So, at the We Media conference last week, I decide to sneak off for some caffeine at the Starbucks in the AP lobby (nice setup, right?). Waiting for the elevator, I see two of our speakers, NY Times columnist Nick Kristof and Weblogs Inc. Chairman Jason Calacanis, sitting across from each other, deeply into their laptops.

I take the opportunity to say "hi" to Nick, who pretends to remember me in the nicest way possible (we’d met a couple of times when both of us were living in Tokyo). I call over to Jason, "Hey Jason, I don’t know if you know Nick Kristof. Nick, this is Jason Calacanis." Then my elevator arrives, I jump in, and here’s the fun part: As the doors are closing, I see them shaking hands, brown head and blond head leaning into each other, and I hear Jason say, "So what do you do, Nick?"

I don’t hear Nick’s response, but I would lay money down that he doesn’t know who Jason is either.

At The Media Center, we hear and talk about these two guys all the time, guys who are tremendously respected and well known in their respective fields, guys so famous that Doesn’t Everyone Know Them? I guess not, because they didn’t know each other.

And I introduced them. Cool…

I’m attending the WeMedia conference today and will be live-blogging in this entry. Watch the site for constant updates as I will keep adding to this entry.

It seems there are two clear camps here: the new media adopters and the traditional crowd. They can easily be identified based on whether they have laptops in front of them or not. It creates an immediate delineation line as the blog crowd obviously has a backchannel to use whereas the traditional media crowd does not. That’s another facet of WeMedia: always connected, enhanced knowledge through immediate sharing of data.

We News Panel

The AP showed a few familiar citizen generated clips of the Tsunami,
the London bombing, the WTC bombing and said they started to use
contributions as a way to get speed to market.

"Technology is fundamentally changing the business and if we don’t adapt, we will loose that audience" – Richard Sanbrook, BBC

Discussion of class disparity and availability of access to the
internet channel. The United States are behind on this and it seems
that there is little leadership in terms of moving forward on this.

Keynote: Al Gore

"TV dominates the flow of information in America… The most prominent
casualty [of changes in the marketplace] is the marketplace of exchange
of ideas…

It is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the strangeness of our times."

He sees three basic tenet of the marketplace of ideas:
1. Open to every individidual with no barrier to entry
2. Depended on meritorcracy of ideas
3. Accepted rules of discourse presumed that all speakers were trying to find general agreement

Talks about how television is not a two way conversation (leading up to current.tv pitch, I’m assuming).

"News divisions are now seen as profit centers and used to pursue the
agenda of the corporation they are owned by" He then goes on into media
manipulation by the White House and current state of coverage (no real
news but rather entertainment).

He now is talking about how private control of the TV airwaves is a
problem for democracy (gives example of moveOn being shut out because
advertising is the only way to get one’s voice on the air(because their
ads were not accepted while the White House’s ones were).

Current.tv is about enabling a two way conversation in television.

He stills see TV as the dominant medium of the next few years and
closes with a plea to ensure that Internet access remains free and open.

We Inc.

Discussion of business and media. There is a lot of discussion about
the potentials of the Internet as a new channel but, as Scott Rafer, of
Feedster, points out, they are "on a higher socio-economic bracket…
People aren’t able to find the tools to hear independent voices."

Craig Forman, GM of Yahoo!, is asked by Jason wether Yahoo! is a media
content creator or an area that content producers can work with. He
talks about the hotzone, which is independent content and flickr (also
owned by Yahoo!) and how the community self-organizes around new tags.

Jennifer Feikin, Director of Google Video, sees it as organising
information based on user-generated content. Sees it as "just the
beginning". Lots of talk about Google Video and how it makes video
content more readily available. Google’s long term aspiration is to
also facilitate video on demand and be able to charge for it (this
seems reminiscent of the initial Microsoft model (circa 95-96) of
trying to get a vig off every transaction on the Internet)

Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News still sees the Internet as not
on par with TV right now. "There is no 60 minutes of the internet.
There are very few stars, no compelling storytelling… "

There’s discussion of a generational divide. According to Heyward, the
main reason traditional media is slow to react is that they still have
very large audiences, ie. the people who are over 40. He also believes
that opinion from journalism on the blog is probably antithetical to
the philosophy of CBS news. It’s not something he wants his journalists
to engage in.

The most successful writers in the blogosphere, according to Rafer,
are the people who are willing to come out and tell where they stand
before covering a subject.

Citizen media revenue opportunities: Scott Rafer sees it on the same
size as Ebay. Jason Calacanis sees it as 20% of traditional media.
Craig Forman sees the revenue opportunities as a mediator between
creators, advertisers, and audiences.

We, Invest

Brad Burnham, of Union Sq. ventures, sees the real money being in the coordinate of activity, not in the activities themselves.

Brad Feld, of Mobius Venture: "Computers and software suck… from a
venture perspective, there doesn’t seem to be a foreseeable end to
it… The challenge is… how to find out what people are interested in
and how to organize all this. " He talks about how Google has
demonstrated the value of automation.

Brad Burham counters that Google (and also goes into Skype) is partly
based on automation but also based on an underlying human network. The
next question he has is whether you can sell a network.

Brad follows up in agreement that scalibility is essential to the
model. User attention is an essential part of monetizing traffic.

Following on a view from Rafat Ali that content is not an investment
play for VCs, Feld follows up that money is in things that are not
easily reproducible.

Burnham: "It is so easy to get to market [for a media company] on the
net… that is hard to find something that is monetizable.

A lot of the value within the tool is in the community. It’s getting
to be very hard to see the difference between a media and a software
co. As the cost come down, the price of delivering a service is so low
that you can support it with adsense or another ad model. A media
business paid for by the person who wants to have a conversation with
the person receiving the service. "

Feld: Pays credit to web 2.0 and the web 2.0 conference as a geek
gathering; "On the east coast, we have a conference where people are
talking about something that I, as a technologist, really don’t
understand. You have a dynamic where you think they’re coming together
but culturally, they’re diverging more than ever."

We Marketing

Rick Skentra, topix.net CEO, talks about the value of word of mouth
and how the message for the blog world must be different than the
message for other traditional media.

Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads.com, talks about how there is no
more We in the WeMedia. There is now a personal relationship between
bloggers and their audience. Marketing messages in that channel are
counter-productive.

John Bell, creative director of Ogilvy PR, talks about the challenges
of moving away from a control-focus message."What we’re seeing is an
opportunity for companies to be more transparent and there is still a
great split within our customer-base… Some clients are nervous but at
the same time, they’re seeing things change and want to get there…"

Fernando Espuela, CEO of Voy, is targeting the latino market with
community empowerment tools and marketing it through a non-traditional
approach by launching the brand before launching the product.

I asked a question on pushing messages instead of working within the
message from the customer. Copeland mentioned how jobs are at risk.
Skentra looks at using the people out there as a large focus group.
Bell likes the idea of companies that will engage in such a way.

Discussion now goes to Dell-Hell and the Jarvis discussion. Skentra
looks at it as an opportunity for companies to adopt a human face and
responds to markets. Rubel ask whether companies are allergic to this.
Bell says size has nothing to do with it. "… and it goes beyond
blogs. For example, BP did a good job when they relaunched their brand
as beyond petroleum but they made sure they were not only more
transparent but were also walking the walk."

In Us We Trust

This discussion is focusing on trust and how to get it.

Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR, has been talking about how levels
of trust in institutions has fallen. However, one has to wonder whether
this trust has eroded as a result of greater transparency which showed
that the trust in those institutions was based on very thin ice to
start with.

Collaboration Cafe

The goal of this session is to foster dialogue (think bloggercon for
traditional media types) and discuss the concept of collaboration. Some
of the ideas that were covered included active listening, discipline in
caring, demonstration of passion, and general engagement, allowing for
vulnerability.

Last Thoughts

The conference was very interesting and I got to meet a lot of
fascinating people. The most interesting thing to me, sitting here as a
media outsider, was that most of the people at the conference still
believe they can have full control of the messages distributed online.
This, in my view, is a major fallacy in their thinking as it is
becoming clearer and clearer as time goes on that there is very little
one can control on the Internet. The only way you can impact the
direction of a discussion is engaging into it.

Media Watching
Participants:
Jessica Coen, Editor, Gawker.com
Patrick Phillips, Founder & Editor, I Want Media
Jay Rosen, Founder, PRESSthink
Moderator: Ellen Kampinsky, Senior Editor, Glamour
To download the MP3 of the session, click here.

We Invest
To download the MP3 of the session, click here.
Audio begins during intro of Rick Ducey, Executive VP, BIA Financial
Other panelists are:
Brad Burnham, Partner, Union Square Ventures
Paul Ginocchio, Media Analyst, Deutsche Bank
Brad Feld, Managing Director, Mobius Venture Capital
Moderator: Susan Mernit, Senior VP, 5ive

Culture, Politics & Buzz
Participants: Dominik von Jan, Director, NextNextBigThing
John Gerzema, Chief Insights Officer, Young and Rubicam Brands
Moderator: Farai Chideya, Editor & Founder, Pop and Politics
To download the MP3 of the session, click here.

We Marketing
Participants:
Fernando Espuelas, Chairman & CEO, Voy
John Bell, Senior Vice President & Creative Director, Ogilvy PR
Rich Skrenta, CEO & Founder, Topix.net
Henry Copeland, Founder, BlogAds
Moderator: Steve Rubel, Blogger, Micro Persuasion
To download the MP3 of the session, click here.

Activism & Democracy
Participants:
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times Columnist
Marcus Xiang, CEO, PDX.CN
Brian Reich, Director, Mindshare Interactive Campaigns
Seth Green, Executive Director, Americans for Informed Democracy
Moderator: Rebecca MacKinnon, Co-Founder, Global Voices
To download the MP3 of the session, click here.

In Us We Trust
Participants: Craig Newmark, Customer Service Rep & Founder, craigslist
Richard Edelman, President & CEO, Edelman PR
Watts Wacker, CEO, Futurist
Karen Stephenson, President, Netform
Moderator: Dale Peskin, Co-Director, The Media Center
To download the MP3 of the session, click here.

Tag: wemedia

From left to right: Moderator Jason McCabe Calacanis, Co-Founder & Chairman, Weblogs, Inc.; Scott Rafer, Chairman, Wireless Ink; Craig Forman, VP & GM, Yahoo! Jennifer Feikin, Director of Google Video, Google
Andrew Heyward, President, CBS News.
To download the MP3 of the session, click here. Photo by Richard Drew – AP

Yahoo! aims to be the best place for consumers to find, use, share and expand their knowledge, and the highest value partner for advertisers and publishers communicating with those consumers. Yahoo!’s open content platform helps publishers syndicate and distribute all types of media content via RSS feeds on My Yahoo!, the Internet’s most popular personalized start page. The Yahoo! Publisher Network offers new revenue opportunities for publishers and advertisers – creating an ecosystem that connects businesses with the right online audience.

The NewsMarket, Inc. (www.thenewsmarket.com/) is the only web-based, on-demand platform that enables news producers and journalists to browse, preview and download broadcast-standard video clips free-of-charge from organizations including UNICEF, Pfizer, BMW, Roche, Yahoo!., Motorola, General Motors, Intel, Google, adidas and the American Red Cross. These content creators pay The NewsMarket to ensure that their stock footage and B-roll is made easily available to the news media for inclusion in news and feature programs. By creating an on-demand digital platform, The NewsMarket is transforming how the world’s news media access video content from third parties. More than 5,000 news organizations in 140 countries today source video clips from www.thenewsmarket.com

The Company is headquartered in New York and has operations in Europe and Asia. It is privately held by management and investors including venture capital firms such as Apax Partners and Softbank and media organizations such as Hearst Corp.

MEDIA SPONSORS

Digital Media Wire is a news organization, publisher and events company serving the digital media industry since May 2000. We publish a well-respected free daily email newsletter and an industry directory(www.digitalentertainmentdirectory.com) and produce six annual conferences in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and New York City featuring the leading minds in digital media: www.digitalmusicforum.com, www.gamesandmobile.com, www.digitalmediaconference.com, www.televisionconference.com, www.digitalentertainmentawards.com and www.digitalcommercesummit.com. For more information, please visit www.digitalmediawire.com or call 323-822-0936.

Guidewire Group is a global research firm focusing exclusively on emerging technology companies and markets. The company’s online media, reports, and executive events bring the right people together at the right time with the right information to accelerate market development and business opportunity for entrepreneurs and those who support them. Chris Shipley hosts Guidewire Group’s next conference, BlogOn 2005 Social Media Summit, in New York this October. For more information, visit www.guidewiregroup.com.

Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide is a global communications firm built upon the best brand-building heritage. In this age of complex, networked marketing, our strengths in consumer marketing, corporate communications, social marketing, health, public affairs, technology, entertainment and our new 360 degree Digital Influence offering fuel innovative and creative solutions for the most important brands: our clients.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest and most effective business network. On LinkedIn, more than 3.6 million professionals find jobs, people and service providers through their existing network of business relationships. LinkedIn offers four premium services. Hiring managers posting jobs on LinkedIn Jobs receive candidates recommended by fellow employees or other trusted contacts.

The Producers Guild of America New Media Council is the premier industry resource and representative body for producers of New Media entertainment. The PGA New Media Council represents the interests of producers of Digital Animation, Digital Visual Effects, Videogames, Mobile Entertainment, DVD, CD Rom, Broadband, Interactive Television, and integrated story telling. Given this mandate, we are here to provide our members, and the PGA members at large, with networking, educational and employment opportunities. To find out more about our schedule of events, check back often by going to www.pganewmedia.org.

PR Newswire provides electronic distribution, targeting, measurement, translation and broadcast services on behalf of corporate, government, association, labor, non-profit, and other customers worldwide. Using PR Newswire, these organizations reach critical audiences including the news media, the investment community, government decision-makers, and the general public with their up-to-the-minute, full-text news developments.

Red Herring is the global weekly magazine and digital news source that technology entrepreneurs, investors and industry observers read to stay ahead of the curve and to be better informed about the global marketplace. Red Herring covers technology, innovation, financial strategies, important personalities and trends globally that are transforming the world of business with unique insight, opinion and forward-looking analysis. Readers turn to Red Herring and Red Herring.com for knowledge to make strategic decisions, build companies and create a competitive advantage for their businesses. Red Herring is available by mail, digital subscription, Web, email newsletters and RSS feeds. Many of the magazine’s articles, research and event information can be found online at www.redherring.com.

No ordinary conference, We Media is about how we
create a better-informed society by collaborating with
each other. Arrange meetings in advance or during scheduled meet-ups at the conference

Engagement by all attendees is encouraged. We rely on attendees to set a course for We Next.

7:15a – Registration; Bagels with bloggers

8:30a – We Media 2.0, Presented by The Media Center – Dale Peskin, Andrew Nachison

9:00a – We News – Tom Curley, Richard Sambrook, Farai Chideya, Larry Kramer, Merrill Brown

10a – 15-minute meet-ups / AP Tours

10:15a – Keynote – Al Gore

11a – We Inc. Executive forum – Jason McCabe Calacanis, Jennifer Feikin, Craig Forman, Andrew Heyward, Scott Rafer

Noon – Mid-day meet-ups / AP news center tour

1:15 – Three Sessions:
Media Gawking – Jessica Coen, Ellen Kampinsky
We Invest – Brad Feld, Paul Ginocchio, Susan Mernit
Culture, Politics & Buzz – Dominik von Jan, Farai Chideya, Patrick Phillips, Jay Rosen, Rick Ducey, Brad Burnham, John Gerzema

2p – Three Sessions:
Citizen Journalism – Susan DeFife, Dan Gillmor
We Marketing – Fernando Espuelas, John H. Bell
Activism & Democracy – Rebecca MacKinnon, Nicholas D. Kristof, J.B. Holston, Lex Alexander, Henry Copeland, Steve Rubel
Marcus Xiang, Brian Reich, Seth Green

2:45p – Afternoon stretch

3p – In Us We Trust – Craig Newmark, Richard Edelman, Watts Wacker, Karen Stephenson

4p – Collaboration Cafe with Speakers

5:30p – Cocktails

6:30p – Adjourn

From left to right during the We News panel at The Media Center’s We Media event at AP headquarters in NY:
Farai Chideya, Editor & Founder, Pop and Politics; Tom Curley, President & CEO, The Associated Press; Richard Sambrook, Director, BBC Global News Division; Larry Kramer, President, CBS Digital Media. Merrill Brown, Principal, MMB Media LLC, Moderated the event.
To download the session, click here. Photo by Richard Drew – AP

Panelists differed on their views some saying that we may still have ‘further to slide’ before we start to reform ourselves, others thinking that we’ve reached that point already.

Wacker – 3 things going on, conspiring in this country –
1. plutocracy – putting money in the hands of a few who control
2. conservative manifesto – one country will dominate
3. dominionist religious component – women are second to men.

These three things will have the potential to create the perfect storm that will create the fall that will result in a participative democracy that is not centered in this country.

Wacker then got into the ability everyday people have to create their own reality. The present environment makes it difficult for people to figure out who they trust. This needs to be changed. People need to find a common context with corporations.

What does the next Craigslist look like? Newmark said most of what they’re about is classifieds. If something is wrong, you can flag it for removal and if more people agree, the item disappeared. People are overwhelmingly trustworthy; there is only a small percentage of ‘bad guys.’ Wacker said we have a different list from who we solicit trust from.

Companies have been used to a top down model, said Edelman. Today, smart companies do the opposite; they talk to their customers and employees and even let the customer co-create their product.

Are we headed to dystopia or utopia? Stephenson said these companies aren’t going to go away, but they will be transformed. There are things to retain in these traditional institutions, but it is old news and we’re still not seeing these organizations redefine themselves.

We don’t want institutions to go away. We want them to prepare themselves for a future which we see as different. The renewal of these institutions to remain relevant in a future that we see as already here.

Newmark evoked the Wikipedia example noting that history was already written by the victor. Now, everyone can write history.

‘Paradox of transparency’ – Edelman said companies are smart enough to let people know what they know, however, at certain times.

Wacker – trust and ethics are going to be dominant in the next generation. ‘Institutional crisis is pandemic.’ The real key is culture, who’s definition is what we pay our reverential hommage to, what we respect. In the world of ‘we’, it’s very easy to shut off anything you don’t want to listen to. How do we create mediation in a world of complexity and paradox? We need to distinguish between ‘true’ stories and ‘truth’ stories.

