Jeff Reifman isn't a media exec and he doesn't work for a struggling newspaper. He has written freelance pieces for various magazines, but isn't a career journalist. But Reifman sees the importance of strong journalism provided by robust newspapers and magazines, and that's why he's using his skills to help newspapers across the US figure out how to monetize their content and survive through such unstable times.

"I've been a freelance writer and I've learned a lot about the values of journalism and its importance to democracy," he told the Editors Weblog in an interview.

This belief in journalism and democracy has led Reifman, a former Microsoft group program manager, to create NewsCloud. The open-source software was developed by Reifman in 2006 as a Facebook community based around online news and information where users could interact with each other and the important issues of the day.

With a 2008 Knight Foundation grant, Reifman expanded NewsCloud to offer a customizable platform to the student newspaper at the University of Minnesota, MnDaily, and to environmental activist newsmagazine Grist.org. The two publications created Facebook applications and offered Reifman a real-world lab to research youth interactions with news and Facebook.

The Media Consortium, a collaborative project joining small progressive news outlets in pursuit of a common goal, is currently accepting applications to be a part of their upcoming project. The Consortium will offer participating media outlets $5,000 to $10,000 to offer their experiences for research in an attempt to find new business models for small independent news outlets.

Members can get involved in two of three collaborative experiments organized by the Consortium, which involve "experimenting with new revenue-generating opportunities," "moving into mobile," and "integrating journalism with community engagement," says its website.

Because all of the media outlets are small, these experiments will pool knowledge and experiences from a wide range of different outlets and will offer a nuanced view of what methods work and why.

The opportunity offered by the Media Consortium is invaluable for small operations--some of the Consortium's member organizations have only 10 people on staff--to get a bit of breathing room to experiment, and also a bit of cash to help implement these experiments.

"This structure will provide lab members with the opportunity and space for self-education, peer knowledge sharing, connection to outside experts/tools, and collaborations that can scale up to improve the long-term sustainability of their outlets," says the website.

Few are as successful as the Huffington Post by their fifth birthday.

In five short years of existence, the web publication doubled its staff to 100, expanded its site to include a number of local and niche news pages, and most recently received 13 million unique visitors during the month of March. In honor of its May 9 birthday, Newsonomics media blogger Ken Doctor wrote a post for the Nieman Journalism Lab outlining exactly what it is that makes the Huffington Post so successful.

His six points all highlight what's unique about HuffPo, starting with its brand--the Huffington Post stands for "a high-pitched way of thinking about the world," he writes, and Arianna Huffington has never backed down from her feisty liberal assertions. The website is known for liberally partisan news, but Huffington is not apologetic about this fact, and it still manages to increase viewership year after year--up 94% in just the last 12 months.

Facebook is indeed a force to be reckoned with, as it proved at yesterday's f8 conference by launching a number of wide-reaching additions to the social networking site. The additions, including something they've named the Open Graph and various tools called Social Plugins for third-party websites, will integrate Facebook into the fabric of the web "so people can have instantly social experiences wherever they go," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

What are the changes?

The Social Plugins and the Open Graph Facebook has created support each other. Now, sites will be able to offer plugins on their pages to allow users to "like" the content, and this content will be instantly published on their Facebook news feeds.