• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 17, 2009

That’s Steve Brill, of course. The former impresario of Content (a.k.a Brill’s Content), and now head of Journalism Online, and a guy who thinks long and hard about the underlying value of what we all consume via the media.

Actually, Brill was focused on one key aspect of content: journalistic content. More specifically, he’s telling the online publishing industry why it may be in jeopardy unless they fix some key problems.

“Despite all of your accomplishments, one byproduct of the new world you have helped to create has to be fixed, and has to be fixed now,” Brill said this morning during the opening keynote at OMMA Publish in New York. If not, he said, “solid, independent journalism,” the kind that society depends on for “acurate honest information that they need to make decisions, will simply disappear.”

Yikes. Aside from undermining my own profession, that’s not a very good thing for society overall. Just my opinion. But here’s some more of Brill’s.

“The Internet has undermined that kind of model for journalism, and notice, I said journalism, not content,” Brill said, emphasizing the importance of objective, news reporting content.

He noted that it’s critical for those who consume journalism to “pay something for it.” It’s important, he said, because it “ensures an enterprise culture in which content has value for something that surrounds advertising.”

That’s key, he said, because in the entire history of the world, there is no example of a “quality journalism organization” that depended on advertising alone. The “closest historical artifact,” he said, was the Big 3 broadcast networks, but even they had a virtual monopoly in their heyday, and their news programming was actually a “loss leader” for the rest of their profitable programming.

So what is Journalism Online? Well, it sounds a bit like the vision that Brill had back at Brill’s Content, one in which he would help aggregate quality journalism â€" from newspaper and magazine publishers â€" and offer them in a centralized place for consumers to access online, and for a fee.

He said he would split the revenues with publishers.

Another key element of Journalism Online will be market intelligence. Brill vowed to provide publishers in his network with reports showing them what economic models work best.

He noted their currently is a big debate between “micro payments” and “subscription” models.

“My hunch is that subscriptions will work better,” Brill said, citing the “hassle” factor of micro payments.

“The point is, who knows,” Brill added. “Our affiliates will know, because we will be giving them those reports.”