Craigslist is a community. Why is it such a phenomenon in which communities have begun telling their stories? People connect for all sorts of reasons, commerce, social, etc., said Newmark. ‘Providing good customer service, we’ve created a culture of trust… we don’t say it so much as practice it."

Stephenson was asked how these communities of trust are emerging. She answered that human society is changing, that we can all converse through the Internet in ways never imagined. Trust and authenticity are being redefined. ‘Little clutches of trust distributed around the world in different societies are being formed.’ Using a graph done by the Media Center in Synapse, she described her idea of where trust currently stands in human society.

Edelman used the example of European societies trusting in NGO’s more so than large corporations. In the past, we used to trust in doctors, but now we beleive in those close to us, family, friends, employees, and we don’t trust large corporations anymore, which is exaclty the problem with the mainstream media.

Tag: wemedia

Tag: wemedia

Tag: wemedia

Tag: wemedia

Tag: wemedia

Seth Green: What we’re trying to do is create global education, that there is a small community right now that is involved and goes to blogs. But there is not a discussion large in this country about our role in the world.

What Seth is doing is, then, is trying to jumpstart this discussion by creating forums on this topic, and then bringing it to the web. He says it is a good model to use with youth, that college students respond to this.

Marcus Xiang, a Chinese businessman, has a community of 1 million mobile phone users in China. They share on their phones their experiences, but its less about politics and more about therapy. He says he read a report from AOL that 50 percent of blogs were used as therapy. he says it’s true because it is like his community.

Rebecca to Nicholas Kristof of the NYT: What do you think about people channeling their feelings about what you write into some kind of policy area?

Nicholas: Blogging has brought some kind of accountability into scrutinizing the Times and CBS News. But it has not been good at scrutinizing its own house. For example, the altered photo of John Kerry with Jane Fonda, or rumors about Kerry and girlfriends, that those had real impact. A dirty drickster would reassess how to weigh into a campaign in the future.

Brian: I don’t want to defend bloggers for the same reasons, but do you think tricksters will do it because it’s wide open?

Nicholas: If you come up with some vaguely plausible that’s difficult to disprove, it will fly around in email and people want to believe it and they will never see the denials.

Rebecca: How do you span what is called the digital divide? That come a lot this morning. But right the conversations are going on between elites. What are the implications of that? I’d liek to bring in Andy Carvin of the Digital Divide network. What do you think about this? how do you make sure that those communities are empowered?

Andy: It’s fallen out of the American discourse. Two-third of American public has internet access. Powers that be assume everyoone they need ot reach has access. It’s creating a revolution for those of us who are plugged on, but the other groups are even more marginalized than ever. These groups are lacking basic media skills and literacy skills.

Seth: I don’t think it’s a digital divide. I think of my Aunt Marilyn and I’m kind of the global person in the family. She gets her news from the TV. I’ll bring her over to the computer and try to do with her, bring her to these global websites. But she says, Seth, that’s your domain.

Brian in response to a question to Move On, says it is an unsuccessful model for everything, except fundraising. We glorify these things that get the numbers, but they didn’t do anything that actually met the goals they set out to achieve.

Dan: If this is about conversation, the first rule is to listen. What is the state of the art with big media.

Lex: The state of the art starts with listening. The more of that they’re doing, the closer to the state of the art they are. If they’re not doing that, nothing else much matters. If you’re not engaging in dialogue and discussion with your readers, the best promotion and technology isn’t going to get you very far. An extension of the listening, the dialogue, the blogging is a means to an end. … We structure our letters to the editor as a blog; our K12 blog gets some fair comment. We have a fair bit of participation.

Dan: BackFence.com is doing important work; these are people with a news background. Is it possible to do it from scratch?

Susan: Well, we did do it from scratch. We looked for the gaps; hyperlocal news. We were concerned about the user interface and (business model). There is a groundswell for the this hyperlocal content. We’ ve given them a place. We trust the intelligence of our area user and their ability to express themselves. We value the diversity of the experience. Eventually, you want to get down to the community level, the block level. Once acclimated to the concept and they see how small that it is, it can get smaller. … We think we’re providing that place that local advertisers can afford.

J.B.: What kind of brand equity do you have. If you’re a newspaper, you know that local news is what you’re all about. Brands are trustworthy; brands are trusted. There are 80,000 new blogs every day. Best arbitrator is who do you trust. … RSS is a simply way for folks to subscribe to stuff that they want to read.

(The room is just absolutely packed!!!)

Dan: What if there’s no real business model?

J.B.: We’ll be here as consultants next year! That’s the fuel that makes the engine go. BackFence is a terrific brand opportunity. That’s the kind of model that has lots of monetization opportunity. That’s not the question anymore; there’s investment money out there.

Susan: We’re trying to create a dialogue on a platform that’s easy to use that we can expand (nationally). It’s the fuel that helps the model grow.

Lex: There will be a way found to compensate the citizen journalists. You can have a pretty exact count; you know who is drawing the hits. If you put your mind to it, there’s a way to compensate them. 

Susan: Why do people contribute to a BackFence? Because they want to share information about their local community. Second, people like to have an identity online. People want to be a star. Communities want to share; what they want from us is a place to do it.

Dan: To the extent that the public does journalism, I want to help them do it well.

Lex: We’re not making people do journalism. We’re offering people an opportunity and platform to express themselves in different ways. It covers the spectrum of social experience.

Lex: The first thing small newspapers should be doing is listening. Then offer as many opportunities in a partnership so that they can do what they want to do.

The recurring question: Does everything have to have a business model???

Susan on how much is technology a problem: Know your audience. We don’t do RSS right now because less than 5 percent use it (and far less of our audience). Are we using blogging, wikis? Yes. Does our audience know they’re using them. No. My caution is don’t get too caught up in the technology.

Lex: If you’re listening to your audience, and your audience is engage, they’ll tell you what matters. The readers are going to find the important issues before your readers do.

J.B.: We post a number of links to any given story; helps readers navigate through the jungle. That’s very popular; it’s not a matter of right or wrong.

Susan: Newspapers are hemorraging readers fast because they aren’t relevant to their readers. That top down model isn’t working; that they know best.  We don’t purport to replace journalism. … Our goal is to create a place where people can talk to each other, and they are articulating the questions quite well.

J.B.: A voice that has more authority can rise up quite quickly; voices that have never been heard before.

Dan: This is a symbiotic movement; that they can be collaborators.

Lex: A story that requires a certain level of skill, you can one of your professionals partner with someone who has knowledge of the subject if not the tools to write it.

Lex: We get 20-25 story tips for every reader contribution; we label those stories so that readers know that readers like them generated the story (knowing which stories are worth doing in the first place).

Lex: We let people write in their own voices.

Susan: There is a real tension between journalists and citizen journalists. There is a collaboration (possible). A tension between edited and unedited content. There is a place for both.

Dan: The minute you touch it (edit it), you own it.

Susan: We let the audience have it’s voice (not to make the lawyers happy, which it does).

Lex: Our website impressions are up already. Nobody has said to me that what you’re doing has to make a profit. However, I work for for-profit business. This offers us the best opportunity of staying IN business. We will be OUT of business if we keep doing what we’re doing the way we’ve done it.

Patrick left Hearst corporate public relations to start I Want Media. On his site, he tracks changing media, business models. He covers technology, media, and journalism. Patrick started his site, and now he has people like Sumner Redstone quoted in his work on the site, and he says that Tina Brown knows about his site.

Jay says "Low barrier to entry." Yes, this is low barrier. A computer is all you need.

Jessica was just starting Columbia Journalism School, when she had the chance to write for Gawker. She never looked back. Now she speaks at Columbia.

She checks her email everyday, before anything, before Drudge. And she fields 1,000 emails a day from tipsters, and 300 are useful. She notes that NY Times reporters occasionally ask her to make fun of a story they wrote so it will be on the most emailed list.

Here’s Jay on PressThink: He started his blog having heard the advice "write short." He broke the rules. His posts are long, and long by most internet standards. PressThink is an exercise in decontrol in journalism.

Question: In academia they have a very strict publish by refereed journal. My question is how do you reconcile being in academic, and being in journal, and trust and truth and transparency and heirarchy?

Jay: If I were on a standard academic track, I would write for scholarly journals that reach 2000 people. But PressThink reaches 10,000. The university is going to be another one of the institutions that adapts to this. I broadcast journalism education outside, widely.

Q: What about media reporting on itself?

Jessica: CBS has launched this thing Public Eye and it is a sad, sad little website. Vaughn Ververs can’t write about what he wants to write about.

Patrick: The blog doesn’t really say very much. It seems like it’s a response to several things, but it really doesn’t address any of them.

Q: Do you get the equivalent of news tips about, say the NY Times and the Judy Miller story? Do you pass them on to other reporters? Are you a player behind the scenes?

Jay: I don’t pass them on like that. If I wanted to write stories using anonymous sources and break news, I could.

Q: At what point do the media gawkers have rresponsibility?

Jay: I don’t have rules about it. The way I create trust at my blog is very different from what Gawker does or the NY Times does. The rules for creating trust at Pressthink set my limits for what I can do. If people come to my blog and say what do you think about Judy Miller, and I say I don’t care, that doesn’t create trust. So what I do is say, here’s what I think.

