Last night I had the chance to speak to a group of new media/journalism students at Oregon State University. I always try to be relevant and upbeat about the tools available now to working journalists and the entrepreneurial spirit that defines success now in the field. But I’m always excited about the depth of questions that come from the students, and challenged in trying to respond to them.

We talked about a whole range of topics:

• The role of professionals in growing sea of amateur journalists (my take: field guides and fact-checkers);
• Whether tools like Twitter are effective for reporting in rural and impoverished areas (Increasingly, yes, though it’s important to keep user demographics in mind and not report exclusively from the Internets);
• The critical mass of connectivity (Interesting to see what mobile phones have done in the digital divide);
• Threats to digital information flow (What’s the bigger threat: a great big government switch, net non-neutrality, “filter bubbles”?)

I’ve been struggling with how to pick up the posting schedule since I left daily journalism and now focus more on audience development and product development and kind of lost my way about what I wanted to say here. Now I see that getting down to the basic elements of building community, developing information products, content strategy and refining workflows might be the way to re-energize.

Thanks to the students for highlighting this.

For them, here are links to some of the items I mentioned:

• Storify: Make stories using social media
• CoverItLive: Embeddable liveblogging app
• Eli Pariser: Beware of online ‘filter bubbles’:
  
• Clay Shirky’s now-legend Web 2.0 keynote: