Traditional news outlets may be gasping for air amid some of the toughest times their industry has ever seen – but some innovative journalists in the space are confronting the challenge head on with the help of social media. Can blogs and social networks provide the necessary oxygen to help embattled media outlets thrive?

360i interviewed Scott Kleinberg, Senior News Editor at RedEye Chicago – the Tribune daily aimed at young Chicago urbanites – to learn more about the interplay between social media and journalism. Kleinberg’s publication embraces what it calls “print media 2.0” to the fullest, utilizing a popular Twitter feed, several blogs and even a proprietary Facebook app called RedEye Five on Five, which pits sports fans against a panel of RedEye columnists.

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I would be violating the rules of gaming journalism, it seems, if I didn’t write something about OnLive this week. The gaming-on-demand service was the belle of the ball at this year’s Game Developers Conference, and has yielded a crop of speculative articles about the future of console gaming as well as many, many bad headline puns (”OnLive is OnCrack,” and “OnLive is UnLikely” are some choice selections).The service is demoed here, but for those who don’t click through — OnLive is a small, 1MB plugin for your Mac or PC, or a small hardware box for your television, that promises to allow you to play top-end PC games on your entry-level computer, rather than dropping $2,500 on a gaming rig. It works by “cloud processing,” which essentially means that the heavy lifting of running the game is done server-side, and the video is streamed to your computer or TV through your broadband connection. In theory, the only limitation on what games your system can support is the speed of your connection. Read the full article