I'm taking a class at the university about societal change. It's taught in the business school and a chief aim is for marketers to stay on top of change so they can keep selling products to an ever-morphing audience.

The universe is divided into spheres -- the infosphere, the sociosphere, the psychosphere, the technosphere, the bio/power-sphere.

My group project was on the infosphere and how radically it's changing. No news there -- look at your Good Morning Newspaper as it struggles with staff cutbacks and leveraged ambitions.

But that's not the subject of this blog post. Instead, let me tell you about a connection I share with the professor, Edward Forrest, over iPhone apps that deliver news.

Snowbird Resort, outside Salt Lake City: 135 women gather to examine the state of journalism and their role in its survival. JAWS is Journalism & Women Symposium begun in 1985. Members include three who sued the New York Times in the 1970s over unequal treatment of women journalists.
The only other time I passed through Utah was in a green VW stationwagon, driving across country with a college friend. We stopped by a roadside stand and bought the juiciest, most luscious peaches I ever ate, before and since.

But this is a different Utah. Women journalists are gathered at the Snowbird resort at 8,000 feet in the mountains outside of Salt Lake City for an annual conference and to celebrate 25 years of their group's existence -- all at a time when journalism, at least in its traditional forms, is lurching precariously, while the new forms are not yet up on steady legs. They are called the Journalism & Women Symposium.

newsy.com: Here's a site designed to cope with the fragmentation and polarization of news sources: News from multiple points of view.

I'm taking a class in the business school at UAA that is an eye-opener. The professor is Ed Forrest and the class is CHANGE. He doesn't call it that, but I do. The official title is Current Marketing Issues Seminar. He was expecting 20, but got 76 enrollees, and moved the class into an amphitheatre lecture hall. Essentially, it's a big-picture look at societal change with the intent of explaining to marketers how to deal. He's divided the world into spheres: the new economy, the technosphere, the infosphere, the psychosphere, the bio/power sphere and, oh yes, THE FUTURE.

Goodbye, LoudounExtra.com: While newspapers are ditching their hyperlocal efforts, large portal sites like AOL and MSNBC.com are buying them. This image is what the LoudounExtra looked like today. It will be gone in a month.Just a few hours ago, the Washington Post announced it was shuttering its intensively local community news site, LoudounExtra.com because, as spokesperson Kris Coratti put it, "We found that our experiment...was not a sustainable model."

Off The Chain Collecctive:: Want to learn how to fix your own bike and save some money? That's what this local bike organization offers.This is a thumb's-up to the subject of an article appearing in Monday's Anchorage Daily News about the Off The Chain Bicycle Cooperative by Elizabeth Bluemink.

I'm a recreational rider in Anchorage who wishes she knew more about fixing her own bike. Over the years I've noticed some great opportunities -- workshops by the Alaska Dirt Divas or REI on bike maintenance. These are wonderful, but frankly, I've failed to fit these events into my schedule. Now, with the bike cooperative, I know there is a bigger window to accomplish my goal of learning bike maintenance.

Larry King and Ashton Kurcher: This interview is from April, when Kurcher hit his 1,000,000 followers on Twitter. King joined Twitter: @kingsthings.

This is a UStream video of Ashton Kurcher interviewing Larry King on the new media revolution. Kurcher took Twitter questions in real time and Larry answered - for about 10 minutes. They plan an hour-long show together in the future.

Most interesting thing to me was King's comments about newspapers and the information revolution. The Twitter question came as: What do you miss the most about the way the news used to be done, and what to you like the most about the new way?

What happens when a place loses its newspaper?

That question popped up in a story in the Economist, loaded to my iPhone with an app that delivers print content to mobiles. All while I waited for my Taco King takeout.

On the way home, I read parts of the story to my husband as he drove.

As it declined, the Echo withdrew from its office in the middle of town and trimmed its coverage of local affairs. By the end it was hardly an effective watchdog. “We used to nearly write the stories for the journalists,” says Richard Chattaway, a county councillor. Not surprisingly, the newspaper’s circulation more than halved between 2001 and 2008.