Spotted: Real-life “media giraffes.” Seated around me at a dinner table, at a conference in search of the soul of the new media.
Wednesday June 28
9:14 p.m.
What happens when new media types sit together at dinner, at a convention on the future of journalism?
First of all, we realize we don’t need to shell out several bucks for a drink at the cash bar, if bottles of California red and chardonnay are at the table. New, old — reporters are reporters, after all.
Though we’re not all reporters anymore.
The table at which I end up, here on the UMass Amherst campus, includes a new-media heavy from the Knight Foundation (I didn’t mention they’d turned the Independent down for money; I’m determined to keep similarly mum with representatives from other foundations that dissed us); a new-media journalism professor from American University; an under-30-something from the Pioneer Valley who’s been living in Paris and editing a blog on global newsrooms. His name’s John Burke. He speaks from firsthand experience about the reality that panics newspaper publishers as well as plenty of beat reporters stuck in mainstream old-media newsrooms: People his age will not read newspapers. Ever. They get their news online. (He does read the hard-copy version of The Economist on the Metro.)
The most interesting avatar of the new breed sits to my right: Fabrice Florin, a Mill Valley, California, Apple refugee of Romanian and French lineage. He left Apple because the company wasn’t interested in producing content, only in delivering it. Florin is in the first year of developing a not-for-profit site called NewsTrust. His site enlists citizens to rate news reported by conventional media outlets and blogs alike; Florin’s staff rates the raters to weight the total score. At least that what it sounds like based on his description.
I think he’s on to something. With the avalanche of information about the country and the world available on the web (though not so much local news; that’s another story), readers in coming years won’t need more national and international news sources. They’ll need to know what information to trust. The potential is huge for, say, Google to get help in deciding which news to filter to millions of users. Florin’s speaking more about his project at a panel tomorrow; I hope I can make it.
There is another true reporter reporter here at the table. She’s a young British woman wearing pearls, by the name of Jemima Kiss. She writes for online news outlets back home, while building her own blog — for which, it becomes clear, she’ll be reporting on dinner. Early on in our conversations at the table, as we exchange cards and tell our stories, she has her Apple laptop out. (Conference organizers have made wireless Internet access available to all of us who want to blog the event.) Kiss fiddles with her IPod in anticipation of speakers’ remarks to come later in the dinner.
Finally, she produces a digital camera and shoots our pictures as we kibbitz and fress. Then I know it’s OK to slip my own Nikon from my pocket and take my own pix. No one seems to mind; Kiss offers an all’s‑fair-in-the-blogosphere smile. Florin does remark how journalists have become the story.
I see his point. But I beg to differ. I think the democratizing effect of the wireless media age can have the opposite effect. Ratings-driven corporate media have made celebrity journalists the story, at the expense of reporting. At least when it comes to local journalism, my money and my hopes rest in the new media allowing more journalists to cover local news again, leaving ourselves out of the story. (Except, I guess, when we blog — like at this conference.)
After dessert, a panel commences. Helen Thomas offers some remarks again (see the item below), along the same theme as her earlier talk. “We have lost our honesty, our sense of compassion for our fellow man,” she says. “The feds can walk into your home without warning.” Our e‑mails are monitored, our phones tapped without court order. “Who are we? And what have we become, as the fear card has been played so well?”
Laptops are out at various tables, along with the occasional mike. Earlier I saw a videocamera; some of these conference events are being streamed live.
The panel includes, besides Thomas, MSM types from the Globe, the Springfield Republican, as well as academics. They offer the kind of remarks about media that I love to read in newspapers and magazines and Poynter and Knight foundation reports, about the future of newspapers, about the burning issues confronting journalism, the open question of who’ll pay for high-quality investigative reporting.
“My opinion isn’t worth two cents compared to the straight story, when people make up their own minds — ¬¶”
On Jon Stewart: “Is that journalism? Or is it not?”
“By God, if it can’t be about verifiable facts, we’re gonna waste three days — ¬¶”
Others speak about how their dailies are using the web to promote “connectivity” in their communities and promote democracy.
Good job! One of the speakers, NYU’s Jay Rosen, is one of my absolute favorite commentators on the new media; his PressThink site inspired me to launch the Independent last year.
I care deeply about all this stuff. I think about it everyday. I read about it everyday.
In fact, I’ve read all this stuff before.
So I notice something. The discussion is a background soundtrack. I’m typing away and staring at my screen. So are most of the laptoppers (including Connecticut’s resident Internet guru, Aldon Hynes, who’s here to sit on a Friday panel).
I realize how wifi has transformed the way we cover events like these. I’ve always found conferences and panels boring. Even when the topic fascinates me —” like this one. Even when I normally devour articles by and about the speakers —” as in this case. I just find this kind of discussion easier and quicker to digest in written form.
So while the talking proceeds, I’m researching Florin and Kiss and Burke, and their work, on the web.
I discover that Florin’s experiment in citizen ratings of news isn’t publicly available yet. I show him the page that pops on my screen: It’s only a description of the project, not the project itself. He gives me a private test address to access the project itself.
May I show it to the Independent’s readers? I ask him. (Meanwhile, he’s taking copious notes on the speeches, the old-fashioned way: pen on legal-sized pad. A better conference-goer than I!)
“How much traffic do you get?” he responds.
We’re small enough for his pilot project to handle the traffic. He gives us the OK. So: Click here. Check out his project. Try it out. And post a comment below about what you think of it.
- * * *
6:43 p.m.
Recognize this woman? She’s consorting with a bunch of media “giraffes” — adding some old-media wisdom to a search for the soul of the new.
In case you didn’t know, she’s Helen Thomas, the longest-running act in the White House press corps. She’s up here at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst to kick off a five-day conference organized by the “Media Giraffe Project.”
The conference is bringing together journalists from all over who are trying to figure out how news will be delivered in the 21st century, and how to do it well. Many of us already publish completely online. (That’s why I’m here; trying to figure out how this “hyperlocal news website,” the New Haven Independent, fits into the mix.) People from old mainstream media like the Boston Globe and the Oregonian are here too.
From the look of the schedule of panels, it’s clear that this question about the future is more than a matter of technology. It’s about whether we journalists, whether “citizen journalists” or more traditional newsroom ink-stained wretches, are going to matter. And how to matter. Some sample discussion titles: “How Will Journalism Stay Relevant? To Whom? In What Forum?” “Innovate, Die or Be Sold.” “Quality: How Do You Measure It?” “Can Free Media Sustain Democracy?”
Before the opening dinner, Helen Thomas spoke about her new book, about her decades at the White House, and about how she upset the Bush administration so much that it eventually banished her from her perch asking the opening question at press conferences. (She wants to know why we’re in Iraq.)
I think Thomas was an inspired choice to start the conference rolling. Sixty years on the D.C. beat, curmudgeonly, integrity and gumption intact — she’s the kind of model we “new media” know-it-alls need to remember. For all the exciting new avenues open to us through blogs and citizen posts and interactivity and multi-media feeds, our mission begins and ends with an old-fashioned mission of ferreting out facts and challenging those in power.
For all the choices in the modern media constellation, there seems to be less of that basic shoe-leather fact-gathering and public official button-holing than ever. Especially in local communities where media monopolies have closed down newsrooms and merged and slashed staffs.
“How do you win back the people?” Thomas asked during her opening remarks. “The best way is to find out the truth and not let anybody stop you.”
Them’s fightin’ words. Now on to dinner and more Helen Thomas….