Like clumsily pursuing jewel thieves and racing a hilarious Volkswagon to Monte Carlo. Or, for Vienna, "I am the cow!" Salzburg fountain…

For his movie One Water, it wasn't about the size of the audience, filmmaker and Academy faculty member Sanjeev Chatterjee told us Monday. The aim was "more what kind of audience."

The hope for valuable, engaged, active audiences is one of the newer refrains in online journalism, and it presents a new challenge for students of media literacy. In the past, observers could assume they were the intended audience for journalism or make educated guesses at an audiences based on geography. But those assumptions now often fall short, and subsequent interpretations can be wildly incorrect.

As the Web has gained complexity, the vague masses are no longer valued or sought. Specific crowds have begun to matter, groups who can give long-term value to media. Those interested in media literacy need to dig deeper, seeking the same audiences the media seeks.

To have a chance at illuminating media's work in 2009, observers must assume they are not the intended audience. They must assume the media organization has not made choices for them. They must approach media literacy's core concepts of identifying, monitoring and understanding from outside the media-audience relationship.

A good example of these literacy needs comes today in a News.com storyabout Charity Water, a group Chatterjee mentioned Monday as an ally in his push for global safe water sources. The story examines Charity Water's past success in Twitter communication and fundraising, and the challenge that Twitter's more recent explosive growth poses to charities' abilities  on the platform. If the space has become far more crowded, can charities still connect with audiences there successfully?

Charity Water is no traditional media organization, but does it qualify as new media? Sure. The non-profit collects and dispenses information to interested digital audiences. In a media sense, the advocacy and fundraising — at the group's core, organizationally — are cake. To a media observer, the non-profit's new challenge in reaching its audience should matter critically.

Is Charity Water going to have to grow louder to be heard? Is it going to have to seek new audiences and find new messages or methods to connect with them? Is any of this change going to shift Charity Water's identity, or can the methods shift as the identity stays the same?

These questions apply to new and traditional media alike. To examine the questions, the study begins with the audience — then the media.

Crossposted with some editing from Salzburg Global E-Media blog.

What's the fastest way to cover the world? As you've seen in entries on the e-Monitor blog, students at the Academy have taken different approaches to their e-Monitor work, doing daily journalistic surveillance on news sources across the Web. The work is a class assignment for them, nothing more. What the students may not realize is how closely their work follows a new journalism role.

With just an hour each morning, the students are limited in the time they have to read sources, determine the valuable stories on their beats, debate with students on the same beat watching other sources, and rank their importance against the day's results from other coverage teams. Some teams exchange their finds by e-mail. Others huddle around a board and talk. Some team leads offer early direction each day. Others hold back to see what surfaces.

Teams meet tonight on how this process is working, and I'm interested to hear the discussions. At USAT, we have ongoing talks on the same.

We call this kind of work "surveillance journalism" — looking at news the world covers each day, surfacing the best content to readers and explaining the information's value or conflict. We send readers elsewhere. We know they consume news from plenty of locations, not just USAT. Why should we try to keep them on our site when 1) that's impossible and 2) we can help them find broad perspectives on news? If we do our job well, reputation attracts readers back.

But — understatement, yes — the world's a big place. How do we search, assess and write global coverage in minutes? A look at the early morning posts form USAT's central news blog, On Deadline, shows the answers remain elusive but worth seeking.

Since 2006, On Deadline's staffers, myself included, have published nearly 1,700 day-opening posts. The styles have shifted over time.

2006: In January's opening week, there was a short narrative on the day's USAT and a shorter look at other papers and websites. By spring, the USAT post had become a bulleted list, with more work put toward longer looks at specific stories. By fall, the look elsewhere had grown. That winter, the blog tested lists of our most popular stories as an additional eye-opener.

2007: The look elsewhere had grown substantially by the spring. A front-page image had joined the daily USAT links. Moving toward summer, the blogger broke down the look elsewhere by media type and examined briefs with the USAT content. Later in the summer, the blog reduced the latter element to just front-page content. In the fall, it briefly bolded news outlet names in the look elsewhere.

