As David and others said at the start of the year, there isn't a silver bullet. If there was money to be minted in events or anything else, someone would do it. But I look at the news organizations that are path setting in 2012 and none of it looks familiar to someone reading a newspaper -- or paying for one -- a decade ago. I’m excited about Circa and The Atavist and MATTER.

To me, what those have in common is that they began with a product or a service. Whether they will find enough customers to be sustainable, we will wait and see. But local news sites still, almost always, begin with what newspapers used to do and try build a business around that.

Let’s flip that. Start with the product or service we can sell, grab a small part of that old, big industry we called newspapers, and work together to build a networked industry that is sustainable.  That's my takeaway from this year.