Yesterday I asked Dave Winer what he would teach journalists.  He responded with the suggestion that the journalists should blog with existing software with instruction/feedback/conversations involving the local MSM and anyone else who'd like to stop by driving the instruction.

Interesting, but who is going to create checkbox news? Is that something you can create with a Blogger account?

Last semester I helped develop several projects that are really innovative approaches to complicated problems journalists face. 

Notebook - This is an alternative interface for commenting that tries to lead users to categorize their feedback by Tips, Facts, and Sources.  The comments are all fed into Drupal where they can be viewed by publication, journalist, tags, ratings, etc.  The goal of this project is to try to create value from comments instead of simply having a flame war at the end of every story.  The hope is that a journalist would go back to their Notebook before writing about a topic to see what users have said about other stories on the same topic.  I ran into javascript conflicts between fivestar rating, jquery scroll, and jquery tabs that I haven't been able to figure out.