I found your observations about journalism industry organizations to be especially relevant. It seems today that the Online News Association, Poynter, and just a few others are thriving. Many have reinvented themselves to focus on (or at least include) digital skills and thought leadership, but the best efforts have been negated by zero training budgets.

I share your sentiment about Newspaper Next and N2. I think it was a great project and was able to attend API and N2 events in 2008 as we tried to lay out a new path for newsrooms to follow. The resistance was back at the home bases of companies not owned by someone like Gannett.

I have blogged about my perceptions of why that was the case, but it’s not due to the good efforts of those who worked on the projects. Organizations such as API and SPJ can try to shine a light on the way to go, but it still requires industry leaders to go there.

“Bleeding edge” isn’t a comfort zone for legacy news organizations, but I agree with maverick John Paton who said last year, “You want to be out in front of everything.”

I’ll certainly circulate this around SPJ (and other) circles and encourage leader s (and all) to reflect and offer feedback. I hope other associations/orgs will do the same.

Of course, it seems appropriate to mention at least one other collaboration/joint conference coming up – the 2011 RTDNA/SPJ joint conference in New Orleans: http://excellenceinjournalism.org

There is a fair amount of collaboration and communication as a whole, as the Council of National Journalism Organizations shows. A leader at one of the member organizations could expand much greater than I. A few years ago this group put together journalismtraining.org, which is more of a database to find in-person training. But who knows – it could eventually morph into a standalone training site in the vein of Poynter’s NewsU (just a personal thought – that’s not insider baseball).

I think it’s only appropriate that as news outlets and the journalists who work for them become more “collaborative,” the journalism orgs and associations that do the wider advocacy/training work practice the same thing.