Jay: Al Gore give us a really good challenge. We have to figure out how to use the horizontal media to utilize our public reasoning. As a keynote, it actually struck a note. Maybe that’s why he’s a professional politician.

Oops … no Ana Marie; she must be wonketting elsewhere today.

John: Self-manifestation by simply typing … creating and presenting your own world. … RSS allows people to create their own applications their own world.

How do your reach young people?

Dominik: Needs shift rapidly (among this demographic). They have friends out there who are attuned to changing pods.

John: They learn through interaction with people in their own networks.

Farai: How do reach young people who are silo-ed out with a news product?

Dominik: One way is to get Puff Daddy.

Dominik: Blogs are authenitic; it doesn’t get much more authentic than that. … Kids today don’t have just one life; they live in 99 worlds. … Kids grow up with technology; it’s natural; they don’t have to think about it.

Dominik: If you had voting by text messaging, you would have a lot of young people voting.

John: Transitional values don’t change (recklessness, revolt against authority), but underneath that are core values.

John: Quality will always be quality, and people will go to quality (check out www.musicplasma.com). …News has been biased for a long time and will continue to be biased as we continue to go to what we are interested in.

What is the revenue model?

John: All the models right now are up in the air … 30 years of old ideas; it’s up for grabs. This is a time of great uncertainty (as the metrics shake out). The models are all changing.

The Wild West nature of the contribution thing — Is that good, will it continue?

Dominik: People will blend out what doesn’t make sense; people will begin to seek out brands.

John on "podding out": Media fragmentation is obvious; it isn’t going to come back to a mass audience. With fragmentation, the media models are changing. Podcasting has only been around for a year! … It’s still about communities. All these trends, you’ve got to stay within 17 to 27; that’s what you’ve got to watch.

Dominik: This age group doesn’t focus on just one thing (there’s the 99 things).

Al Gore addresses The Media Center’s We Media conference at AP headquarters in NY. To download the 48-minute, 20 MB MP3 of the speech, click here. Photo by Richard Drew – AP

Here is the text of former Vice President Al Gore’s remarks at the We Media conference on Wednesday in New York:

I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.

How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it’s almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe"?

I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, non-stop coverage of the O.J. trial was just an unfortunate excess that marked an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. But now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.

Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?

On the eve of the nation’s decision to invade Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor asked: "Why is this chamber empty? Why are these halls silent?"

The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said, "The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history."

But whether you agree with his assessment or not, Senator Byrd’s question is like the others that I have just posed here: he was saying, in effect, this is strange, isn’t it? Aren’t we supposed to have full and vigorous debates about questions as important as the choice between war and peace?

Those of us who have served in the Senate and watched it change over time, could volunteer an answer to Senator Byrd’s two questions: the Senate was silent on the eve of war because Senators don’t feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much any more. And the chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else: they were in fundraisers collecting money from special interests in order to buy 30-second TVcommercials for their next re-election campaign.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was – at least for a short time – a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our public discourse that reminded some Americans – including some journalists – that vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded.

In fact there was a time when America’s public discourse was consistently much more vivid, focused and clear. Our Founders, probably the most literate generation in all of history, used words with astonishing precision and believed in the Rule of Reason.

Their faith in the viability of Representative Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular emphasis on insuring that the public could be well- informed. And they took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure the free-flow of knowledge.

The values that Americans had brought from Europe to the New World had grown out of the sudden explosion of literacy and knowledge after Gutenberg’s disruptive invention broke up the stagnant medieval information monopoly and triggered the Reformation, Humanism, and the Enlightenment and enshrined a new sovereign: the "Rule of Reason."

Indeed, the self-governing republic they had the audacity to establish was later named by the historian Henry Steele Commager as "the Empire of Reason."

Our founders knew all about the Roman Forum and the Agora in ancient Athens. They also understood quite well that in America, our public forum would be an ongoing conversation about democracy in which individual citizens would participate not only by speaking directly in the presence of others — but more commonly by communicating with their fellow citizens over great distances by means of the printed word. Thus they not only protected Freedom of Assembly as a basic right, they made a special point – in the First Amendment – of protecting the freedom of the printing press.

Their world was dominated by the printed word. Just as the proverbial fish doesn’t know it lives in water, the United States in its first half century knew nothing but the world of print: the Bible, Thomas Paine’s fiery call to revolution, the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution , our laws, the Congressional Record, newspapers and books.

Though they feared that a government might try to censor the printing press – as King George had done – they could not imagine that America’s public discourse would ever consist mainly of something other than words in print.

And yet, as we meet here this morning, more than 40 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers and, for the most part, resisting the temptation to inflate their circulation numbers. Reading itself is in sharp decline, not only in our country but in most of the world. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by television.

Radio, the internet, movies, telephones, and other media all now vie for our attention – but it is television that still completely dominates the flow of information in modern America. In fact, according to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of four hours and 28 minutes every day — 90 minutes more than the world average.

When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time that the average American has. And for younger Americans, the average is even higher.

The internet is a formidable new medium of communication, but it is important to note that it still doesn’t hold a candle to television. Indeed, studies show that the majority of Internet users are actually simultaneously watching television while they are online. There is an important reason why television maintains such a hold on its viewers in a way that the internet does not, but I’ll get to that in a few minutes.

Television first overtook newsprint to become the dominant source of information in America in 1963. But for the next two decades, the television networks mimicked the nation’s leading newspapers by faithfully following the standards of the journalism profession. Indeed, men like Edward R. Murrow led the profession in raising the bar.

But all the while, television’s share of the total audience for news and information continued to grow — and its lead over newsprint continued to expand. And then one day, a smart young political consultant turned to an older elected official and succinctly described a new reality in America’s public discourse: "If it’s not on television, it doesn’t exist."

But some extremely important elements of American Democracy have been pushed to the sidelines . And the most prominent casualty has been the "marketplace of ideas" that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders. It effectively no longer exists.

It is not that we no longer share ideas with one another about public matters; of course we do. But the "Public Forum" in which our Founders searched for general agreement and applied the Rule of Reason has been grossly distorted and "restructured" beyond all recognition.

And here is my point: it is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the "strangeness" that now continually haunts our efforts to reason together about the choices we must make as a nation.

Whether it is called a Public Forum, or a "Public Sphere" , or a marketplace of ideas, the reality of open and free public discussion and debate was considered central to the operation of our democracy in America’s earliest decades.

In fact, our first self-expression as a nation – "We the People" – made it clear where the ultimate source of authority lay. It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable. That is why it was so important that the marketplace of ideas operated independent from and beyond the authority of government.

The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were:

1) It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry, save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also to the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all; 2) The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent Meritocracy of Ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them; 3) The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a "Conversation of Democracy" is all about.

What resulted from this shared democratic enterprise was a startling new development in human history: for the first time, knowledge regularly mediated between wealth and power.

The liberating force of this new American reality was thrilling to all humankind. Thomas Jefferson declared, "I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." It ennobled the individual and unleashed the creativity of the human spirit. It inspired people everywhere to dream of what they could yet become. And it emboldened Americans to bravely explore the farther frontiers of freedom – for African Americans, for women, and eventually, we still dream, for all.

And just as knowledge now mediated between wealth and power, self- government was understood to be the instrument with which the people embodied their reasoned judgments into law. The Rule of Reason under- girded and strengthened the rule of law.

But to an extent seldom appreciated, all of this – including especially the ability of the American people to exercise the reasoned collective judgments presumed in our Founders’ design — depended on the particular characteristics of the marketplace of ideas as it operated during the Age of Print.

Consider the rules by which our present "public forum" now operates, and how different they are from the forum our Founders knew. Instead of the easy and free access individuals had to participate in the national conversation by means of the printed word, the world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation today.

Inexpensive metal printing presses were almost everywhere in America. They were easily accessible and operated by printers eager to typeset essays, pamphlets, books or flyers.

Television stations and networks, by contrast, are almost completely inaccessible to individual citizens and almost always uninterested in ideas contributed by individual citizens.

Ironically, television programming is actually more accessible to more people than any source of information has ever been in all of history. But here is the crucial distinction: it is accessible in only one direction; there is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation.

The number of cables connecting to homes is limited in each community and usually forms a natural monopoly. The broadcast and satellite spectrum is likewise a scarce and limited resource controlled by a few. The production of programming has been centralized and has usually required a massive capital investment. So for these and other reasons, an ever-smaller number of large corporations control virtually all of the television programming in America.

Soon after television established its dominance over print, young people who realized they were being shut out of the dialogue of democracy came up with a new form of expression in an effort to join the national conversation: the "demonstration." This new form of expression, which began in the 1960s, was essentially a poor quality theatrical production designed to capture the attention of the television cameras long enough to hold up a sign with a few printed words to convey, however plaintively, a message to the American people. Even this outlet is now rarely an avenue for expression on national television.

So, unlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged in the wake of the printing press, there is virtually no exchange of ideas at all in television’s domain. My partner Joel Hyatt and I are trying to change that – at least where Current TV is concerned. Perhaps not coincidentally, we are the only independently owned news and information network in all of American television.

It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.

The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound like gobbledygook, but it’s a phrase that packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance.