2008: On Deadline added Saturday and Sunday looks elsewhere, with the same format as weekdays, and a daily open thread for readers to raise their own topics and give general feedback. Late in the year, the blog dropped the daily post on USAT's content and expanded further the look elsewhere, chunking it by bolded topics.

2009: At year's start, the looks elsewhere tightened around those bolded topics, also adding art. By early summer, the post was a deep, diverse look at the biggest story in the news each morning. But by late summer, the blog began experimenting again, giving quick looks in many directions with two new angles — a more Web-centric focus and an emphasis on news at that moment. Within weeks of introduction, the blog added its previous media-chunking to the new mix.

Throughout the four years, the questions around these changes have remained the same: What kind of value do the posts bring? How much time to they take to create vs. time that could be spent in other ways? On Deadline has just one staffer at any time of day. What deadline does a blogger have to meet to hit with the day's first traffic jump? What does an overview do for readers vs. posts on individual stories? The latter draws more traffic, but the former provides rhythm to the blog, valuable for returning audiences that make a news product last.

There are no easy answers. At USAT and On Deadline, while this coverage aspect is small compared to others, talk continues of even more experiments and approaches. Hopefully students here are open to the same. "The usual" in anything doesn't cut it anymore.

Crossposted with some editing from Salzburg Global E-Media blog.

The cops bust you in front of a palace. It's not all pretty scenes here.

Want to send your kids to the toy section? Hope they like real swords.

The Hummels get weird too. Craziest, scariest kitchen ever.

Even the feared USAT birthday hat shows up.

Can imagine David Caruso doffing his sunglasses by this river?

"Something something … worth his salt." (YEEEEAHHH!)

I blogged Monday about how Tom Stoppard's remarks to the Academy were disappointingly off the record. With all-around-cool faculty chair Susan Moeller continuing to push the case to release, some extended Salzburg quotes have now gone on the record. My favorite of them:

You are what you write, you are the way you write it, you are the way you work, you can't kind of decide to be somebody else. I'm the kind who cares and rewrites a huge amount. I don't mean, I don't at all mean that the plays I write exist in many drafts, what I mean is that I rewrite as I go, which you can look on as a kind of neurosis if you like. In other words, the inability to go further until one is comfortable with that, it's a sort of neurosis. The first page of my plays may exist in twenty or thirty forms. And the last page in only one, because what's happening is that the further you go, the fewer the doors that you can go through.

Also, Susan blogs in Huffpost about Stoppard, threats to journalists: "In Stoppard's conversation here in Salzburg … with students from Uganda and the UK, China, Chile and the United States, he essentially called journalism a 'lever' to 'change the world.' But what is it that needs to be moved with that lever? We are what needs to be moved — out of our apathy or ignorance of the essential role journalists play in keeping us informed and in protecting our freedoms."

Jess forwards a Serious Eats item on how gritty biodegradable spoons are possibly on their way to ruining our ice cream experiences, and I think this is a serious concern. If I have to choose between ice cream and the environment, I want to know how much ice cream is involved.

These new-fangled spoons sound awful, and I'm with those backing metal spoons in shops. But for ice cream to go? A few Eats readers suggest cones are the answer, doing away with cups altogether. But in Soviet Russia, ice cream cones… something, something … making everyone use cones is communist. Ice cream lines would be next.

How about, if we're going to hurt the environment, we hurt it slowly? Perhaps in a way that makes our ice cream look giant-sized and last longer? Tiny spoons, my friends. Tiny but sturdy gelato spoons are the answer. On top of helping the experience, these spoons mimic the ice cream size of the tongue and human bites. They also give America's top flavorologists the time they need to find delicious, environmentally good solutions. We are the ice cream spoons we've been waiting for.

