EVENT REPORT: Columbia-Hearst Journalism Panel: "Changing Media Landscape 2008"

by Greg Bocquet

NEW YORK CITY, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2008--At a Columbia Journalism School panel tonight, Jacob Weisberg, chairman of Slate, put the tension between “old” and “new” media most starkly.

“New media and the traditional media are diverging rapidly after a period of peaceful coexistence,” he said. “We are moving into a conflict model.”

In this new model, whose development will only be accelerated by current economic conditions, all agreed that what matters most is the two-way relationship between the news organization and its audience.

Trying to figure out economic models was just one of the themes dicussed at the annual "Changing Media Landscape, 2008" panel hosted by Columbia Journalism School and the Hearst Foundation. More than 250 students, professional journalists and bloggers gathered at Columbia to listen to a group of media influencers offer their take on the changes in journalism in a discussion moderated by Sree Sreenivasan, who runs the school's new media program.

Erica Smith, a graphic designer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (and creator of the Paper Cuts blog which has tracked more than 13,000 newspaper layoffs this year) emphasized the importance of having a conversation with the readership, an idea echoed by Adriano Farano, executive editor of the multilingual pan-Europe site CafeBabel.com.

“The internet is more and more the mirror of our own society,” Farano said. “We are looking for things on the web that we do in the real world, like establishing communities.”

Sewell Chan, editor of the New York Times’ City Room blog, emphasized the need to establish trust with readers, which can be accomplished in three ways: maintaining a high standard of reporting, serving as reliable aggregators of content produced outside the organization, and creating an environment where readers can build on the trust of peers in their social networks.

David Cohn, a media entrepreneur and Columbia grad who started the spot.us platform for participatory journalism, has developed a framework for citizen journalism that moves the business model from advertising to user donations to fund freelance work. He sees this as a golden age for innovation.

“Finally, experimentation is being embraced,” he said. “We should think of it as research and development; journalism will survive on the shoulders of its failures.”

Chan provided the discussion’s strongest caveat, insisting that although journalism is increasingly democratic, it is by no means representative. Some groups, such as cyclists or foodies (see 333,000 Google hits for “chocolate covered bacon”) are over-represented, while underrepresented groups tend to include immigrants and people who depend on public services.

If we take Weisberg at his word, that “print won’t go away, but many newspapers and magazines will,” we must be mindful that the result be as inclusive as possible, especially for places in the world without bandwidth. Sites like Global Voices Online are moving in this direction.

Takeaways:

• How do you create a healthy online conversation? Weisberg has a suggestion: Kick out all the men. (see Slate’s XX Factor blog.)
  
• The barriers to entry have come down, and people can now build a website on their own as filmmakers making their first independent film. Dave Cohn’s advice: start small, start cheap. Community trumps technology every time.
  
• Microsites, tools, feeds: Friendfeed brings together Facebook and Twitter in one place (Smith), and Twitter as a fundraising tool (Cohn). Also see Smith's collection of how Twitter is used in newsrooms.
  Sewell Chan on the future: we are all becoming feeds in some way.

NOTE: You can watch a recording of the panel at http://mogulus.com/columbiajournalism

Post your comments below, please.

From left: Sewell Chan, David Cohn, Adriano Farano, Erica Smith, Jacob Weisberg

Other items about "Changing Media Landscape 2008"

• Marci Alboher's "Shifting Careers" column for NYTimes.com: "Keeping Up, When Your Industry Changes"
• Adriano Farano's report for CafeBabel
  

NOTE: Also see a similar panel, about the future of journalism, held at The Christian Science Monitor in Boston to mark the paper's centennial. Among the speakers were three with Columbia connections. Douglas Smith, who runs the J-school's Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program ; CSM editor John Yemma, who is in the Sulzberger Program as a participant; and Prof. Sree Sreenivasan.