Our overall recommendation for new news organizations is even simpler than for journalists or for legacy organizations: Survive.

–From a Columbia Journalism School report by CUNY’s C.W. Anderson, Columbia’s Emily Bell and NYU’s Clay Shirky, entitled “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present”

Last night, San Francisco got a high-dose injection of East Coast media experts.

In an event space once belonging to the San Francisco Chronicle, New York University’s Clay Shirky, Columbia University’s Emily Bell and City University of New York’s C.W. Anderson sat down for an onstage interview with AllThingsD editor Kara Swisher (who is herself a transplant from the New York area).

The group convened at Intersection for the Arts to discuss “Post-Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present,” a new report published by the Columbia Journalism School, which also hosted the event for its centennial. You can find the full report at this link; it is also embedded at the bottom of this story.

After the event, I caught up with Anderson and Bell for a few postgame questions about the changing state of the media:

Many of the people in attendance tonight were in some way connected to the media. Why should people outside those circles pick up this report?

C.W. Anderson: To understand the hypercharged individual. If you want to understand how technology is empowering individuals to have all sorts of new responsibilities, but also significantly more ability and authority, you should read this report. There is far more pressure on you, and far more responsibility, because you’re now acting in public in a new way.

And for those who are in the media, what can they do? Is there some action individual journalists can take now?

Anderson: Individual journalists should familiarize themselves with how a database works, how an Excel spreadsheet works.

Most seem to know nothing about that.

Anderson: Yeah, my initial answer would be, “Oh you should learn to code.” But let’s not even go there yet.

Why not?

Anderson: Because, as you said, most journalists don’t even know how an Excel spreadsheet works.

So it’s a step-by-step thing?

Anderson: One thing at a time. Every journalist should learn some basic coding skills — not necessarily becoming coders themselves, but understanding the people who do in their organization, understanding what they can ask from them. But, hey, baby steps. Do Excel first.

Emily Bell: It’s really about understanding that the world of information is changing very quickly. We’ve always aligned journalism with things like marketing and PR, because it’s about telling stories and how you present something. But what about journalism as finding and distributing information? Learn math.

What about news editors? What should they do?

Bell: There was a phase of everything being converged — the offline and online newsroom. I wonder now whether a lot of that was a big waste of time. [Laughs] That’s why I think so many journalists now leave and do their own thing. They want to be freed of whatever that process is, just to experiment with new stuff. It sounds wishy-washy to say “enable your staff,” but that’s a hard thing to do.

And what about that distinction between journalists and non-journalists? Do we need better media literacy?

Bell: The public and journalism are indistinguishable. Journalism as a profession and a trade can’t take all of this on. Some of this has to be about how society is changing. Often, people produce really good journalism, but if they’re not journalists, they don’t do it all the time.

And that’s not a problem.

Bell: No. But we need people doing it all the time.

Read the entire report, “Post-Industrial Journalism,” here:

As long as the newspaper was a bundle, no one ever had to care that people were buying it for radically different reasons. But once you go online, and people can unbundle things, where you can traffic directly to a story without going through the home page or any of the rest of it, suddenly what it — the individual choices made by individual readers come to matter a lot.

– Clay Shirky, on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan

One thing that was particularly fantastic from the protests over the two bills in Congress that most of the Internet was protesting over yesterday, was the plethora of creative videos that were released.

Here are two that I liked a lot — a comic one from Jest, called “Wikipedia/SOPA Survival Kit”; and a very cogent argument against the legislation, from Clay Shirky on the TED Web site, titled “Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)”:

Other luminaries on the guest list:

• Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey
• Howcast CEO and co-founder Jason Liebman
• Clay Shirky, author and New York University professor
• Jared Cohen, Member of Secretary Clinton’s Policy Planning staff
• Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum
• Shervin Pishevar, founder of Social Gaming Network
• Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby Awards
• Luis Ubiñas, President of the Ford Foundation
• James Eberhard, pioneer of mobile content and services

What’s on the agenda? Dunno. But I imagine we’ll hear a lot of chatter about it during and after the fact. Here’s Dorsey’s self-portrait, taken en route to the event today:

BoomTown is now right next to a canal–no falling cows in sight!–in Amsterdam, here for an unusual digital conference called PICNIC, which starts Wednesday and runs through Friday.

With sessions like “We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity,” “The Emerging Real-Time Social Web” and “The Future of Business Creation,” it seems to be a place for big, messy Web ideas.

Speakers from the U.S. include former Microsoftie Linda Stone, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and Internet thinker and author Clay Shirky.

For PICNIC’s conference onstage, I will be interviewing Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries on the future of television, and the CEO of Vodaphone Netherlands, Guy Laurence, on the future of mobile.

But I am a little worried, after seeing this promo video for the conference, that it is a little too brainy for me (Warning to those who don’t like seeing heads exploding in a bloody mess!):

When I was in Munich, I ran into well-known Web pundit, teacher and consultant Clay Shirky (pictured here), who was on the “Exploding Media” panel at Hubert Burda Media’s DLD–Digital, Life, Design–conference held there this week.

So I used the opportunity to talk to the always thoughtful Shirky about his new book, called “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” which is set to come out in about a month from Penguin Press.

I have not read the book yet, but it should be another that seeks to figure out what impact digital technologies are having on society. It is described as “how the wildfire-like spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects–for good and for ill.”

That sounds about right, but let’s let Shirky explain in this video: