Cynthia Webb at washingtonpost.com reports “In the thick of a historic and obsessively watched Election Day, bloggers shook up the mainstream media by providing an early look at election exit polls, proving once and for all their influence not only in the coverage of politics but perhaps in the electoral process itself.” (registration required)

Meantime, Media Center Director Andrew Nachison is quoted in a Baltimore Sun article on the same topic (registration required):

“‘I think mainstream media should feel threatened,’ said Andrew Nachison, director of the Media Center, a Reston, Va.-based think tank. ‘What we’re seeing is ordinary citizens exerting a new level of power to participate in political discourse in a way that was never available to them before.’”

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The away teams are still hard at work. Here’s a summary, from our perspective, of what happened last month in Newport Beach. It boils down to this: Technology is driving or enabling profound changes in how individuals access, assess and respond to information. These changes, and emerging technologies that will propel them further, are visible now.
Read more

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In a few moments we’ll be conducting a a webcast to review what we learned in Newport Beach, the SIMM simultaneous media consumption study we released to the public this morning, and where we’re going with all this.

Comments and additional discussion are always welcome.

The most important outcome of MediaMorphosis was the initiation of a cross-sector network of professionals and organizations. The volunteer away teams are one piece of that network. We’ve also been urged to create a Media Center circle of friends to enable this new network to grow and accomplish something - and we’re working on that now. On a more formal level we’re communicating with a group of companies most committed to supporting The Media Center and tapping into our network of researchers, consultants, thinkers and industry leaders - so we can better lead and enble innovation for a better informed society.

We knew the smart people we gathered in Newport Beach would come up with a lot of ideas. We expected some would be keepers and some wouldn’t. We wanted more than a pile of ideas or hints at where we might go next: we wanted to mine those ideas and extract from them some real opportunities for action. So now we’re mining. The away teams are digging deeper into the MediaMorphosis brainshare, and we want to open this conversation to as many informed contributors as we can manage. If you’d like to join and work with one of our away teams, simply send a note, naming the team you’d like to join, to: morph@mediacenter.org.

One again, the teams are:

- Team Biz - focused on disruptions to media business models.
- Team Ops - focused on operational, workflow and technical adjustments necessary for media organizations.
- Team Change: focused on managing internal expectations, culture and leadership challenges in the disrupted media environment.

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Last week, we launched Morph, a real-time conference blog for the Mediamorphosis conference sponsored by the American Press Institute.
Ezra Klein, Britta Gustafson, and Mary Hodder worked with me on covering the discussions; we also involved folks like JD Lasica and Jon Dube to comment remotely.

The blog launched Wednesday; but Thursday afternoon it had more than 20 posts on it, and by Friday, it had been picked up and commented on by Jeff Jarvis, , Steve Yelvington and others, thanks in part to being Feed of the Day on Feedster for March 11th.

By Friday morning, 48 hours after it launched, about 15% of the conference participants had posted messages or comments on the blog. A week after launch, posts and comments are still appearing, albeit in a slowed-down fashion. Although there was much discussion at the conference of blogs vs. media (yawn), the conference blog itself served as a viral tool and flashpoint for discussions, even for the very people questioning the credibility of the blogging platform.

The blog offered an interactive, transparent discussion that complemented the real time conference sessions. Most importantly, the blog provided both an independent view of what was happening, from the fresh perspectives of Mary, Britta and Ezra, as well as enabling commentary on the proceedings from those involved. The content creation at the conference mirrored what happens in the blogging world–citizen journalists posted their independent views even as professional offered their comments and stories.

At a conference, where many of the people were on the far side of 40 and frequently invoking projects they did in 1996 or 1998, it was great to see how everyone sought out the perspectives of Ezra, Mary and Britta, three of the youngest people in the room. I was incredibly proud of them and impressed and fascinated by the telling observations they had

I was also amused that at a conference where some participants were arguing about blogging vs “traditional media”, the blog quickly became a central flash point and key tool for the discussion.

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This morning first thing, this State of the Media report was posted on a few blogs. I started reading through the sections, which cover newspapers, online, local/cable/network TV, magazines, radio and ethnic/alternative media. It was put together by Columbia’s JSchool (and a few other folks) and funded by Pew. NPR was on it by around 11am, with Talk of the Nation. One caller noted his experience with news, where he goes to blogs first, because he feels they filter traditional news better, and their follows their links to those articles recommended. Audio link here.

