This month’s Carnival of Journalism asks what emerging technology will have a major impact on journalism next? Within the setup for this prompt is the answer: People. Changes in leadership and culture is the emerging technology that will allow those amazing new tools and opportunities to be fully utilized.

Host Steve “In” Outing says it himself:

“Who’s to blame? The answer is clear to me: Journalists and those who manage news organizations. Our industry and profession didn’t act quickly or aggressively enough to adapt to the way that new technologies would change journalism.”

What is the deal with the nonprofit news model? I think about this a lot and have plenty of different answers, but in considering it recently, my first reaction was emotional: It’s about being a part of a community.

Growing up, the publication I remember most clearly around our house was ​People​ magazine. The most talked about paper was probably the Chilton school newspaper (I kid, I kid). We read the local paper (I delivered it for four years) and watched the news, but life was not organized around the news cycle.

Do we make good journalism to support capitalism or to support our communities? Do we write to support the bottom lines of an increasingly consolidated group of corporate media conglomerates, or do we write to engage and inform our communities?

This month’s Carnival of Journalism prompt, “Can a good journalist be a good capitalist?” reminded me of conversations that followed a recent conference in Philly. The Center for Public Interest Journalism brought together journalists and citizen media makers for a conversation on “Engaging Communities.” During a session on citizen-produced media, panelists described how to engage citizens in the production of media. They also discussed an important underlying question: Why do citizens make media?

ProPublica, already a leader in investigative nonprofit news, announced the News Applications Fellowship today. This is huge. It is specifically targeted at journalists with an interest in, and facility for, becoming app developers. ProPublica will mentor the fellow and teach him/her how to build apps as a way of testing a hypothesis: “Can a smart, technical journalist with excellent and proven skills in other nerdy newsroom disciplines like graphics and CAR become a news app developer?” I can’t think of another opportunity like this, which is targeted at the journalist side of the hacker-journalist hybrid.

The new version of CiviCRM includes support for Drupal 6 and 7, and for the first time, WordPress.The version is still in beta, but continued support for Drupal 6 is an enormous relief.

Just a few months ago a make it happen project extended support for updates for Drupal 6 through March 2012. Even that extension would have required us to upgrade our Drupal 6 site immediately. For us, and  many other small nonprofit clients who love and rely on CiviCRM, a required upgrade right away would have been extremely difficult. Heck, some organizations are just moving from Drupal 5, and the much-delayed release of Drupal 7 made it difficult to plan when to do an upgrade anyway.