The journalism world is catching up to NewAssignment.Net. It’s impossible to avoid that conclusion today if you follow the news industry site, Romenesko. (We do.)

Michael Hirschorn’s article in the Atlantic is the latest in what appears to be a series on how to save newspapers. His advice: “stop printing.”

“With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers.”

His suggestion sounds eerily familiar to what we at Assignment.Net are attempting— with the caveat that we’re not a commercial site.

Hirschorn’s piece is fascinating and definitely worth reading. He revisits the EPIC 2014 video, which I had forgotten about. The video, which predicts the demise of the traditional journalistic organizations and the rise of social networks, aggregators and citizen journalists shocked many in the business when it was first released in late 2004. I must have had a dozen colleagues e-mail it to me at the time, with the same panicked “have you seen this?” subject line.

What’s amazing, says Hirschorn, is how much of the futuristic video has come true, or is on its way to becoming true.

“As a piece of pop futurism, EPIC 2014 is both brilliant and brilliantly self-subverting (at once inevitable and preposterous). But what’s remarkable is how many of its ten-years-out predictions have already come true—if not materially, then de facto: the mass migration of everything to the Web, the explosion of blogging, the near-instant embrace of social media (see YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia), the growing sophistication of Google’s AdWords and AdSense (the latter soon to be extended to user-customized RSS file format and other feeds), the TiVo-ization of television, and on and on. Instead of buying Amazon, Google bought YouTube, an Evolving Personalized Information Construct that didn’t exist in 2004—GoogleTube instead of Googlezon. Thus does two-year-old futurism already seem hopelessly recherché.”

And in what can only be described as a major earthquake in journalistic circles, political editor John Harris and national political reporter Jim VandeHei announced today that they are leaving The Washington Post to work for a new politics Web site.

In its announcement, Allbritton says that the duo will work together with the group’s new newspaper, The Capitol Leader, to create “an unmatched, web-based, one-stop-shop for political news coverage.” They will try to challenge the traditional media for dominance in covering national politics and Congress.

For two of the nation’s top political journalists to decide to leave The Post and its award-winning Web operation is stunning. This is the time when all the major news operations are gearing up for the ’08 election cycle. Harris and VandeHei apparently think they can do it better elsewhere — on the Web. And they think innovation is more likely to come from outide the established news organizations. As Fishbowl DC put it: “The decision by both VandeHei and Harris is premised on the belief that the ‘old media’ way of doing things simply doesn’t work for political coverage.”

Used to be that when you got to The Washington Post you had gone as far as you could go. Now there’s another place: Self-invention on the Web.

Steve Fox worked as an editor at washingtonpost.com for 10 years.