I may blog sometime later about lessons learned from my time here as the senior community host and now managing editor, but today I want to share that I am soon going to be moving to a new job.

In a couple weeks I will join The Poynter Institute — analyzing, writing and teaching about mobile and social media in the new news system.

The staff of Poynter Online are filling Poynter.org with outstanding coverage of the news industry, and I’m excited to contribute to that in some of the most exciting and fast-evolving branches of technology. I’ll also be involved in training programs at the institute and consulting for individual companies who are looking to take their social, mobile or community engagement approaches to a higher level.

The big goal of my new position at Poynter is “thought leadership” for the mobile and social news industry — bringing analysis to the big issues and developments and helping anyone who’s interested figure out what it means and what to do about it. However, I don’t expect to do this by shouting from a mountaintop.

I’ll be carrying forward the things I learned at TBD about the power of community engagement and involving users in the entire content cycle. Thought leadership isn’t really leadership if no one’s following you, so I hope you’ll all come along with me to help explore and discuss. My door is always open at jeff(at)jeffsonderman.com, on Twitter @jeffsonderman, or my relatively new Facebook page.

I want to hear from you about what you’re doing in the mobile or social space, or what you want a news provider to do for you. What do you think is being done well? What are the biggest questions that need attention?

UPDATE: For those of you I’ve gotten to know here in D.C., yes I will be staying in the area and working from here. Also, thanks to Steve Buttry for his very kind words about my move.

Malcolm Gladwell in 2008. Photo by Flickr user Pop!Tech

New Yorker writer and sociologish author Malcolm Gladwell has a new essay out in the New Yorker that seeks to draw a line in the sand between social networks and “real-life” relationships when it comes to producing significant social change.

My first reaction was, this reads like hyperbolically contrarian linkbait — in the vein of “X Is Dead” headlines sprawling the tech blogs today. Maybe that’s true. But I’d like to think he’s serious about this, and so I’d like to give the proper context to the world of networks and action that he frames.

First, let me stipulate that I think Gladwell is basically right about his descriptions of the different functions of weak-tie and strong-tie relationships. He’s right that weak-tie relationships that dominate a sprawling network structure are less likely to produce mass acts of risk-taking “in real life,” such as sit-ins. They are more likely to produce mass amounts of small, online-only participation such as donations or petitioning.

However, Gladwell stops his analysis at stage of strong-tie vs weak-tie, when really that is not the situation “in real life.” My quibbles:

1) The mass amounts of small participation that social networks can produce are not as worthless as Gladwell frames them. He flips Clay Shirky’s example of finding a lost cell phone, and notes that “The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece.” That still adds up to $115,410.51 toward the Darfur cause that wouldn’t be there otherwise. Not to mention the less tangible raising of awareness.

2) Weak ties can grow into strong ties. Your 1,000 Facebook “friends” may not really all be friends, but many are acquaintances who you may never have met without Facebook, and with a few you may over time build a strong-tie relationship that does produce IRL action.

3) Online networks and IRL networks overlap. They aren’t entirely exclusive competing environments. Some portion of the people I connect with on Twitter and Facebook are relatives or good friends who I do have strong ties with and would take “real action” with for a good cause. These networks strengthen strong-ties while also building new weak-ties. They are not, as Gladwell would have you believe, a vast wasteland of weak-tie, pretend friends.

While he accuses innovators of tending to be “solipsists” who “want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model,” Gladwell is doing the same. He wants to make a point — a fair one — that weak-tie relationships produce different action than strong-tie relationships. But he stretches too far in not recognizing the contributions of weak-tie relationships and mass coordinated action via social networks is of some great value that is still growing and not yet fully measured, and it does not operate exclusive of or in opposition to real-life strong-tie relationships.

UPDATE at 3:08 p.m.: Check out this interview clip from January when Gladwell tells Katie Couric he’s not really interested in social media and doesn’t think he’ll write about it because other people know it better:

Journalism school is neither totally irrelevant, nor totally necessary. There are things they do well, and not so well. Each prospective student can decide whether these things are worth their time and money…

Journalism school is good for:

- Learning basics of how to report and write information. This part is a craft more than an art. There is a right way to write clearly, and you can learn it from a good school.

- Meeting a network of peers. If you do it right, you will leave J-school with hundreds of friends, colleagues and professors who share a lot in common and can help each other along their career paths for years down the road. Journalism jobs are still a lot about who you know, and who knows you — and J-school is a great place to know a lot of people.

- Helping find your first job. Especially for undergrads, having the newly minted journalism degree (and the contacts I just mentioned) can be enough credibility to get you that first entry-level job. (After that, however, your career largely sinks or swims based on work performance and experience.)

- Stoking idealism. Graduates usually believe that journalism defends democracy and can change the world. You need confidence and a make-it-happen attitude to succeed in today’s challenging journalism environment, so that’s a good thing.

Journalism school is bad for:

- Creating understanding of how news really works. J-school can better prepare you for learning on the job later, but there’s no substitute for learning on the job.

- Teaching you about the broader world. You should travel, study many non-journalism areas and possibly even get a second degree in something you would like to cover. There are many sources to turn to for online news on any subject — if you’re not an authority bringing something special to the topic, you’ll get lost.

- Teaching ahead of the technology curve. A few schools, professors or classes do this better than others, but most are teaching a journalism ethos from at least a few years ago (when the professors were in the biz), from textbooks written a few years ago, on systems designed a few years ago. Students have to take responsibility for staying on top of the cutting edge themselves.

- Guaranteeing you will succeed as a journalist. A lot of bad journalists manage to graduate from J-schools and wash out of the news business later. The degree doesn’t matter if you don’t have work ethic, aggressiveness, initiative and common sense.