It did not come as a surprise that the concentration of control over this powerful one-way medium carries with it the potential for damaging the operations of our democracy. As early as the 1920s, when the predecessor of television, radio, first debuted in the United States, there was immediate apprehension about its potential impact on democracy. One early American student of the medium wrote that if control of radio were concentrated in the hands of a few, "no nation can be free."

As a result of these fears, safeguards were enacted in the U.S. — including the Public Interest Standard, the Equal Time Provision, and the Fairness Doctrine – though a half century later, in 1987, they were effectively repealed. And then immediately afterwards, Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves.

And radio is not the only place where big changes have taken place. Television news has undergone a series of dramatic changes. The movie "Network," which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1976, was presented as a farce but was actually a prophecy. The journalism profession morphed into the news business, which became the media industry and is now completely owned by conglomerates.

The news divisions – which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network – are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part. They have fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations hand-outs. This tragedy is compounded by the ironic fact that this generation of journalists is the best trained and most highly skilled in the history of their profession. But they are usually not allowed to do the job they have been trained to do.

The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. They placed a former male escort in the White House press pool to pose as a reporter – and then called upon him to give the president a hand at crucial moments. They paid actors to make make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.

For these and other reasons, The US Press was recently found in a comprehensive international study to be only the 27th freest press in the world. And that too seems strange to me.

Among the other factors damaging our public discourse in the media, the imposition by management of entertainment values on the journalism profession has resulted in scandals, fabricated sources, fictional events and the tabloidization of mainstream news. As recently stated by Dan Rather – who was, of course, forced out of his anchor job after angering the White House – television news has been "dumbed down and tarted up."

The coverage of political campaigns focuses on the "horse race" and little else. And the well-known axiom that guides most local television news is "if it bleeds, it leads." (To which some disheartened journalists add, "If it thinks, it stinks.")

In fact, one of the few things that Red state and Blue state America agree on is that they don’t trust the news media anymore.

Clearly, the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest. It is to "glue eyeballs to the screen" in order to build ratings and sell advertising. If you have any doubt, just look at what’s on: The Robert Blake trial. The Laci Peterson tragedy. The Michael Jackson trial. The Runaway Bride. The search in Aruba. The latest twist in various celebrity couplings, and on and on and on.

And more importantly, notice what is not on: the global climate crisis, the nation’s fiscal catastrophe, the hollowing out of America’s industrial base, and a long list of other serious public questions that need to be addressed by the American people.

One morning not long ago, I flipped on one of the news programs in hopes of seeing information about an important world event that had happened earlier that day. But the lead story was about a young man who had been hiccupping for three years. And I must say, it was interesting; he had trouble getting dates. But what I didn’t see was news.

This was the point made by Jon Stewart, the brilliant host of "The Daily Show," when he visited CNN’s "Crossfire": there should be a distinction between news and entertainment.

And it really matters because the subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: it leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.

One of the only avenues left for the expression of public or political ideas on television is through the purchase of advertising, usually in 30-second chunks. These short commercials are now the principal form of communication between candidates and voters. As a result, our elected officials now spend all of their time raising money to purchase these ads.

That is why the House and Senate campaign committees now search for candidates who are multi-millionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources. As one consequence, the halls of Congress are now filling up with the wealthy.

Campaign finance reform, however well it is drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the only means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue by one means or another to dominate American politic s. And ideas will no longer mediate between wealth and power.

And what if an individual citizen, or a group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But they are not even allowed to do that.

Moveon.org tried to buy ads last year to express opposition to Bush’s Medicare proposal which was then being debated by Congress. They were told "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, one of the networks that had refused the Moveon ad began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the President’s Medicare proposal. So Moveon complained and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporary, I mean it was removed until the White House complained and the network immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the Moveon ad.

The advertising of products, of course, is the real purpose of television. And it is difficult to overstate the extent to which modern pervasive electronic advertising has reshaped our society. In the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith first described the way in which advertising has altered the classical relationship by which supply and demand are balanced over time by the invisible hand of the marketplace. According to Galbraith, modern advertising campaigns were beginning to create high levels of demand for products that consumers never knew they wanted, much less needed.

The same phenomenon Galbraith noticed in the commercial marketplace is now the dominant fact of life in what used to be America’s marketplace for ideas. The inherent value or validity of political propositions put forward by candidates for office is now largely irrelevant compared to the advertising campaigns that shape the perceptions of voters.

Our democracy has been hallowed out. The opinions of the voters are, in effect, purchased, just as demand for new products is artificially created. Decades ago Walter Lippman wrote, "the manufacture of consent…was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy…but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique…under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy."

Like you, I recoil at Lippman’s cynical dismissal of America’s gift to human history. But in order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum and create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the Rule of Reason. We must, for example, stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public’s ability to discern the truth.

I don’t know all the answers, but along with my partner, Joel Hyatt, I am trying to work within the medium of television to recreate a multi- way conversation that includes individuals and operates according to a meritocracy of ideas. If you would like to know more, we are having a press conference on Friday morning at the Regency Hotel.

We are learning some fascinating lessons about the way decisions are made in the television industry, and it may well be that the public would be well served by some changes in law and policy to stimulate more diversity of viewpoints and a higher regard for the public interest. But we are succeeding within the marketplace by reaching out to individuals and asking them to co-create our network.

The greatest source of hope for reestablishing a vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is the Internet. Indeed, Current TV relies on video streaming over the Internet as the means by which individuals send us what we call viewer-created content or VC squared. We also rely on the Internet for the two-way conversation that we have every day with our viewers enabling them to participate in the decisions on programming our network.

I know that many of you attending this conference are also working on creative ways to use the Internet as a means for bringing more voices into America’s ongoing conversation. I salute you as kindred spirits and wish you every success.

I want to close with the two things I’ve learned about the Internet that are most directly relevant to the conference that you are having here today.

First, as exciting as the Internet is, it still lacks the single most powerful characteristic of the television medium; because of its packet-switching architecture, and its continued reliance on a wide variety of bandwidth connections (including the so-called "last mile" to the home), it does not support the real-time mass distribution of full-motion video.

Make no mistake, full-motion video is what makes television such a powerful medium. Our brains – like the brains of all vertebrates – are hard-wired to immediately notice sudden movement in our field of vision. We not only notice, we are compelled to look. When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn’t look are not our ancestors. The ones who did look passed on to us the genetic trait that neuroscientists call "the establishing reflex." And that is the brain syndrome activated by television continuously – sometimes as frequently as once per second. That is the reason why the industry phrase, "glue eyeballs to the screen," is actually more than a glib and idle boast. It is also a major part of the reason why Americans watch the TV screen an average of four and a half hours a day.

It is true that video streaming is becoming more common over the Internet, and true as well that cheap storage of streamed video is making it possible for many young television viewers to engage in what the industry calls "time shifting" and personalize their television watching habits. Moreover, as higher bandwidth connections continue to replace smaller information pipelines, the Internet’s capacity for carrying television will continue to dramatically improve. But in spite of these developments, it is television delivered over cable and satellite that will continue for the remainder of this decade and probably the next to be the dominant medium of communication in America’s democracy. And so long as that is the case, I truly believe that America’s democracy is at grave risk.

The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.

We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy’s future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom.

But first, a segue into  what would Andrew Heyward do if he had more choices? He says he’d love new media, but the trade off for working in Big Media is larger audience and impact. New Media, he says, has a lower barrier to entry, but lower impact. Heyward says that he finds content creation on the web to be "primitive."

Back to Craig Forman: he sees this as the next phase of media being "respect my intelligence." That’s what people under age 40 want, he says. Forman also tells a terrific story about the beginnings of the Wall Street Journal, when Dow and Jones (and another guy) ran around and took notes about Wall Street doings on their sleeves and then printed a paper. (Which sounds frighteningly like something a blogger might do.)

Jason brings up something that I’ve actually mentioned on Jay Rosen’s site: Why do large media companies tend to separate their digital business from the rest of the business? Heyward says the news department is sort of a "vendor" to the digital part of the business. Heyward emphasizes that his journalists are not encouraged (in fact discouraged) from commenting on issues on the Public Eye. Jason asks about objectivity: Does it exist, or are all newspeople affected by bias?

The folks in the blogosphere with the most hits are those who are upfront about their point of view, and then talk about the facts in that context, says Scott Rafer. Bias is going to exist, and if we choose not to recognize it we’re foolish.

Craig says it’s not transparency by authenticity.

Forman is veering away from big business media. Some of the other panelists, Andrew Heyward of CBS for example, are focused more on the reality of the economy of media.

Jennifer Feikin talks about how search engines are making things accessible. She’s from Google video.

All this strikes Gore as "strange."

He wants to recreate a meritocracy of the marketplace of ideas to stimulate more diversity of viewpoints.

Many in the audience, he says, are doing this: a better informed American public.

We are looking a future of viewer created content to bring in more voices into the dialogue and market of ideas.

The Internet still lacks the power of TV because of its reliance on still limited bandwidth, it still doesn’t support real-time distribution of full-motion video. Our brains are wired to notice movement. Video streaming on the Internet is becoming more common and accessible, BUT it is television that will continue to the dominant medium of communication.

The Internet must remain open and accessible — despite the provider. Consolidation and control that affects television must not affect the Internet, too.

