In my job as a strategist I often use a fairly simple trick to get the process going: Turn the problem over. What if all your assumptions are wrong? Flip-flop them and see what you learn.

Recently I was on panel at the annual Society of Professional Journalists convention Chicago. Here are three examples I gave of "bad" that have "good" aspects if you change your point of view.

Presstime, the monthly magazine of the Newspaper Association of America, asked me to write an opinion piece for Back«Talk, a column inside the back cover. It's on page 60 of the September issue. Here is the text.

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I once worked for a major newspaper that didn't have a news obituary page. So the newspaper formed a committee to draw up standards. It met for six months before a dead person could get into the newspaper.

We can't work that way any more. The world is being remade by people don't form committees that meet for six months to avoid making mistakes.

Kudos to the Online Journalism Review and Robin Miller for observing "the poor quality of online forums run by newspapers and other local media outlets" and offering "Five rules for building a successful online community."

Rob's been doing this for along time, and has some great points to make. I've been running online communities for a long time as well (since 1986). Not surprisingly, I disagree with a few of his assertions and agree with others. Here are my reactions.

For those of us struggling to understand the consequences of opening up our local news websites to broad public participation, Ulises Ali Mejias has a helpful essay, Social Media and the Networked Public Sphere. He focuses on a key distinction between mass and public:

Jay Small cites an eMarketer item about the low level of Internet access by U.S. mobile phone users.

The article cites a number of reasons for the low usage despite pretty much universal access capability in the installed handset base. (The study says 81% of mobile browsers support XHTML Mobile Profile, the latest standard.)

I think it's much simpler than it's all made out to be: The telcos have simply strangled this new medium.

This week I'm at the Poynter Institute at an online ethics conference. Here's a question that's come up: How much transparency is beneficial? It's easy to say "more is better," but is that always true?

Here are three "buckets" to consider:

Writing for the Observer, Britain's Sunday newspaper, author John Naughton reminds us how Gutenberg's invention of movable type had unanticipated side effects. It would "undermine the authority of the Catholic church, power the Renaissance and the Reformation, enable the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, create new social classes and even change our concept of childhood." But who knew?

And today we have Tim Berners-Lee's gift to humanity, the World Wide Web. As Naughton writes: