Journalism needs to change because the world is changing.

What has changed about news is that we can deliver exactly the news that you care about. We want the news right away. We want it in a lot of different ways. We want it on our cell phones. We want it on our desktop computers at work.

Hi. I’m Steve Buttry. I’m the C3 Innovation Coach for Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Gazette Communications is about 126 years old, and we publish The Gazette, which is a daily newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and we also own the market’s biggest television station, KCRG TV-9.

We are pursuing a new business model that I wrote — it’s on my blog — called “A Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.”

C3 is an effort to change the relationships between media companies and our communities. I’m connected to the news. I’m connected to my neighbors. I’m connected to people who share my interests all through this connection system that we’re developing.

We live-blog news events. We were the first news — [Trish Mahaffy] of our staff was the first reporter in the country that a federal judge allowed to live-blog from a federal trial, and it was a trial that was moved to Sioux City. It was a change of venue, so people locally cared about this.

Last year, on my third day on the job, Cedar Rapids was hit with a flood that was our nation’s worst disaster since Katrina, and that has had a profound effect on us. We did a live chat. It was mostly people in the community telling what was happening in their neighborhood during severe weather in the last weekend.

If we can invest the time to help the community start using this, this platform that we provide, might we help them tell their own story?

One of the things that we’re considering for one of our first C3 projects is something that would provide a platform for people involved in high school fine arts — choral music, band, and theatrical. You know, at any dress rehearsal, you’re going to see some parents with video cameras. Well, if we can provide a place for them to share those videos, yes, we’re going to be letting people tell their stories and upload their videos and everything, too, but we also want to be a place that you can buy your tickets to this weekend’s high school play and go to conferences and say, “How many of you have bought something or made a reservation or done some sort of transaction over the Web?” Hands would go up all over the room. And I’d say, “But you haven’t done that through your local newspaper, have you?”

That local news site needs to become the local digital marketplace. How that changes the relationship is instead of being an expense line in the budgets of our business customers, we’re a revenue line. We’re bringing in revenue for them.

Because the existing products produce a revenue stream, even if it’s a declining revenue stream, it’s a huge revenue stream that we can’t disrupt while we’re innovating. We need to be entrepreneurs. We’re not going to succeed in the digital marketplace if we don’t figure out how to be digital entrepreneurs.

If our product is ink on paper delivered to your home daily with yesterday’s news in it, our days may be numbered. But I never thought of that as our product.

Even when I was a paperboy back in Columbus, Ohio in the 1960s, I wasn’t getting up to read the newspaper before I ran my route; I was getting up to read the news, and news and community connection and meaning and connection to the marketplace, those are our product, not ink on paper.