Al says: Thirty second television commercials are the only thing that matters in political discourse today. … There was a time when our political discourse was more vivid and clear and rested on a well-informed citizenry. … The U.S. lived and communicated in press for much of its early history: the public discourse was words in print…. It is television that dominates the flow of information in America. … Americans watch television an average of 4:28.00 a day (but second to Japan at 5 hours!), but a half hour over the international average. … The Internet still does not hold a candle to television. … Television overtook print in 1963 (JFK assassination). … Men like Edward R. Murrow led the profession in raising the bar (that will make George Clooney happy!). … If it’s not on television, it does not exist. … Casualty: the market place of ideas; it effectively does not exist. The public forum has been grossly distorted.

Open and free public debate was essential in America’s earliest decades …

We can see where this is leading, eh WeMedia?

Current TV Chairman and former Vice President Al Gore, or as he put it in his keynote, "The former next president of the United States" poses with Media Center Director Andrew Nachison prior to his keynote address at We Media at AP Headquarters in NY. (Chad Capellman posted this and only mentions this to avoid the appearance that Andrew Nachison is referring to himself in the dreaded third person.)

http://ifocos.org/2005/10/05/speed-dating/ Well, was this fun or what? Our assignment during the break: To meet someone at another table in this very crowded room, exchange business cards, and network — make a connection.

I met William H. Wilson, managing editor of the Elkhart (Ind.) Truth, which was kinda cool since I once worked at the South Bend Tribune. When I told Bill (we’re friends now!) that I taught cross-platform journalism at George Mason University, Bill told me he was looking for an online content editor. He’ll be sending me a job description, and I hope I can steer one of my former students looking for a job his way.

So, great exercise, Dale and Andrew!!!

Kramer said that the most important thing we can do is to keep explaining stories better and better by listening to the public. Getting people engaged in the news, however, is difficult. Nightly news audience is decreasing for example. Broadband is allowing the media more exposure by allowing people to spend the little amount of time they have to access news whenever they have a minute.

Sambrook thinks that blogging and social software has expanded the civic space for public discussion. There are hopeful signs. An example he used was how the BBC introduced people on small islands to blogging and now anyone in the world can learn what it’s like to live on these islands directly from those who live there.

Question – How many people are interacting through new media vs. traditional newspaper or newscast. How many are involved in the discussion.

Curley – where do old media stop and new media begin? There will be an evolution. There are places we’re going to have to go to help the conversation throughout outreach efforts for instance. The biggest change we can make is to help people who work at an organization like AP know what the public wants to hear, what stories they are interested in which is facilitated by new media.

Kramer says that most people who watch newscasts still visit websites at some point during the day. The pace at which you use one and the other vary. People will be more informed.

Rebecca McKinnon asked how they are going to include the audiences who don’t have access to the new products that media companies are rolling out. Are we in danger of creating a rich participatory environment for the ‘haves’, forgetting the ‘have-nots’? What are American media companies doing to help more people get online? Are these companies pushing for free Wi-Fi access for example?

Kramer said that they refer to themselves less and less as a distributing medium. They’re not as heavily invested in distribution as they used to be. CBS will over the next few years try to make its content more available to more people. It’s harder to fund one form of distribution over another when you’re a traditional media company. We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out.

Curley said that the US is behind. Politics have denegrated to the point where it’s a big money process. This is a great opportunity for the blogging community to become engaged and change this. Media companies are very sensitive to where the public eyes are going.

Question – Are you the wrong people to be on this panel because so many youth are getting their news from Comedy Central?

Chideya – maybe we’re the wrong people to be talking about this at all. One way to look at news media is a town hall where people meet to talk about what’s going on. The traditional media has eroded this, there is no forum. we need to have strong peer-to-peer media. Non middle upper class people need to be able to generate news.

Sambrook followed by saying the BBC is in the middle of a reorganization, a reprioritization of the digital on-demand envriornment. It’s a complete revamping to the whole organization.

For many of CBS journalists, the idea of opening the organization up to a 24-hour network was exciting. Kramer had to sell the advantages of multiple platforms to them. They were able to take a news organization focused on one show and spread it out over mutlitple media.
The Public Eye is used to confront the public. The Web allows us to do things we were not able to do before, especially digging deeper and publishing more detailed accounts of stories which helps the curious public to see more than just what’s on the nightly newscast. "We’re giving them tools to respond."

AP has made a big change by filing news for the ‘fast format’ first. It used to file for newspapers first, but now puts breaking news on the Web. Brown asked what AP is doing to get citizens involved at a grassroots level. Curley said that asap, AP’s youth website has blogging options for youth which helps to involve them in the news process, its customers will also soon be able to categorize their desired news.

When asked what kind of cultural changes NPR is going, Chideya mentioned that NPR is adding staff and features such as podcasting. It is even adding a new position called a ‘music media editor’ – a new hot job that she would love to have. When she went to cover Katrina, she handed out tape recorders to several citizens who were allowed to record their own material which was then regathered and edited by Chideya and Co. at Pop and Politics. She doesn’t want the digital revolution to be a ‘digital exclusion’ of those not fortunate enough to have access to the Internet and media in general. How are we going to include these people?"

Kramer talks about big organizations, and about the challenge of becoming a 24-7 organization. How do we ask the political team to cover things yearround,rather than just election coverage. He talks about reorienting to the "new competitiveness." Merrill challenges Kramer, what about the cultural change in CBS, getting CBS news involved with the public, Kramer ways to see the blog, the Public Eye, and that’s where it’s going to be discussed. He says that the CBS reporters are now thinking about the blog and how they might discuss the story there. How they might explain what tape made air, and what tape ended about on the floor.

Curley says that the AP has changed radically to start filing for the 24 hour news cycle, rather than just for the slow news cycle of morning newspapers. He describes having to discuss in detail with the staff, and having to change the mission a bit at the AP. Merrill asks, what is AP doing to engage citizens at the grassroots level that has not been done before? Our technology people are trying to engage bloggers.

It’s interesting to listen for what’s not being said too.

CBS is educating its news division to "the new competitiveness." But top management must encourage this; insist on this.

We confront people at CBS News every day about the way they do things. A minute and a half on the Evening News can be 20 minutes online. The story reporters are trying to tell doesn’t always get told; well, here’s their opportunity to tell it (online). We’re giving them the tools to respond.

Tom Curley: Walk in and show them what’s in it for them: More bylines, more visibility. We now file for the fast format first: the Internet. We used to file for the slow medium first: newspapers.

The staff gets it (at AP).

When asked if he is fulfilling the role of the press in including citizens, Curley explained the difference between professional and consumer media, saying that AP photographers use a mixture. AP plans on remaining business to business related, but using this consumer technology is opening up new doors. In adapting to new media, AP has launched a youth initiative, asap.

Kramer said that the ‘we thing’ goes both ways. Traditional news organizations have embraced the fact that they need to operate on multiple platforms. The media will have to figure out the best ways to use podcasts, mobile phones and other new media. News providers want to publish the best content they can, including real time content which can sometimes be better than what an organization such as CBS can produce. Together with an involved audience and broadband, they’ll be able to do incredible things with media in the near future.

"Even calling it a movement sells it short," said Sambrook about We Media. He went on to say that the media is more accountable to the public than it ever has been before and the definition of the role that an organization like the BBC plays is changing. The question is where does a media organization add value to all of the content that is out there by finding and organizing it in a comprehensive manner.

Chideya explained her varied journalism career, saying that now she was ‘drifting through the new media world without any roots’ but that now she is beginning to embrace the dated term ‘convergence.’ She’s now trying to figure out how to best serve her audience through all media.

Curley explained that this using citizen contributors is something that AP has done throughout its history and introduced a series of images of major events including the World Trade Tower attacks and the tsunami disaster captured by citizens. Curley said that he is at the conference to learn as well.

Kramer began by describing a revamping of CBS News’ website, saying that the goal is to treat stories ‘more like a loop.’ Stories don’t end when they are published but are just starting through reactions by the public. Because of its size, CBS thought that their citizen contributions need to be more filtered than most, they needed a moderator for Public Eye. Three people are designated to find criticism on the Web for the site and engage the public more on Public Eye. Reacting to viewers "makes us better reporters."

Sambrook said that the strength of any media organization depends on its relationship with the public. If media doesn’t embrace the new relationship provided by the Internet, then they are going to loose touch with their readers/viewers. He used the example of the July 7th bombings where the BBC received large amounts of citizen material. The following days news included a video compiled from citizen contributions, the first time that such a newscast had ever taken place. ‘The BBC does not own the news anymore but our job is to make connections between and with the audience.’

Tom Curley (AP):
Images (and audio) provided by citizens … Serves up the f-word before breakfast (something John Feinstein did on Saturday during the Navy football broadcast!) … Competitive challenges and WHO owns the rights.

Larry Kramer (CBS):
CBS has recently revamped its website (www.cbs.com) … Public Eye to get citizen involvement in a national television environment … provide news in a loop … people react, respond … a vehicle by which people can communicate with CBS News … could lead to something bigger CBS is missing … Because of mass audience, needs to be more filtered; a responsibility to what’s posted … a filter, a moderator … You can see it on the front of the site … Looking for intelligent discourse on the news of the day … on the website, on the network news, on all of the CBS news programs … We believe that conversation with the general public makes us better reporters … Make ourselves more available to the public when the have news … Why? To tell stories.

