In T.H. White's "The Once and Future King," a telling of the Arthur legend, Merlin turns young Arthur (then known as "the Wart") into an ant. The Wart finds the ants to behave with an unsurprisingly hive-mind mentality. They speak in what we'd recognize as binary. Ants live a life of work. Their binary language consists of two signals: "Done" and "Not Done." Through these signals, they can inform each other of work tasks, and can form longer black-and-white phrases. The best known of these are the signs above every anthill tunnel entrance:

EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY

The society is enforced by centurion ants who can't think for themselves. The metaphor in this section of the story is about totalitarian societies and control. There is no room for discussion and analysis in the ant colony, only instructions and reports. You'll find other versions of this quote. Another variation on the theme is "That which is not prohibited is mandatory."And that brings us, tidily, to newsroom culture where it seems that adopting the culture of the Web is often forbidden... until it's compulsory.

Think of every major development in online information in the past decade, and you'll find that news's reaction to it was to forbid it first, then require it:

• Having news on a website instead of just promotional information
• Scooping your own newscast by publishing a story online first
• Blogging
• Putting video on YouTube
• Creating original pieces for the Web

And so on. It's all impossible until it's not. Then it's required. And here lies a serious flaw in newsroom judgment: we're not ants. How many times have you heard of the news manager who saw blogs or some other feature on another site and insisted the next day the station's site have that feature? We follow, and we do it with ease. We are told something is "Not Done," so we don't do it. Then, once it's "Done," we do it.

What's the problem with this? It doesn't take experimentation into account. In this binary language, we don't have the luxury of "Not Done, But Try It Out." We don't get the message that something is "Done, But May Not Be Right For Us."

The media reinvention requires the reinvention of this code. We have to experiment and be there first. Using simple and available technology, we can capture video and send it back to the station from a laptop. Still, the centurion ant will say "Not Broadcast Quality is Not Done." But we can look beyond the binary and recognize that the Web is not TV, and what we can produce quickly and cheaply is "Done Enough."

We heard how reporters and anchors didn't have time to blog. Then, suddenly, it was a job requirement. Except most of the blogs are unfocused and not strategic. They are "Done," but done poorly indeed. Blogging is more than writing what you had for breakfast; it is conversing in the language of the Web. (Which, though binary, is able to process enough ones and zeros to add shades of meaning.)

The ants of "The Once and Future King" know of food and war. Newsrooms know of newscasts and think they're at war with other TV newsrooms. Our competition has changed. It's not enough to have the best TV website in town. You'll get creamed. You need to think outside the hive and onto the full, local Web.

That's where the media reinvention gets Done.