Clay Shirky has become one of the most recognized names in tech circles by spending a career studying the social and financial effects of the web.  Today NYU announced that Shirky will be bringing his talents to their campus in a full-time capacity with his appointment as a faculty member at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Tisch School of Arts.

Shirky, who is currently an associate teacher at Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), will oversee three courses at NYU.  At the Carter school Shirky will teach the Studio 20 graduate concentration as well as the media criticism course sequence for journalism-focused undergrads.  Tisch students can get their share of Shirky’s tech wisdom by enrolling in his Designing Conversation Spaces class.

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The Paley Center for Media has announced the launch of The Next Big Thing, a quarterly event where tech-savvy entrepreneurs can pitch their business plans to investors and help shape the future of news. A new spin on the organization’s mission to celebrate media industry movers and shakers, the inaugural event will take place at the Paley Center in New York City in January 2011 with sponsorship from Velociter, the strategic investment arm of Mediabrands.  Get your pitches together, because the Paley Center is bringing the media, entertainment, and technology communities in one space to talk about the next big thing.  From the press release:

In consultation with About.com founder and Paley Center trustee Scott Kurnit, the Paley Center has convened a Next Big Thing advisory board to help identify startups and curate the sessions. The advisory board will be chaired by Kurnit and include Tim Hanlon, CEO and managing director, Velociter; Wendy Clark, SVP, Integrated Marketing and Communications Capabilities, Coca-Cola; Kay Koplovitz, Paley Center board member and founder and CEO, Koplovitz & Co.; Alan Patricof, founder and managing director, Greycroft LLC; Clay Shirky, author and associate professor, NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program; angel investor Yossi Vardi; and Fred Wilson, managing partner, Flatiron Partners and Union Square Ventures.

“By enabling this kind of exchange of ideas and experience between the new and the established, the Next Big Thing series could have a direct impact on innovation and growth across the media industry,” said Mr. Kurnit, CEO of AdKeeper, Inc. in a statement.  ”Startups get access to high-level executives and the wisdom of their collective experience while media executives and investors get a closed-door look at new ideas and new talent from the digital world.”

The gatherings are invitation-only, so interested parties should consider joining the Paley Center’s Media Council.

While blogs and social networking sites like Twitter pride themselves on being able to break stories faster than conventional news outlets (as well as often playing the role of citizen watchdogs to the MSM), a new study has found that the actual original reporting produced on the Internet is nowhere close to the amount needed to make up for the gap caused by cuts in traditional journalism.

The study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, funded by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, found that in Baltimore alone, only one-third of the number of stories were being produced from the same number of outlets in 1991. One would hope that with digital media making print obsolete (or at least, inconvenient and expensive), that blogs and online publications would pick up the slack, but unfortunately that’s not the case either:

“Digital-only outlets accounted for just 4 percent of original pieces of reporting: One report came from a local blog, and the other was breaking news disseminated by a police Twitter feed.”

This would concur with an idea floated during the Jay Rosen/Clay Shirky discussion at NYU last month: that the Internet was never meant to replace traditional journalistic sources, but to work as a supplement. If we decry print journalism completely, we’ll not only be losing a valuable resource of news, but nearly all of our original information-gathering stream. Publications as they exist on the Internet now simply do not have the money or man-power to incite long-term, investigative reports or keep journalists embedded overseas the way mainstream outlets can.

Read More: Most original news reporting comes from traditional sources, study finds –Los Angeles Times

Previously: NYU Media Professors Discuss Future Of Media By Looking Back

Last night, New York University hosted a panel in its continuing “Primary Sources” series focusing on journalism, featuring professors and media commenters Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky.

While the topic may have officially been “New Media’s Present and Future,” the conversation quickly moved into the past: specifically delving into five years ago, which Shirky said most people mistakenly refer to as the Golden Era of Journalism — before the Internet came and took all the money away. Five years ago, Shirky stated, newspapers were losing readership left and right, but their revenue was booming. Ironically, now most newspapers actually have more readers due to their Web sites, but the money has dried up.

While most news orgs would have liked to take that conversation in the direction of how to get that money back, Shirky and Rosen were more interested in how the Internet plays into the public’s perception of the mainstream media.

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NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller claims she is an optimist, yet she opened her keynote address at mediabistro.com’s UGCX conference with a scary premise. “I’d like to start by really, really depressing you,” she said.

Schiller then took a moment to run quickly through some sad statistics of the media industry — statistics we know all too well. Like, for example, 11 percent of full time news jobs were cut in 2008. Or that major newspapers in San Francisco and Boston lose about $1 million a day. Ouch.

“This is pretty grim stuff,” Schiller admitted. “But we’re in the middle of such a change, an evolution or revolution in the news business.”

Schiller said she remains optimistic because new models will rise out of the ashes of the dying media business model.

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Embedded video from CNN Video

FishbowlLA: The Los Angeles Times‘ James Rainey wrote an even-handed profile about Nikki Finke — after the Internet journo scared the crap out of him.

Unbeige: New York artist Dash Snow died Monday from a drug overdose. He gained notoriety in the New York art scene thanks to a lengthy profile in New York magazine two years ago.

New York Times: Thomson Reuters is in talks to buy financial commentary Web site Breakingviews.com.

Silicon Alley Insider: Online video start up Next New Networks laid off a “handful” of staff today as part of reorganization.

Cato Unbound: Clay Shirky predicts that in the future journalism will have to deal with changes in subsidy. “There are many shifts coming, but three big ones are an increase in direct participation; an increase in the leverage of the professionals working alongside the amateurs; and a second great age of patronage,” he says

Newspapers are dying, magazines are closing and more journalists are finding themselves without paying gigs every day. Everyone is wondering: what does the future hold for the media? We brought the questions to the front lines, asking leaders in the field to tell us: what’s next?

This week, we kick off our series with a discussion with David Schimke, editor-in-chief and general manager of the Utne Reader, a Minneapolis, Minn.-based digest of independent and alternative media, and it’s Web site, Utne.com. The magazine also presents annual Independent Press Awards, honoring excellence in independent magazines, which this year celebrated its twentieth anniversary.

FBNY: Many people blame the economy for the media’s recent problems. Do you think the recession is to blame or are there other factors at play?

David Schimke: I think there are two things going on at once. The first is a shift in the way people are consuming reported material and writing. We really are in the midst of a revolution, so it’s hard to see where we are. The blogger Clay Shirky [who has been republished in the Utne Reader] makes a great comparison to the creation of the printing press. Now, everyone knows what the printing press wrought, but at the time it was a transition period. And right now we’re in the transition period.

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