Richard Sambrook (BBC):
If we don’t embrace these changes (the greatest in 25 years), we’ll lose our audience … social media … 7th of July bombs … actually led next day with camera phone and footage from the public … We don’t own the news anymore.

Society becomes participatory.

I’m a educational researcher who studies learning, and I’m also a former journalist and present statistician, and I know that participating requires knowledge. Lots of it. In order to be a participating citizen, you need to know a lot of things. There’s a jump between what’s being discussed here, and actually getting there, but it’s interesting to think about the possibilities without the practicalities.

There are runners in the room with microphones. Yikes. Sort of API meets Phil Donahue.

Dale says we’re actually going to act like cultural anthropologists and consider the changing cultural landscape, both in media and beyond. Now, let’s go to the videotape….

Here are images and notes from the new culture…pictures taken on a cell phone in the London Underground during the bombing evacuation, a note that the Pope Benedict has asked people to email him. Pictures of kids with Ipods, and people using phones to take pictures.

And now, into the We News panel.

Craig Newmark, Customer Service Rep & Founder, craigslist

Tom Curley, President & CEO, The Associated Press

Richard Sambrook, Director, BBC Global News Division

Andrew Heyward, President, CBS News

Larry Kramer, President, CBS Digital Media

Karen Stephenson, President, Netform

Ana Marie Cox, Editor, Wonkette

Dan Gillmor, Founder, Bayosphere

Watts Wacker, CEO, Futurist

Craig Forman, VP & GM, Yahoo!

Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times Columnist

Farai Chideya, Editor & Founder, Pop and Politics

Jessica Coen, Editor, Gawker.com

J.B. Holston, President & CEO, NewsGator Technologies, Inc.

Jennifer Feikin, Director of Google Video, Google

Patrick Phillips, Founder & Editor, I Want Media

Brad Burnham, Partner, Union Square Ventures

John Gerzema, Chief Insights Officer, Young and Rubicam Brands

Steve Rubel, Blogger, Micro Persuasion

Rich Skrenta, CEO & Founder, Topix.net

Richard Edelman, President & CEO, Edelman PR

Fernando Espuelas, Chairman & CEO, Voy

Merrill Brown, Principal, MMB Media LLC

John Bell, Senior Vice President & Creative Director, Ogilvy PR

Rebecca MacKinnon, Co-Founder, Global Voices

Susan DeFife, President & CEO, Backfence.com

Jay Rosen, Founder, PRESSthink

Ellen Kampinsky, Senior Editor, Glamour

Jason McCabe Calacanis, Co-Founder & Chairman, Weblogs, Inc.

Henry Copeland, Founder, BlogAds

Brad Feld, Managing Director, Mobius Venture Capital

Scott Rafer, Chairman, Wireless Ink

Susan Mernit, Senior VP, 5ive

Marcus Xiang, CEO, PDX.CN

Paul Ginocchio, Media Analyst, Deutsche Bank

Seth Green, Executive Director, Americans for Informed Democracy

Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder & Chairman, Majestic Research

Dominik von Jan, Director, NextNextBigThing

Rick Ducey, Executive VP, BIA Financial

Lex Alexander, Citizen Journalism Coordinator, Greensboro News-Record

Brian Reich, Director, Mindshare Interactive Campaigns

Andrew Nachison, Director, The Media Center

Dale Peskin, Co-Director, The Media Center

We’re less than 24 hours until We Media ’05 in New York at AP headquarters and we’re busy setting up for what promises to be an informative, lively, interactive event. — Chad Capellman

Here on the morph blog, Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC’s Global News Division, talks about the BBC’s collaborative experience in covering the July 7 bombings in London. Have you told your story yet? Read Richard’s story and share yours, here.

The NewsMarket has signed on to support the We Media cocktail hour, joining Yahoo! as a We Media Sponsor. PRNewswire and LinkedIn have joined Ogilvy PR, Red Herring, Digital Media Wire, the Producers Guild of America and Guidewire Group as Media Sponsors. Find out more about our sponsors, here.

Don’t forget, We Media will be live-blogged and podcast. You can follow the proceedings and submit ongoing comments. If they add to the conversation, we will drop your pearls of wisdom right into the middle of the proceedings. Here’re the people who will be going crazy bringing We Media, live, to the Web:
    •     John Burke, Editor, www.editorsweblog.org (blogging)
    •     Tristan Louis, www.tnl.net/ (blogging)
    •     Steve Klein, Coordinator and Professor, Electronic Journalism Program, George Mason University (blogging)
    •     Jenny DeMonte, Jenny D. Blog (blogging)
    •     Chad Capellman, Media Center Managing Editor (podcasts and everything else)

Bookmark this page so that the live-blogging and podcasts are just a click away.

Wish us luck!

Chad Capellman checking in with what he hopes to be a frequent occurance … posting photos to the morph blog though this new flickr account.

<a href="http://mediacenter.org/wemedia05/the_program.html" rel="tag">wemedia</a>

Other great companies have signed on to help us spread the word. Our media sponsors are: Ogilvy PR, Red Herring, Digital Media Wire, the Producers Guild of America and Guidewire Group.

There’s still time for YOU to join in. If you’ve been thinking about sponsorship, call me. If you’re thinking about registering to attend, don’t hesitate, seats are filling fast. Just do it.

But whether or not you make it to New York, you can still be a part of it. Picture this: You’re in a quiet bar, nursing your drink of choice. Across from you sits Al Gore, Craig Newmark, Andrew Heyward, Tom Curley, Farai Chideya, Dan Gillmor, Jason Calacanis or any of the other amazing people to appear at We Media. What would you want them to talk about? What questions would you ask? Well, through the morph blog, here, you can tell us and we’ll make sure our speakers sit up and pay attention.

Finally, as you know, The Media Center works hard for as many people as possible to learn from our events and activities. We Media will be live-blogged on morph, so tune in that day. Also, in August, we invited applications from independent, academic and nonprofit media for fellowships to attend We Media. We heard from more than 140 people from all over the world, and it was a hard decision to select from such a deserving and accomplished group to fill just 15 seats. After much deliberation and anguish, we are please to present our We Media fellows:

• Nathalie Applewhite, Candidate, Master of International Affairs School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
• Anjali Arora, Freelance Consultant in Information Architecture / User Experience Design
• Dr. Ralph Braseth, Director of Student Media & Assistant Professor of Journalism, The University of Mississippi
• Kent Bye, Director, The Echo Chamber Project
• Andy Carvin, Director, Digital Divide Network, EDC Center for Media & Community
• John Mwendwa Gitari, Fanning Fellow, Kettering Foundation
• Timothy Karr, Campaign Director, Free Press
• Kathryn Kross, Deputy Director, Center for Public Integrity
• Katie Lips, Creative Technologist and Co-Founder, Kisky Netmedia
• Ndesanjo Macha, Blogger, Jikomboe and Digital Africa
• Ron Mwangaguhunga, Editor, The Corsair
• Steven C. Podd, Principal, Nesaquake Middle School
• John Schott, Chairman, Cinema & Media Studies, Carleton College
• Elina Shcop, Founder, Kaleidoscope of Living (KOL)
• Nichelle Stephens, Blogger, nichellenewsletter

Read their statements on why they wanted to be part of the conference, here.

We received about 140 applications from all over the world. It was a highly qualified, exceptional applicant pool, making it very difficult for us to select just fifteen people. Somehow we managed.

Here are the We Media fellowship recipients and their statements about why they wanted to attend We Media:

Nathalie Applewhite
Candidate, Master of International Affairs School of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University

I am working and studying at the crossroads of the fields of media and communications and political science. My interest in media and communications stems from my belief that media’s power lies in its ability to transform perceptions and create new models for understanding and communicating. And today, innovations in new media facilitate a form of empowerment where marginalized communities can tell their own stories and reach wide and diverse audiences.

Last fall, I was one of four US delegates on a US-Syria Citizen’s Exchange program through Columbia University’s Center for International Conflict Resolution. Inspired by this experience, I am developing a media diplomacy initiative which seeks to harness the power of video and Web technologies to facilitate a sustained dialog across borders in an effort to challenge stereotypes, increase understanding and transform relations between the people of Syria and the United States. In many ways, this is an extension of the work I did as an independent filmmaker with my documentary, Picture Me an Enemy, about two young women from the former Yugoslavia which explores the demonization of the Other in times of conflict.

The We Media conference will provide an opportunity to engage and interact with some of the pioneers and visionaries in the field today, and will surely provoke ideas on the potential for new media technologies to shape the way our democracy and our security develop in the future.

Anjali Arora
Freelance Consultant in Information Architecture / User Experience Design
http://www.artbrush.net/

I am a user experience designer / information architect, and Visiting Faculty in Information Architecture at New York University.

I wish to attend this fascinating event in order to better understand the phenomenal changes happening around us as a result of a mix of highly accessible technology and more and more people becoming active producers in the media world. From camera-phone-wielding citizens that help the law-and-order establishment as happened during the recent London bombings, to bloggers who can now not only comment on events as they perceive them but are very likely to find large audiences for their writings; the remarkable success of wikipedia, flickr, delicious: all social applications that work so well, but would have been hard to imagine even five years ago: an encyclopedia built largely by ordinary folk, open-authoring and yet so relevant: you must be kidding!

