There are moments of breathtaking clarity when you recognize an essential truth in a wildly alien context. For journalists, that truth typically has something to do with the words of Jack Knight, co-founder of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain (and, ultimately, of our partner, the Knight Foundation). In 1969, Knight described his company's mission movingly: "We seek to bestir the people into an awareness of their own condition, provide inspiration for their thoughts, and rouse them to pursue their true interests."

Som Nath Aryal is a radio journalist in Madanpokhara, in the Palpa district of central Nepal. He has built Radio Madanpokhara, a station that serves 37 rural communities. Here's how it works, and why it strikes me as so powerful.

We think and talk a lot here about the word "engagement" (see how big it is on our tag cloud?): How can social entrepreneurs use information to better engage people in and with their world? How does information drive action?

There was a terrific discussion around this question this week on Dowire's news-online group — focused not just on the questions above, but on the relationship between engagement and value, both economic and social. It's excerpted below, and well worth reading to the end. Your thoughts?

"Online news hasn't crossed over to citizens moving from talk to solving problems. Is there any good reason that news organizations shouldn't try to foster that?"

So, Pierre Omidyar, who founded eBay and then turned his attention to philanthropic investments, has surfaced as an executive for tech startup Peer News Inc., which runs a so far mostly under-the-radar service called Ginx.

Ginx appears to be a set of tools to help people better use Twitter, the social networking service that lets us send updates of 140 characters or less to a community of followers — and for us to receive corresponding "tweets" from whomever in Twitter's network we find interesting.

I'll admit that, personally, I have yet to find the deep magic in Twitter. It clearly has application as a sort of universal police-band radio — as its well-documented use by witnesses to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and last month's air crash in Buffalo indicate. That's why Sky News Online has just named a full-time Twitter "correspondent" to constantly troll the wire, as it were, for breaking news.

Some months ago, as we were birthing the concept that would become Ashoka's News & Knowledge Entrepreneurs program, I came across Howell Raines' monthly media column in the business magazine Portfolio. Raines, former executive editor of The New York Times, has spent the years since his departure publicly grappling with a Big Media world that no longer makes sense to Big Media, if to anyone.

Here, he opined on speculation that Rupert Murdoch, having swallowed whole The Wall Street Journal, would "spend whatever it takes to undermine the Times>' standing as America's leading general-interest newspaper." Having successfully emasculated the Grey Lady, Murdoch would then buy it.

The prospect concerned Raines–as it should, he argued, every able-bodied news professional. "There is no more important question in journalism," he argued, "than the future of the Times." 

The other shoe has finally dropped in Zell-land: Tribune Company, which investor Sam Zell took over just a year ago, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The filing, made at the behest of Tribune's understandably jittery debtors, should surprise no one — least of all readers of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun and other Tribune papers whose editorial gutting has been accelerated in the last few months.

But it does underscore the question, which I pondered last month with Fortune writer Marc Gunther: As the business model for traditional journalism is proven (literally) bankrupt, how will people get news that is authoritative, responsible, and, y'know, worth reading? How will be be connected to decisions that matter? How will we keep track of our world?