Yesterday, the Columbia Journalism Review held a conference entitled “Beyond the Newsroom: Traditional journalistic skills in a nontraditional world” with panelists Michael Calderone from Politico, David Banks of Civic Venture and Encore.org), New School professor and former Associated Press correspondent Clara Hemphill, Charles Sennott of The Global Post and Paul Steiger of ProPublica.

So with these veteran reporters speaking about new media endeavors, did anyone produce a new perspective on web journalism or its potential lucrativeness?

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The New York Times magazine this Sunday will feature a 13,000-word article that reveals the findings of a two-year investigation that was a joint venture between the Times and non-profit investigative organization ProPublica.

The piece’s author, Sheri Fink, details the stories of what happened to patients who died at New Orlean’s Memorial Medial Center after Hurricane Katrina. The lengthy story is something that we’re seeing less and less of in newspapers and consumer magazines (outside of the New Yorker, that is): long form journalism.

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The Huffington Post is launching its Game Changers awards — “100 people who are using new media to reshape their fields and change the world.”

Making the awards democratic, Arianna Huffington is asking for your submissions for “game changers” in 10 categories: Politics, Entertainment, Technology, Media, Sports, Business, Style, Health, Green, Philanthropy & Service.

Of course, we’re most concerned with your thoughts on media’s game changers. Certainly Huffington herself belongs in the category, and we’d make cases for members of The New York Times digital newsroom, ProPublica and people like Andy Carvin who are helping NPR harness the power of citizen journalism with new media tools like Twitter. And what about people like Matt Drudge and Perez Hilton?

Here’s a fun summer Friday game: who would you nominate as new media game changers in media?

Now it’s time for something completely different.

In the current era of searching for “what’s next” for the media industry, James Gaines, a former managing editor at People, Time and Life magazines thinks he has found the answer in FLYP Media, an online, interactive publication that combines old fashioned journalism with video, audio, animation and all number of treats for the senses.

“This is where all story telling is going,” Gaines, who is FLYP’s editor-in-chief, told FishbowlNY recently. “We’re making the optimal user experience. You don’t just read the stories, you experience them.”

FLYP’s tagline, “more than a magazine,” says it all. Published since March 2008, FLYP has produced 35 issues, which are posted online and emailed to 20,000 subscribers. The publication is privately funded by Mexican multi-millionaire Alfonso Romo, so there is no advertising and subscribers get it for free. The magazine’s business model may change in the future, but right now Gaines has no plans to charge for its content.

Like other digital magazines, or the digital versions print magazines love to publish on their Web sites, FLYP does utilize virtual page turning. However, there is so much going on each page — from interactive videos to charts and displays to animation — you quickly realize that FLYP is unlike any other magazine you have ever experienced.

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The past few years have been a transitional period for journalism, filled with innovative reporting strategies and interactive presentations that allow readers to get involved in the process of editing and experiencing the news. The Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, presented by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, honor those new approaches to journalism, and this year they awarded top honors to The New York Times.

The Times took home a $10,000 prize for its “dynamic body of work” in the past year, including unique tools developed by its digital newsroom like its document reader, which allows users to search, bookmark and annotate docs posted online; custom Times, a prototype tool that gives readers the ability to personalize their news reports across all mediums; “Living with Less,” a special feature on the Times Web site that highlight how people are dealing with recession using audio and photos; and “One Word,” a digital tool that asked Times readers on election day, “What One Word Describes Your Current State of Mind?”

(Members of the Times digital newsroom presented at the mediabistro Circus last month, and you can watch their presentation here.)

Read on for more information about other Knight-Batten Award winners

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After announcing his departure from Texas Monthly just last week, Evan Smith made his first big move as incoming CEO of new online news venture the Texas Tribune today with the acquisition of Texas Weekly, a newsletter covering the state’s government and politics.

When the Tribune launches this fall, Texas Weekly subscribers will begin to receive a new weekly publication that will include “premium content not available to regular readers of the Tribune,” the company said. Texas Weekly‘s archives will be added to the Tribune’s Web site, allowing users to search past articles.

The acquisition of Texas Weekly is just the latest news in Texas Tribune’s growth. Today, Smith named Texas Weekly‘s Ross Ramsey managing editor of the Tribune and said five other reporters had also been brought in to the Tribune’s newsroom: Brandi Grissom, Elise Hu, Emily Ramshaw, Abby Rapoport, and Matt Stiles.

Following Smith’s announcement that he was leaving Texas Monthly, where he had served as editor since 2000 and editor-in-chief and president since September, more information came to light about his new venture, the Texas Tribune. The Web site, which is scheduled to launch in September, will be a “non-profit, nonpartisan public media organization whose mission is to promote civic engagement and discourse on the public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide interest,” the company says. The organization will publish original news and reporting online and events like conferences and panels. It is to be funded primarily through philanthropy, much like ProPublica and the Huffington Post‘s Investigative Fund.

The full release about the new hires after the jump.

