No where is the changing online landscape more apparent than in the newsrooms of the major daily newspapers across the country. With more competition for attention than ever before, reporters and editors are struggling to create a product that both adds value to the collective conversation and is financially sustainable.

The 2008 Annual Report on the State of Journalism, conducted by the Project for Journalism Excellence highlighted that last year, despite efforts to partner with web 2.0 companies, many news organizations struggled to grow in this online space.

Unlike some other popular Web sites, online news providers are not financially capitalizing on the growing digital audiences. Despite the increase in digital readership, the news sites seem to be stuck in the old delivery model common with traditional print outlets.

AOL Executive Ted Leonsis recently published a 10 Point Plan to Reinvent The Newspaper Business. His first point is for newspapers executives to “get out of the newspaper business,” rather those execs “should turn over the reigns to young execs, women and people with diverse backgrounds, who are web based and new consumer savvy and will NOT be wed and enamored with the print-based delivery system of the past.”

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Unless you are the Lone Ranger, Rambo or Superman, you have to work with others to get the hard things done. And the harder the thing is you need to accomplish, the more important collaboration becomes. Fortunately for today’s executive, there are some great new Web2.0 tools that can help you connect with others.

Popular social networking tools include LinkedIn, Plaxo, Spock, SecondLife and Facebook. The following are some personal thoughts/perspectives based on how I use those tools:

LinkedIn.com is good for keeping up with the careers of friends and associates. It has also been of use in helping me introduce myself to others since I can connect to a new associate via LinkedIn and they can see my extended profile. Conversely it helps me learn a bit more about who I might be meeting with so I frequently check LinkedIn before I meet with someone new. If an executive was only going to pick one online social networking site to use I would recommend this one.

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Last week, San Francisco hosted the fourth annual Web 2.0 Summit. The event wrapped up on Friday and with over 100 featured speakers, from Tim O’Reilly to ebay CEO Meg Whitman, there was a lot of related news coverage. For a full report on what’s become a yearly west coast tradition, visit the news and coverage section on the event website.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made waves when he announced that Microsoft plans to purchase 20 web companies a year for the next five years, pledging to spend between $50 million and $1 billion on each of the prospective companies.

“Those will be good acquisitions, and they’re important to us,” Ballmer said. “And they’re of strategic importance.”

Open source developers may also be on the table, according to Ballmer. “We will buy smaller companies. We will buy smaller companies that make some use of open source software,” he said, according to CNET. “We don’t want to discourage people who would talk with us just because they do some open source.” Ballmer even went so far as to offered his email address for any interested developers looking to sell.

Here’s a clip of the Ballmer interview from the Web 2.0 Summit:

Click To Play

Ted Leonsis and Om Malik, featured speakers at the summit, will also be at the New New Internet’s Web 2.0 event, this November 1st. While San Francisco’s Web 2.0 Summit was mainly focused on the technology behind many of the popular web 2.0 applications, the New New Internet’s conference will focus on the implication for business and government.

Leonsis, Vice Chairman of AOL, will be the featured morning keynote while Malik, founder and Chief Blogger of GigaOm, will be the featured afternoon keynote speaker. Like the Web 2.0 Summit event, the November 1st event will host a number of speakers and exhibitors who are at the forefront of the web.

If you missed the event in San Francisco, and will be on the east coast on November 1st, it’s not too late to register for this region’s major annual web conference.

Other interesting notes from the Web 2.0 Summit:

News Corp’s Robert Murdoch calls Google both a “threat and a friend” and Facebook “cool, but not that cool.”

Facebook CEO predicts he’ll double his workforce over the next year alone;

AT&T plans to participate in a government auction of the 700-megahertz band that will be available after broadcast television networks switch to digital from analog in 2009.

If you read the popular blog, Techcrunch you know that last Thursday a group of fifteen “industry luminaries” took part in a highly confidential meeting at Google’s Mountain View, CA offices. According to three of those in attendance, Google plans to launch a new set of APIs in early November in an effort to give programmers the ability to cultivate all of the social graph data through gmail, Orkut (Google’s social networking site) google talk, igoogle, and every other addictive Google product.

The API rumors are likely to pull back the Google Curtain as developers begin to create third-part applications in much the same way that Facebook allows on its social networking pages.

Not be out done, Microsoft yesterday announced their intentions to buy a minority stake in Facebook, now valued at over $10 billion, in what the Wall Street Journal described as a “sign of new urgency.”

Microsoft has long been seen as being outpaced by Google’s robust advertising platform that accounted for a vast majority of its over $7.5 billion in revenue in the first two quarters of this year alone. Microsoft likely sees Facebook as an opportunity to expand its own advertising platform by tapping into the 40 billion Facebook page views per month.

Critics point out that unlike search engine advertising, where users are looking for products or services, Facebook users are more interested in connecting with other users, and thus less receptive to ads.

Though Google, too, has expressed recent interest in acquiring at least a minority stake in Facebook. And, with the recent $1.6 billion purchase of Youtube, Google’s isn’t a company known to just kick the tires. Stay tuned and keep eye on the developers’ reaction to Google’s new APIs due out during early November.