Dan Gillmor noted Howard Kurtz’ coverage of the report:

Imagine a business that is steadily losing customers, shrinking its work force, cutting back on services and mistrusted by much of the public.

That is a snapshot of the news business in 2004.

The report is pretty dismal, but it does hold some hope for online media, where 2/3 of the 150 million people in the US go for news. Though you should note that online news sites are heavily dependent on paper papers for content.

If people increasingly substitute the Web for their old media before a robust economic model for the Web evolves, the economic effect could be devastating for journalism. Companies might begin to cut back significantly on their newsgathering abilities, as audiences abandon profitable old platforms in favor of less profitable new ones. The net in this case might weaken, not strengthen, the economic vitality of news organizations and the quality of American journalism.

Robin Sloan at Poytner also blogged it here.

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Parts of Thursday morning’s session, “Disruption and disorientation”, and related links from the web.

“People don’t put obituary announcements on craigslist, they send them to the local newspaper. It’s not so much about the format of the newspaper, it’s about the community.”

GoogObits, a blog, takes obituaries from newspapers and “augments” them with google searches.

“While the media landscape is changing, the old models still apply. Point-to-point communication leads to a happy anarchic kingdom? But humans are very clumpy, clustery. The locus of the clumps is changing. Advertisers flock to those clumps. That’s the traditional media model.”

“Human nature is to cluster, human nature is also to fragment. If you go to Technorati, there’s very little at the top - it’s mostly fragmented.”

Weblogs and power laws, a post on a popular blog, elaborates on this pattern: there’s very few really popular blogs and many not popular blogs, with some in between:

Many systems and phenomena are distributed according to a power law distribution. A power law applies to a system when large is rare and small is common.

“Nobody outside of Metropolis cares about what goes into our newspaper. I don’t think there’s a business there. We could build around our strength - the strength of our community. We could build an economic future on the online.”

The Arcata Police Log, from the Arcata Eye Newspaper (”America’s most popular obscure small-town newspaper!”), is somewhat popular among bloggers. It has items like:

Sunday, February 22 1:08 a.m. One of the party favors at an east 15th Street wing-ding was a punch in the face, which broke a tooth.

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The Mediamorphosis conference flashblog started on February 26th, then a few more posts dribbled, until the conference was just beginning, and then it exploded. Lots of other bloggers and readers outside the conference started paying attention to the blog, which had posts from some invited bloggers as well as lots of audience members. At the end of the Conference, Susan Mernit noted that she wished she’d fought more to just get everyone on the blog in advance, instead of waiting for those in the room to ask for a login.

People who hadn’t seen blog conversations before got to see it happen in front of them. Some walked up late in the conference and noted that they were surprised by what was happening around them, online, on the screen. Disconcerting, but they saw it. It’s something I’ve been watching and participating in for a while, sometimes around an event like this, but often just day to day, as people converse online, each on their own blogs, in each other’s comments, in email and with IM, in real time, about a topic or news event. These conversations are alive, but hard to see if you aren’t in them (tools are in the works to see them, as demoed by Feedster and Technorati at the conference), though you can follow them somewhat because many blog posts link to other posts in the conversation. But not always, and of course, comments can’t be linked or verified, but they are part of this discussion too and so there is more evaluating of trust with them, but still, they are considered. Sometimes, you can go to a site like Technorati to look up a URL of say, an article to see who is talking about it, to find the common conversation, though comments aren’t linked to there either.

Anyway, the great thing about the Mediamorphosis conference was that it was an opportunity to show these conversations, show how and who and where people are in the middle of them. The room was set up UN style, and the vast majority had laptops, occasionally reading the blog, which was commenting often on the panel in front, the moderator walking in the middle, and what was on screen. As these posts went out on the blog, other bloggers not at the conference would take quotes and comment, riff, either on their blogs or the conference blog. At the conference, we would see them, and post them up on the screen behind the speakers, and at one point, Dale Peskin stopped the discussion to note JD Lasica’s comments (he was not there but was reading our posts hot off the grill) about a current panelist’s remarks. While this may be steered the conference into the blog or no blog discussion even further, it did make the point (and certainly seemed to take things further than the ONA conference last November). Other times, the blog was put up on screen by the AV guys (who by the way, did an outstanding job of juggling all that hardware, and coordinating lots of interesting stuff, though the hotel wifi left a lot to be desired…) and panelists would turn around to look at comments about what was happening in the room.

It was a demonstration of these conversations, of multiple channels of dialog, all on the same topic, more orderly in the sense that not everyone was talking at once. Except in a way, the conversations were happening all around rapidly, we were engulfed in lots of silent talking, while one actual speaker at a time spoke up front. It may sound confusing, but it was a reflection of what happens on the internet everyday, across blogs, about a million different topics and news articles, people and events. It’s live and it’s happening, and it is apart of the media business, whether big media wants it or not, is offended or embraces it. There is no squelching it.

Instead of talking about citizen media, we showed it, no matter how crude the tools for tracking and making this media. A lot of those attending are busy people; they may not have time to spend finding these blog conversations, though as tools evolve, they will be able to find them faster and more explicitly, but the key is, it was shown (not told) for those who had little or no experience with it. And the fact that a flashblog got the job done, that people outside the conference dove in was great. It may have been unstructured, messy, in need of editing, disagreeable, not always understandable if you weren’t in the room, occasionally wrong though iterated to correction, but it was authentic, it reflected what people thought, it was a discussion with opposing views and ideas, and was reflective of this new kind of bottom up media.

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I truly valued the opportunity to commune with the impressive group at the retreat, but I offer a bit of constructive criticism for any next round. The advertised breakthrough thinking never materialized because the discussions were stuck at too high a level. The three propositions were, in fact, part of a single given, which we could have stipulated and moved on to discuss real solutions to the complicated questions we all face. Was it a conference on culture, content or new technology? It was all of the above, but the themes were all tossed into a stew that left many of us feeling as if we had dined on a meal of leftovers from seven years ago. We cannot — collectively or individually — be as clueless as we appeared to be in the various sessions. Everyone in the room no doubt has a project now in the works that addresses some or many of the challenges we face. Yet the discussion never drew those out. Maybe next time. My personal view is that the Greenfield opening, although entertaining (for the improv), went zooming back to the future with the very tired premise that old media is hopelessly lost in the new world. Fact is we have all been living, and maturing, in this new world for a while. Much progress has been made, even by the “old” media. There’s no disputing that much remains to be done, but we’re all digging in — with confidence, not high anxiety. Those at the conference from outside the media business might have been left with quite the opposite impression.

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Marta Buscaglia wrote, “The dialog is started. Now we have to move forward. … What should our next steps be?”

Tim Porter wrote earlier: “Anyone want to start a we-news service?”

Last year Rusty Foster (founder of Kuro5hin), Matt Haughey (founder of Metafilter and proprietor of the PVR blog) and I were talking about starting a participatory news service, but got sidetracked by other projects. We planned to call it Open News Wire. Unlike other independent journalism efforts, such as IndyMedia, Open News Wire would not have a political agenda but rather serve as a source of independent news from grassroots contributors and from bloggers.

Such a project would require considerable time and effort to get it off the ground, but it could be done. Last I heard, Rusty was checking into obtaining funding for the endeavor from a journalism foundation, but I don’t think he got any bites. He estimated it would take $20,000 to get it off the ground.

With all the firepower at MediaMorphosis, it may be an idea worth reviving. Funding help, anyone? Part-time volunteer help? I can email the correspondence that Rusty and I had to anyone who is interested.

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This was posted as a comment, but it should be a post on its own.

Posted by Bill Gannon (bgannon at yahoo-inc dot com) at March 12, 2004 01:10 PM.

Random thoughts I’m just barely vain enough to share:

Nomenclature: So API wants to be known - so I was told on a break yesterday as “The Media Center.” Cool. Great. But whose values, views, needs, problems and issues has predominated here?

A question for all of us: What did we learn? How much of our experience and problems did we share? What’s the takeaways? How can we help The Media Center do a better job next time?

True that: A bad sign of this or any conference - I am completely caught up on my e-mail (and Vin Crosby’s latest article at OJR and more) and I’m not some blackberry boy here - I am usually the last to boot-up and read e-mail. A shame, really.

Constructive criticism: The UN general assembly style and set-up - which seemed so promising at registration (”I’m on Morphos!”) turned out to be meaningless. MEANINGLESS! Our colleague from Wired was dead on when she suggested the format ill served a group of our size and diversity given our media, backgrounds and problems we are all seeking to explore and resolve. The alternative is obvious here - an opening and closing big session with smaller breakouts panels and groups. Or use the teams to brainstorm ideas and seek to solve specific problems.

I missed cranky smart Jeff Jarvis here. I don’t agree with him on everything (and I sure wish Newhouse web sites were better) but he brings value to every “conversation” he participates in. And Vin Crosby and industrious Jon Dube and a few of the other usual suspects…

For a conference about news - content - technology - and change, etc., we have left far too many important topics out of the conversation. And right now we’re re-hashing (no new ideas or breakout discussion comments yet) our ideas and comments from yesterday rather than use this valuable time to explore RSS, FOAF, mobile issues, the semantic web and the role of search in news, the role of social networks in future content models,

And I disagree that Jeff Greenfield got us off to a good start. It was far too rooted in the now (meaning 18 months ago) and not enough in the future. He focused too much on a single tool and important topic and left way too much else along side the road.

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Peskin is kind of wrapping things up:

“We’ve got technology here, we’ve got media, and within media we’ve got a lot of variety. Not competing, but looking at things in very different ways.”

“Bringing people together…tap into the collective intellect…I think we’re getting somewhere.”

“We need to carry this conversation much further…continue pushing the dialog.”

“We’re here to help push companies in directions that ultimately create benefits for society.”

The real point of all this:

“We here in this room need to contiune the idea-sharing and brainstorming that we started. The point was not just to compile a bunch of random thoughts and big ideas…I really don’t want things to fester.”

“We need to turn ideas into an opportunity, then into an opportunity document, then into a business plan, then into a company.”

“We’re going to create away teams to formally continue the effort that started yesterday…Take on the technology & infrastructure issues, the society issues, the individual issues, internal leadership, operations & workflow.”

Then, he outlined the assignment for the volunteer away teams. It sounded eerily like homework. “It’s not intended to be a substantial time commitment,” of course.

“We don’t want the post-conference dissipation of ideas to happen.” On March 24th, there’s going to be a webcast conference call thing. Sounds like a good idea.

Susan reminds everyone that “the blog is a secondary place to talk.” Log in and post!

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Several people have wished Jeff Jarvis was here.
In his usual way, he’s captured some of the issues of the conference via a smart read:
An excerpt from his post—and the entirety is well worth reading:
“As an old friend and former colleague of mine said often, journalism is a trade, a craft — not an art or a religion (or even a profession). It’s easy to learn — and teach — the tricks of that trade and some of them would be helpful to bloggers who want to learn them (e.g., how to avoid libel suits, how to get a congressman to return to call, how to file Freedom of Information requests, how to write a gonzo head…). On the same count, you have to learn how to blog (which you teach yourself and your public teaches you as you find your voice); Halley is teaching some old dogs new blogging.
But you’re born with integrity — or taught it by your parents. Good God, journalists have no lock on integrity and acting that way is the worst of arrogance.”

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The live sessions are winding down here.
Look for some summaries of the conference–high points, key points, challenges and recaps to go up in the next couple days.
If YOU have thoughts to share, please post them here–your insights and comments will be valued.

Give yourself the last word, huh?

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DJ Spooky says…

L O O P S O F P E R C E P T I O N
sampling, memory, and the semantic web
by Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky

“free content fuels innovation”
- Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas

I get asked what I think about sampling a lot, and I’ve always wanted to have a short term to describe the process. Stuff like “collective ownership”, “systems of memory”, and “database logics” never really seem to cut it on the lecture circuit, so I guess you can think of this essay as a soundbite for the sonically-perplexed. This is an essay about memory as a vast playhouse where any sound can be you. Press “play” and this essay says “here goes”:

http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/remix.php?is=8&art=0&file=3&tlang=0%0D

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I fundamentally agree with Leah that we are having a ten year old conversation. However, it isn’t as though we haven’t been doing anything in those last ten years. Many, if not all of us, have been moving forward. That’s what’s missing at this conference. We all know the issues, let’s discuss innovative approaches to how we’re dealing with them. That very discussion will spur more ideas. Perhaps that should be our next step.

I think this conference has served it’s purpose. The dialog is started. Now we have to move forward. I would welcome ideas from those of you reading this. What should our next steps be? Where do we go from here?

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