Earlier: Longtime Texas Monthly Editor To Launch Nonprofit News Site

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Evan Smith, the president and editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly said today that he will be stepping down next month in order to take a job as founding CEO of the Texas Tribune, a non-profit news Web site that will launch later this year.

Smith joined the Texas magazine in 1992 as a senior editor, and moved his way up to deputy editor the next year. He took over as editor in 2000, and was promoted to his current position last September. In a letter to Texas Monthly staffers today, Smith recounted some of the editorial highlights of his tenure at the magazine: “two National Magazine Awards for General Excellence in the last six years and fourteen more nominations over the last nine; the most City and Regional Magazine Association awards during that period of any member publication.”

Now Smith is moving on to the Tribune, which likens itself to ProPublica. The new venture will publish non-partisan investigative journalism online and host events.

“It’s no secret that I’ve been consulting with my friend of fifteen years, the venture capitalist John Thornton, on a project very close to his heart: a nonprofit, nonpartisan public media organization whose mission is to promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide interest,” Smith said to his colleagues. “As John has been telling anyone who will listen, the Texas Tribune will publish original news reporting online (much like ProPublica) and put on conferences, conversation series, and other on-the-record, open-to-the-public events (much like the Aspen Institute). For nearly a year I’ve been helping John refine his concept for the Trib, and I’ve suggested various people he might hire. At some point along the way, like Dick Cheney leading the search for George Bush‘s vice president and concluding that he was the one he was looking for, I came to believe that perhaps I should join John in a more formal capacity, and he came to believe it too.”

However, Smith said he will continue to consult with Texas Monthly and host the weekly half-hour interview show, “Texas Monthly Talks,” as editor emeritus, “for the foreseeable future.”

“So you won’t get rid of me that easily,” he told his staff.

Smith will be replaced by Elynn Russell, a longtime Texas Monthly vet who will be the first woman to lead the magazine, minOnline reported.

Jesse Eisinger, the Wall Street editor of now-defunct Portfolio has happily landed on his feet. Starting next month, Eisinger will join nonprofit investigative outfit ProPublica‘s newsroom as senior reporter.

Before joining Portfolio, Eisinger worked at The Wall Street Journal where he founded two columns about the stock market: “Long & Short,” which ran weekly, and the daily “Ahead of the Tape.” While at the Condé Nast magazine, which folded in May, Eisinger wrote the November 2007 cover story “Wall Street Requiem,” which predicted the downfall of doomed investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers months before their implosions.

Eisinger has also worked at TheStreet.com and Dow Jones. Full release after the jump.

Earlier: Portfolio.com Blogger Moving On

Related: What’s Next In Citizen Journalis: 4 Questions For ProPublica’s Amanda Michel

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Yesterday, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the winners of its 2009 Knight News Challenge, which provides funding to innovative digital news projects submitted to the foundation.

This year, the Knight Foundation awarded a total of $5.1 million in grants to nine new projects and 17 winners from the two previous years. The largest amount of funding — $719,500 — went to a project called DocumentCloud, a joint venture between The New York Times and ProPublica. Talking Points Memo is also joining in the collaboration, the company said yesterday.

According to the Knight Foundation, DocumentCloud will be “a Web site that will enhance investigative reporting by making source documents easy to find, share and read” by providing “an online database of documents contributed by a consortium of news organizations, watchdog groups and bloggers, and shared with the public at large.”

The project is led by Ben Koski and Aron Pilhofer of the Times and ProPublica’s Scott Klein and Eric Umansky (in the picture above). Today, Eric, Aron and Scott joined in an interactive chat on Poynter.org, explaining what DocumentCloud will be.

“Too many documents today still end up on the digital equivalent of the cutting room floor,” they said. “What documents journalists do post — and of course they increasingly do — they’re PDFs, a not particularly user-friendly format. DocumentCloud is meant to make each step along the way much easier, and moreover will make the documents more journalistically valuable by showing information about them and the relations between them.”

A full list of the winners and a description of their projects can be found here.

This is the third year that the Knight Foundation has held its News Challenge, and it has pledged to donate $25 million over 5 years.

Non-profit investigative newsroom ProPublica announced the winners of its first ever Investigative Governance Prizes today.

The winners were federal and state/local investigative reports of elected or executive agencies, the legislative branch or independent agencies. The jury, which included public officials, politicians and journalists, awarded four prizes — two at the state/local level and two at the federal level — but did not award a prize for a federal investigation of an independent agency.

The jury included Byron Calame, former public editor for The New York Times and former deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, Denver Post editor and ProPublica Journalism Advisory Board member Gregory L. Moore and Paul Steiger, ProPublica’s editor-in-chief.

“The Prize-winning reports cited today represent government at its open, self-correcting best,” said Steiger. “Our Prizes honor dedicated investigators, and the institutions they represent, for bringing abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust to public notice. Such work can, and does, truly make a difference.”

A full list of the winners after the jump

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