An example: say you’re a media organization with a Washington-based technology editor working for a business-to-business media brand, why not contribute to a research series, study, or indexing effort? The index could be a “Guide to Technology in Washington.” A study could be customized for a sole sponsor; that’s OK if the journalist is 100% independent of sponsor influence. The point is to take the journalist’s knowledge, and package and present analysis in new, interesting and useful ways for paying audiences. In this case, there’s a subset of readers (IT vendors, for instance) who would pay a premium for insight about technology use by government.

Now, let’s go local. Could a film critic or arts editor moderate a readers’ discussion—live or virtual, about a new movie—something actually sponsored by AMC Theaters? You bet! Community-based discussions should be owned by metro (or national) media organizations. After all, they enhance brand equity by hosting local cultural discussions.

Another, particularly timely, example: If a media organization has a reporter covering the healthcare-reform debate, it should host a sponsored health-care seminar, and that reporter should suggest the speakers, program the event, and lead that seminar.

It’s about taking something that some media companies currently do as “add ons” or revenue enhancers, and instead establish an entrepreneurial culture within those organizations, with products conceived in association with journalists. Indeed, product development should be part of a journalist’s job. Journalists should be working side by side with their business-side colleagues to create and monetize products—and should be evaluated, in part, on their ability to do just that.

Yes, media companies now produce conferences and run discussion groups. But why don’t they do so more consistently? It’s the fear factor. Many organizations still believe that merely assisting in such a program would compromise reporters and editors’ professional ethics.

That’s balderdash. What counts is honest disclosure about such relationships, and holding reporters and editors accountable – just like sources are held accountable – for what they produce. In my view it is silly to anguish over the nuances of attribution rules, i.e., whether material discussed at a seminar by source-participants should be on- or off-the-record, or not-for-attribution. (This was an issue that arose with respect to The Washington Post’s canceled “salon” dinners this past year, while I was briefly at the paper as the General Manager of Conferences and Events.) Journalists spend countless hours in background conversations with sources. If they need or want to drag a source onto the record, they should not hesitate to do so. All it takes is saying, “I would like to use this material in this or that way, but I don’t think I can do so without putting it on the record. Will you agree?”

There’s an easy way for news organizations and journalists to know if they’ve crossed the line: It’s when advertisers and sponsors try to dictate the content. Advertisers, in this model, still shouldn’t dictate content; journalists can and should remain independent.

It’s a sin that so many journalists are losing their jobs. The number of newspaper men and women in the U.S. laid off or asked to take buyouts nearly reached 15,000 in 2009, according to Paper Cuts. That’s on top of some 16,000 who lost their jobs in 2008. For the journalists within that group, the wrenching question is: are there enough reporting and editing jobs on individual blogs or within the ranks of all those hyper-local plays, including AOL (NYSE: AOL) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), to employ these journalists?

I doubt it. Journalists will be forced to change careers. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Economist Group is one media organization that gets it. It has its “newspaper” and it has its respected, market-driven, journalistically fueled research house, the Economist Intelligence Unit. Its journalists don’t do news and market research at the same time, but there are cases where journalists have worked for one side of the house then switched to work at the other at different points in their careers, showing that The Economist values the background of journalists who can produce content that’s destined for either news or research.