Friend Ellen brought a great eye to a set of Salzburg street photos I posted last week. If you haven't been reading the comments: When she saw a photo of a quartet playing off a square, she realized she'd taken a picture of a quartet in the same spot four years ago. As she compared shots, it turned out the accordion player had a decent gig.

As posted in this blog, July 2009:

As posted in Ellen's Flickr, June 2005:

The big news in Salzburg this week, I didn't hear about in Salzburg.

Reports of the first performances of two recently discovered Mozart pieces came to me from a relative's e-mail of a BBC News link and a random encounter with a New York Times story. If not for outlets thousands of miles away, I'd never have known what happened in a Mozart building I'd passed a day earlier, wondering what was inside.

This break from reality fell amid another split. Academy students had been drilling daily into news from around the world, sprinting across dozens of sources each morning to surface relevant global stories for our E-Monitor blog. I and others had sat with them. The assigned topics were free expression, human rights, sustainability, and other world political issues — not music. But here we were, sprawling across Internet resources to lasso broad, ongoing and often distant themes, and we had no clue of an intensely local historic moment.

Knowing the Mozart story wasn't work or coursework for us, but as interested travelers, it had been a failed life assignment. Hearing the news beforehand would've been unlikely, but we should have known afterward. What factors should have been different?

1. We should have made ourselves more locally aware. Few of us knew German, but there were English-language Austrian sources and automated "Salzburg" or "Austria" Google News searches we could have used. Twitter searches for the city have yielded mostly German results this month, but they skewed English for the Mozart news.

Journalists have extra incentive to pursue info this way. Applying sustainability's "Think global, act local" mantra to information means local contributions — either by viewership or content creation — but also education in the digital tools/interactions that build global news.

2. Lodging should have made its guests aware of local news. Our dorm has been terrific, but they've been too much like the majority of the industry in regards to current local info. Directions and connections to local spots have helped us as tourists, but happening-now info could provide experiences that set our tourism apart from others.

Nothing provides incentive to return to a location as much as once-in-a-lifetime moments. These aspects matter more in an individual's personal storytelling. Even incidental moments, such as visiting the Mozart house the day after a historic performance, can matter.

3. Systems for travelers and hoteliers should be more immediate. Travelers are restrained by time, stress and information line of sight. (What they don't run across, they don't know.) The lodging industry is restrained by legacy facility and activity investments, many geared toward controlling experience. To the industry's credit, many travelers have a legacy enjoyment of lodging bringing order to madness.

What the picture needs now is balance. Digital services geared toward basic travelers have to bring traditional trust and ease, but they have to push deeper into personal relevancy, especially around timeliness and local engagement. To be successful, the services need the kind of partnerships with customers and lodging that have led to formation of long-term travel content, like hotel and location reviews. Simplified aggregation and central input mechanisms for lodging and diverse output and interaction options for travelers are necessary.

Full disclosure: Improving these ties matter editorially and financially to USAT. But if you ever leave home, the issue should matter to you too.

Crossposted with some editing from Salzburg Global E-Media blog.

To get to the Salzburg fortress, you have to ride a funicular, which a week-plus into staying here still makes me think of funnel cake, which I haven't seen in Salzburg under that name or any other. But this is all beside the point. What's more important is that taking funny cars to funny places seems to be a way of life there. It must change people.

The funicular I took Saturday started well off main streets. A few small signs pointed the way there. Guess you don't advertise the fortress.

Soon you were high above the city, as high as you would go. Right?

Wrong. Looking down on the location of the first picture-taking:

And the view from the new, higher spot, actually confirmed this time:

But life isn't all about heights. Sometimes, it's about cannons.

Or finding the British people on the required audio tour all too wordy.

Or questioning museum inspiration from Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Or standing outside the organ room when the pipes blasted.

Then there was quick lunch atop the fortress, like lunch atop a tower, and I could just about see my room from there (now yellow dotted).

Finished lunch, I tried to see if I could spot my friends on the mountain.