Left to Right: Susan, Matt, Jeff, Nick, some lady’s head, Andrew
The Future of News – Panel discussion
If we accept that media will never return to its pre-Internet form, what lies ahead for news? How will we use current and future digital tools to craft and disseminate information? What lessons can publishers of all types learn from the news industry’s digital transition? A panel of media experts will discuss these topics and others in this forward-looking session.
Wouldn’t you know it, my recorder failed during this event. Below is what I could jot down. TOC will have a video up soon enough and I’ll embed it here. Some key topics mentioned by the panel members:
Andrew Nachison (We Media)
-Everyone is media, there is no more “the” media.
Jeff Jarvis (Buzzmachine.com)
-Books could have done what Google did, linkable, searchable, etc..
-Google has better technology than any newspaper.
-An online model has yet to be invented / discovered which will support an entire news industry
Nick Bilton (The New York Times R&D Labs)
-Google and Microsoft are not content providers, they aren’t good at it.
-NYT is working on “smart content” customization technologies to help readers parse out content of interest to them.
-NYT publishes over 600 articles per day.
-All we talk about is business models, business models, business models. Something has got to give.
Susan Mernit (People’s Software Company)
-Knight News is helping find the future.
-Some hyperlocal is working like Baristanet and WestSeattleBlog.
-trusted locals will report foreign affairs, no more costly foreign bureaus.
Matt Thompson (Reynolds Journalism Institute)
-Introduces the term “micropatronage” at least neither I nor Jeff Jarvis ever heard of it before.
-News sites must develop a community for micropatronage to work, like the examples Susan gave.
Key Take Aways:
- Everyone had an idea of what the future might look like, but there wasn’t anything solid mentioned.
- Susan brought up two great examples of hyperlocal working, but overall I’d say hyperlocal has been a disaster.
- NYT is dumping lots of resources into making their product viable. If it doesn’t work out for them, then the industry needs to re-evaluate their very existence. Deep right?
- Developing communities around news sites to drive revenue is great and can take on many forms. Websites like Kottke.org for example that use The Deck are leveraging their community for greater ad revenues.
- Massive newspaper businesses are gone forever.
- News will always be waiting for someone to report it.
Afterwards:
While waiting to speak with Matt Thompson I bumped into Igor Smirnoff, Director of Strategic Development for PressDisplay.com who showed me a working Readius!
Still waiting I bumped into Josh Benton from NiemanLab. He said, “It’s nice to put a face to the URL” which I thought was funny as hell.
Finally got to speak with Matt. He was gracious and we spoke for about 20 min. about community and geotagging as news. Interesting content concepts but as far as getting run-of-the-mill small and medium size business to buy into that type of advertising, news organizations are going to have seriously step up their infrastructure and their sales team’s purpose, perhaps even make them paid consultants.
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