Welcome to the club, Lisa Williams told journalists at the Online News Association conference in Toronto. She describes herself as a technologist, not a journalist, and sees a wave of mainstream media journalists rolling her way at H2otown.info and placebloogger.com.

Her concentration in hyper-local news –- H2otown is Waterown, Mass. -– is one that traditional media are increasingly interested in. But her advice can work in other new-media areas, too.

Williams says it is not as easy to go hyper-local as it might seem.

The first hurdle, she said, is that the traditional value proposition for journalists just isn’t there in community news.

Williams says that technologists can get paid more than journalists, but that journalists also get compensated in social and cultural capital. Think the Pulitzer Prize. These rewards do not exist in hyper-local sites, so the value proposition will have to change to attract journalists -– or hyper-local sires will attract a different breed of person.

She asked, rhetorically, whether Woodward and Bernstein -- and journalists who aspire be the next Woodstein -- can survive in the suburbs. Much of the content on hyper-local site is not news, much is directed by the audience, not the journalists, and it is all about deep information in a very small area rather than a little information about subjects spanning the country or globe.

With the population having shifted for 50 years to become more suburban, can journalism shift its reward proposition so suburban coverage follows readerships?

Williams said that another change mainstream media will have to navigate in a technology-driven world is that nothing always works as it should. Newspapers, for example, that have published without a miss for more than a century -- through fire, flood and power failures -- will find that they are always battling to keep things up and running on a 24-hour basis. Web site repairs are like home repairs. They  are never finished and one fix always requires another. She says Web site maintenance and development is like shaving a yak. You don't know where to start or where you'll wind up.

Her message: "Get used to some failures. Failure is a perfectly reasonable result" of experimentation.

Conventional media -- big, deliberate and publicly traded -- do not traditionally suffer failure well.

"The experiments need to be small, cheap and safe," WIlliams said, and that can help traditional media survive a few failures on their way to some successes.

Williams proposed a similar strategy for individual journalists who want to update their skills.

"I try to stay away from a goal-oriented mentality," when trying to learn new things, she said. She starts with a tool that looks like it has applications and sees where it might lead.

A tool that does not seem to work well can be discarded, like any failed experiment, and she is off to a new idea. She subscribes to the idea that even just 15 minutes of training a day is worthwhile.

"Twitter is conquering the world 140 characters at a time," she said, in reference to a rapid-blogging tool that allows only short posts.

So, the advice from a technologist who sees journalists adopting her approach to content: Expect different rewards, learn from experimentation and make the change in a succession of rapid, little steps.