Another site to add to your list, btw, is oDesk (http://www.odesk.com), which offers a way to pay freelancers by hour, allowing for longer-term professional relationships.

~Michelle
oDesk.com

Mark — Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about having people in house and getting the skills inside the newsroom. Amen.

But if it comes down to ‘Ok, we have this awesome project we can do really poorly with a copy editor still learning how to tween shapes in Flash, he should have the actionscript skills for our primary tracker in a year.. oh crap, the election will be over’ or ‘Let’s get someone with the skills while we fast track our skilled staff members getting trained’ — I’ll pick the latter every time.

Newspapers need to be nimble while they evolve, which is the fundamental challenge of ‘big’ media’s survival.

With the unclear financial future of newspapers I wonder how long it will be before newspapers have a small core of employees then a periphery of many journalists/developers etc working on the outside contributing inwards.

But I think we know where this road would lead at all too many newspapers: Wholesale intellectual outsourcing. In that case, the organization cedes control of its own destiny, inasmuch as it is no longer capable of distinguishing itself from competitors.

I can’t emphasize it enough: Outsourcing does not relieve us of the need to acquire and master all the skills essential to our future. If Flash development is viewed by a newsroom as essential to its journalistic mission, it must acquire, master and continually improve that skill. Only while maintaining those abilities should an organization then consider offloading projects to individual freelancers or firms.

Newsrooms that won’t make that commitment to their core functions, that won’t invest adequately in the skills that fuel continuous innovation, simply aren’t going to make it. No amount of contract work will save them.

Every paper should have some good Web designers, developers and multimedia people, but a lot of work might need to be done on the outside. There are only so many hours in the day for staffers to work.

The Brain Drain is the No. 1 thing killing journalism right now. A lot of the best j-students from my school are not going into journalism. If you’re really intelligent why would you want to get into a field with so much turmoil and poor leadership?

Well, you wouldn’t. Some day I’m not sure what I am doing in the journalism world, but I’m crazy like that.

I’ve been doing freelance Web work for years with some people I know, and I’m thinking of changing my focus to building apps for newspapers. It seems like they can’t afford to hire full-time Web talent, but they still need the Web help.