The Islamic Republic of Iran has been, and remains, one of the world’s harshest censors of the Internet, frequently blocking sites that are deemed “immoral” and politically offensive to the unelected authorities in power. Dissident bloggers and journalists of diverse ethnic, political and religious backgrounds are imprisoned and at times even executed for expressing their views online.

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Journalists like to think of their work in moral or even sacred terms. With each new layoff or paper closing, they tell themselves that no business model could adequately compensate the holy work of enriching democratic society, speaking truth to power, and comforting the afflicted.

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While many professional journalists fondly remember the work they did in college–covering townie news for the university paper or radio station–some are trying to erase their past work from the Internet because it shows up prominently on search engines like Google (GOOG).

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice feature about the subject in its May 15 issue, called “Alumni Try to Rewrite History on College-Newspaper Web Sites.”

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Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight–that is, more efficient–times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing?

Sitting in a hotel room, cruising by CNN the other day, I caught a behind-the-scenes segment that wanted to show us just how cool it is to be a reporter dashing from story to story.

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The Pulitzer Prizes were announced today [April 20]–and sincere congrats to the hard-working journalists who’ve won those highest of prizes. But with no online-only publications winning–in the first year they were eligible to enter–I wonder if it’s time for an online-only version of the Pulitzers to be offered.

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The Conficker computer virus continues to make sensational headlines, mostly of The-End-Is-Nigh variety. Most recent news accounts–most prominently a feature on CBS’s (CBS) “60 Minutes” Sunday–are portraying Conficker as some unstoppable force which will melt the world’s computers and maybe destroy the Internet on April 1. There’s a kernel of truth to these reports, but just a kernel.

As we wrote last week: It’s likely that nothing bad will happen.

Here’s how we ended up here: There are thousands of companies and independent researchers in the tech-security industry, most of which could benefit from a little publicity. And having read a newspaper once or twice, they know that sensationalism sells. So they gravitate towards a worst-case interpretation of the facts. Journalists, many of whom don’t really understand the technology being described, eat it up.

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Professional journalists in the age of the Internet look as doomed as blacksmiths in the age of the combustion engine. Local newspapers are disappearing. National newspapers and commercial TV stations are seeing the Web take their advertisers.

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If not all lawmakers were 100 percent attentive during President Obama’s speech before Congress on Feb. 24, there’s a good reason.

D.C. has become a land of Twits–or perhaps the proper term is Twitterers.

The social-networking service Twitter has been around for a while, but it seems to have taken Washington’s political and media world by storm since the inauguration.

Karl Rove and Al Gore have been Twittering for some time, but news anchors in particular have recently discovered the service as a way to engage viewers in a more personal way. After she and other anchors lunched with Obama recently, Katie Couric Twittered the menu: “lobster bisque, striped bass, fruit confetti w/pound cake.”

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Journalists are obsessed with Twitter. Obsessed. They use it, talk about it, analyze it, deconstruct it, reconstruct it, love it, hate it, capitalize on it, become experts on it, monetize it, argue about it, and become micro-famous on it. They are mesmerized with what it is and they are as giddy as Tom Cruise on Oprah just thinking about what it could be.

Last Wednesday, MediaBistro held a panel discussion titled, “Journalists and Social Media: Sources, Skills, and the Writer.” The panelists included NYU professor and PressThink author Jay Rosen, NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin, BusinessWeek.com community editor Shirley Brady, and Daily Beast columnist Rachel Sklar. The four journalists discussed which social networks they liked best, their top concerns for the industry, and what they saw as the future of journalism. The main topic of conversation, however, was (of course) Twitter.

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It’s a long way from $700 billion, but the media start-up Six Apart is introducing its own economic bailout plan.

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program offers recently terminated bloggers and journalists a free pro account (worth $150 annually) on the company’s popular blogging platform. In addition to the free yearly membership, the 20 to 30 journalists who are accepted will receive professional tech support, placement on the company’s blog aggregation site, Blogs.com, and automatic enrollment in the company’s advertising revenue-sharing program.

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In the rapidly shifting era of blogger and media relations, we can expect one thing to occur as we forge ahead: mistakes. It happens to the best and the worst of us.

This isn’t a generic post on how not to make mistakes, or if you do, how to apologize, per se. This is an example of true transparency and public soul-searching that will hopefully help and inspire PR practitioners, journalists and bloggers to learn from the mistakes of others–and hopefully work together when unintentional or harmless mistakes are made.

Let’s talk about transparency for a moment. You hear that word a lot across the social mediasphere–almost to the point where it may be losing its original value and intent.

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After the derision that greeted the New York Times’s blogging-will-kill-you story on Sunday, I’m probably not going to do much for the reputation of the mainstream media with hard-core bloggers. So it goes.

Out of curiosity, I drew up a list of 55 technology journalists to find out how many use Twitter, arguably one of the most important social-media technologies on the scene. I included names of some online reporters–including colleagues from CNET as well as TechCrunch–but in the main, the list is comprised of people employed by A-list newspapers and periodicals.

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1. Get out of the newspaper business. Culturally, you can’t look and define your business as the delivery mechanism. The business is truly content and distribution across all pipes. The asset is journalists and the brand. A print-based property is just one of the many ways to distribute the digital bits. Most newspapers have in charge of their leadership “newspaper men.” They should turn over the reins to young execs, women and people with diverse backgrounds, who are Web-based and consumer savvy and will NOT be wed and enamored with the print-based delivery system of the past.

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The time-worn debate of bloggers vs. journalists has finally run its course. For years, traditional journalists scoffed at bloggers as pajama-wearing screamers, while bloggers have pointed to MSM (mainstream media) as secretly biased and obsolete. While the extremists in this argument have had the stage shouting at each other loudly (and it continues to this day), what has happened quietly in the background has received less attention: Mainstream media reporters have started blogging in droves, while larger blog operations have hired seasoned reporters and focused on doing traditional journalism.

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When I started blogging four and a half years ago, there was a clear delineation between bloggers and journalists. But that’s all changed, and now we have this new category, the journablogger.

The journablogger has his or her own blog or works in a blog network like paidContent, TechCrunch, Gigaom, Silicon Alley Insider, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc., etc. Just look at the top of Techmeme’s leaderboard and you’ll see them right next to the traditional journalists like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNET, etc.

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