not transparent. It didn't advertise and accept applications.

I don't attend a lot of big cattle-call conferences any more unless I'm asked speak or be on a panel and the conference will cover my expenses. I don't get much out of them. Neither I nor my employer has cash to spare.

But I do get something out of small, intense get-togethers. Three in particular stand out:

• A private, invitation-only conference that Chris Feola pulled together at the American Press Institute in Reston several years ago. There I met some fascinating people, including Dan Bricklin, who invented the computer spreadsheet, and Brad Cox, who created Objective-C. One of the unexpected outcomes was a news XML standards project whose efforts eventually were merged into NITF.
• A private, invitation-only conference at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg marking 10 years of Web news. The outcomes of that meeting included the community-blogging initiatives at Morris, including the Bluffton Today project, as well as important "social contract" language, developed in a breakout session with Dan Gillmor, that we've used ever since.
• A private, invitation-only conference that Norbert Specker organized in Zurich in 2002 where I learned a great deal about organizational issues that's been helpful in the years since, and met a researcher in "cybernetic psychology" whose work led me to develop a software tool that we used internally for several years.

I was invited to NewsFoo this year and last year. I wasn't able to attend. Perhaps that colors my perception. Naturally I don't feel excluded.

But I'm sure there are many other very interesting get-togethers to which I'm not invited. We can't all be everywhere.

NewsFoo is an "unconference," a technique developed in the world of software development. An unconference is a gamble and the outcome will turn on the talents and interests and energies of those who attend.

This can be done through a process of self-selection and even within the framework of a big conference; BOF ("birds of a feather") sessions are common at software conferences. But even in the open-source software world there are many examples of closed processes and many private conversations.

I were spending my money, or my foundation's money, or my company's money, I'd want to raise the odds of success by trying to attract a combination of people that I thought would interact well. I don't think that is properly characterized if it's described as an attempt to create a "news elite."

It may be difficult to point to concrete examples of results from conferences of any stripe, but that doesn't mean there are no results. Every attendee has the potential to change the world. An idea might take years to bear fruit. Relationships developed at such meetings might lead to something years down the road. Any number of day-to-day decisions could be altered.

Whether the investment of time was worthwhile is a judgment the participants will have to make; whether the investment of money was worthwhile is a judgment the sponsors will have to make. I'm sure they will.

The Kindle Fire and an iPad, for size comparison.

I've had a Kindle Fire for just a few hours, so I won't pretend to write a definitive hardware review, but here are some observations:

The Kindle Fire will create its own market. It's not a matter of competing with Apple. At $199, the Fire is exactly $300 cheaper than the cheapest iPad tablet. Amazon is first and foremost a retailer, and is very smart about analyzing price-demand curves. The Christmas timing is right, and it's in local stores (Target, Best Buy, even Walmart) so you can touch it before buying.

It's rock-solid and worth every penny. Forget any fanboi FUD you've read about it being slow; it's absolutely not. The UI is smooth and the Web browser is snappy. The capacitive touchscreen is responsive. It's physically impressive, if a touch heavy (big battery).

The media store integration really works. Amazon's Web UI for video browsing is pretty poor, and its Roku app is lame when compared with Netflix. The Fire seems to have gone to college and has a few things to teach the rest of the Amazon family. It's focused on Amazon Prime videos (the "free" ones) and very well organized. General Amazon shopping is just as slick. Amazon is said to be losing a few dollars on every Fire in order to make it back on commerce. My only fear is that they'll make it all back from my family alone.

So let's say there will be five million of these in US homes by the end of the year (a number predicted by analysts who monitor component shipments). What does that mean for media producers?

I found the pinch-and-zoom Silk browser to be very pleasant when reading full-size websites. Zoom is important not so much for legibility (the display is very sharp) but for clicking on links. Websites generally aren't designed for fingers; they're designed for mouse pointing. Steve Jobs famously claimed 7-inch tablets would fail because fingers aren't pointed like pencils. Zoom fixes that and feels natural.

As publishers, we're going to have to decide what content to aim at these tablets. Right now some news sites detect the Silk browser as a mobile device and flip the user over to m.example.com. Generally I found myself preferring the full website, which is definitely not the case when I'm browsing on my Galaxy S phone.

I'm coming away much less concerned about small-tablet optimization and much more optimistic that fairly simple responsive-layout techniques will serve us well.

The browser is Webkit-based, like Chrome and Safari. It seems to be based on the Android browser with UI enhancements including tabs. The more interesting changes are under the hood.

By default, it uses caching implemented in an Amazon EC2 cloud proxy to accelerate performance. There's been a lot of misinformation about it that should be cleared up: it doesn't spy on secured sessions and it doesn't steal personal information. Most of the speedup apparently comes from SPDY, a Google innovation that gets rid of HTTP connection latency. There also is supposedly some predictive downloading but I did not see evidence of that.

All this is actually good news for publishers, because it in effect gives us the benefits of a free CDN, at least for Fire traffic, without molesting the content or interfering with analytics and ad networks.

It's best not to think of the Fire as a mobile device (like your phone) but rather as a portable device, like a netbook. There's no 3G or 4G connection. There's no GPS and the browser doesn't even support HTML5 geolocation. It does fit in a jacket side pocket and I can use my Android phone as a portable wifi hot spot, but the overwhelming use case for the Fire will be in-home media and Web browsing.

I encountered just a few bugs. The Netflix app has a problem with excessive scrolling through movie lists (nearly twice as far as you moved your finger). The email app seems to be checking mail automatically even though I told it do only check manually. The third ... well, I'm having a Rick Perry.

There are shortcomings. The hardware includes no microphone or webcam or SD slot. There's a photo gallery, but I have no idea how to get photos into it. There's a contacts list, but it doesn't sync with Google, so it's sort of useless to me.

Clayton Christensen's disruptive-innovation theory says we should watch the low end of the marketplace closely. The first wave of products may be junk, but they quickly evolve to a level of "good enough" for most purposes and surprise the incumbents. Over a year ago I reviewed a cheap Chinese Android tablet, which had a lot of shortcomings. Last Christmas I bought my daughter Paige a Nook Color, which was "good enough" for a lot of things but had some performance annoyances. The "good enough" line is clearly crossed by the Kindle Fire (and the new Nook Tablet, which is similar with slightly better specs and features).

Stand by for a huge spike in at-home tablet traffic to the Web.