I recently completed my masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program, and an area that intrigues me about new media and new technologies is social software and social networks in the digital world. The nature of connectedness offered by new technologies, as also by new ideas / abstractions such as tagging, are mind-boggling and fascinating at the same time. Today, as I sit in New York, looking for a job to sustain me, my mind is working away at entrepreneurial ideas in these fields. In a year or two, I hope to start my own venture that applies ideas from social software, interaction design and findability, and concepts from tagging and beyond to create an exciting product line. I am not sure what shape it is going to take as yet, but I know I need to do it: it is a deep yearning with me to explore and pursue this path of entrepreneurship and new technologies. Attending this conference will play a powerful role in helping me shape and mold this dream.

Dr. Ralph Braseth
Director of Student Media & Assistant Professor of Journalism
The University of Mississippi

If you think the mainstream commercial media is not fully grasping the impact and implications of the "new" journalism and media models, I’d like to invite you to the academic world. Far from being places where new ideas and concepts thrive, WE academic types, for the most part, remain uninformed of the changes and developments in journalism technology. Most of us are stuck on the inverted pyramid and the five Ws and the H. Rather than collaborating and thinking about using the strengths of all media to tell the best possible story, the majority of WE academics is entrenched in the media holes we grew up knowing and practicing. Ironically, newspaper people, the journalists who stand to benefit the most from WE media, seem the least likely to accept change, let alone discuss it. Citizen journalism is not a familiar term and those of us who do know about the concept remain suspicious of “untrained” journalists not to mention the idea is just plain threatening.

I want to attend WE MEDIA in NYC on October 5 because my students deserve to better understand the changes that are coming. My job is to help train the next generation of journalists/storytellers. Our current journalism education models are perhaps stumbling blocks for students attempting to pursue a journalism career.

Four years ago, our student media center decided to make what seemed then like a radical change and a big gamble. We had and continue to have no shortage of critics and naysayers regarding our efforts. Nevertheless, we moved forward and have built what we believe is one of the first fully converged college newsrooms in the country. Our goal is to produce students who will become the next generation of leaders and employees in the journalism and communications professions.

Although we continue to struggle with the problems that accompany major change, we have started to see our students slowly develop into multi-media journalists.

This past year, I visited every newspaper in the state of Mississippi (24 dailies and about 100 weeklies) and every television station with a news department. Unlike so many others, I believe journalism’s best days can still be ahead of us and my students are beginning to believe so, too, but only if WE embrace change and stop sitting on the sidelines waiting and watching.

Journalism education needs to pull up a chair to the discussion. I want to come so my students can learn what I will learn. And in the near future, the highly adaptive media companies that survive are going to need some nimble and talented journalists that I hope to help produce.

Kent Bye
Director, The Echo Chamber Project
MetaThought Productions
http://www.echochamberproject.com

The Echo Chamber Project is an open-source collaborative documentary about the failures of the broadcast television news media leading up to the war in Iraq, and how I produce the film will provide some innovative solutions to large-scale, decentralized citizen journalism.

Collaborative editing of this film will be accomplished with an open-source, Internet-based infrastructure and analytical methodologies that will provide a proof-of-concept for how complex investigative journalism projects could be facilitated with a diverse ecosystem of citizen journalists.

This collaborative process includes the distributed transcription of interviews by volunteers, open-sourcing the text and audio of interviews with nearly 70 journalists, media critics, new media leaders and other scholars, and then using the social software of Drupal to add folksonomy tags to sound bites, stringing together sound bite sequences within Drupal, and then generating valid XML to interface with the Final Cut Pro editing software.

I am documenting this process with a video blog, and provide a number of links with more details here: http://www.echochamberproject.com/WeMediaConference

I look forward to attending the We Media Conference to gather more insights and institutional support for The Echo Chamber Project.

Andy Carvin
Director, Digital Divide Network, EDC Center for Media & Community
www.digitaldivide.net

I’m attending the We Media conference because I am profoundly interested in the role citizens can play as content producers to improve quality of life in their communities.

I run the Digital Divide Network (www.digitaldivide.net), the Internet’s largest community of activists working together to improve Internet access among marginalized communities. DDN strives to educate policymakers, private sector leaders and the public about the role of online technology in civic engagement and economic development. I am particularly interested in the role of blogs and related tools in this regard. Recent surveys suggest that the average blogger is white, well educated and well-off, as is the average blog reader. Blogging has giving countless people a voice, yet the well-connected continue to influence policy within our society, while marginalized communities sit on the sidelines.

That’s why we’re working to introduce blogging, podcasting and vlogging to underprivileged communities. I’ve just returned from podcasting and videoblogging trainings in Ghana, and recently organized the first k-12 vlogging project in Atlantic City, one of America’s most economically challenged communities (www.acroughcuts.com). I’m also working with a group of volunteers to create an open-source tool for mobcasting (www.mobcasting.org) so people anywhere can record and hear podcasts by making a local telephone call. This will have profound impacts on communities that lack Internet access but possess mobile phones.

John Mwendwa Gitari
Fanning Fellow, Kettering Foundation
http://www.kettering.org/

I am a 32 year-old Fanning Fellow at the Kettering Foundation, a nonprofit research corporation in Dayton, Ohio, which seeks solutions that will “make democracy work as it should and make changes in how democratic policies are practiced.”  I am interested in the fellowship as the conference theme ties very closely with my work as a research fellow. I am writing a paper on how the power of the media can be harnessed to maximize civic and political engagement with a bias for countries undergoing transition. It will provide a comparative newsroom perspective of the technological, market place and political challenges facing the media, with case studies from both transitional and more established democracies.  The seminars will be an excellent opportunity to acquire the latest research on the multi-media world, critique it first hand, and integrate it into my field of study for future academic and training needs. The inter- and intra-personal conversations and social networking events will enable me to sharpen and broaden my topic-related intellectual horizons and build networks crucial to the field for future work, especially in my country Kenya.

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director, Free Press
http://www.freepress.net/

We Media presents a crucial opportunity to begin solving one of the looming problems of citizen journalism: engaging the millions of Americans drawn to blogging and other participatory media with structural media reform issues.

Too much is at stake for this crowd to remain mute. Legislation is now working its way through local, state and federal rulemaking bodies that could bar millions from access to the most essential tool of the movement: affordable, high-speed Internet. Unless we mobilize to better bridge the digital divide, a majority of Americans will not have access to the new and revolutionary media. Other policies under debate could impact the quality and diversity of content available via public media.

As the campaign director at the nonprofit organization Free Press, I lead the media reform movement’s work to increase public participation in this crucial policy debate at all levels of government. As a widely recognized blogger at mediacitizen.org, I am on the leading edge of participatory journalism. 

At We Media, I intend to continue to build bridges between these two constituencies — media reformers and citizen journalists — work which was begun.

Kathryn Kross
Deputy Director, Center for Public Integrity
http://www.publicintegrity.org/default.aspx

I hail from the world of commercial media, having spent nearly 20 years at ABC News. More than half of that time was spent as a producer for Nightline. I was honored to have won five Emmys and a Nieman fellowship at Harvard before becoming a senior producer for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Most recently, I spent almost three years at CNN’s Washington bureau, first as a deputy and then as bureau chief where I managed a staff of 300 people. I find myself now at the Center for Public Integrity, a non-profit that practices investigative journalism in the public interest.

I am a happy convert to the nonprofit world, someone who believes that nonprofit, non-partisan journalism will play an increasingly vital role in our society. The Center meanwhile is looking to build on its past successes and enhance its impact through emerging technology. That’s where the We Media Fellowship comes in.

Since 1990, the Center has released more than 275 investigative reports and 15 books. Founded by the inspirational Chuck Lewis, the Center has been honored 33 times by its journalistic peers. Under the new leadership of Executive Director Roberta Baskin, we hope to continue Chuck’s work and expand the Center’s reach, to build a community around our Web site, and ensure the Center’s relevancy far into the next century. I hope the We Media Fellowship can guide us in the journey.

Katie Lips
Creative Technologist and Co-Founder, Kisky Netmedia
http://www.kisky.co.uk/

I wish to attend the We Media: Behold the Power of Us conference. I am an independent creative technologist working on arts and media projects as an artist and through my small company which I set up with my partner. My projects have synergy with the We Media ethos as they are about user-generated content and active and passive publishing, and I feel I can learn further about these topics through the conference program.

Working with mobile-phone technologies, I aim to create environments which allow people to communicate in new ways. I use technology to enable greater personal creativity and communications ownership for my audiences and would welcome the chance to discuss these concepts and ideas with the We Media attendees. My previous projects have employed the concept of the “audience as artist,” the “user as content contributor,” and have focused on enabling enhanced use of mobile phones and their features.

I am particularly interested exploring in how individual artists and small organizations can enter the wireless content industry (a traditionally “walled garden”) through using collaborative Web technologies to make mobile systems more useful, usable, enjoyable and powerful. I believe simple Web-based technologies can be used to influence the mobile content space. I hope to learn from the global nature of the conference and apply these learnings to my European projects.

For me, the We Media conference represents an opportunity to learn about how communities and individuals collaborate online and how I might apply this to future projects, using both Web and mobile technologies. I hope to learn about how the “power of communities” directs technology service design.

Ndesanjo Macha
Blogger, Jikomboe and Digital Africa
http://jikomboe.blogspot.com
http://digitalafrica.blogspot.com

I am applying for the fellowship to attend the forthcoming conference, We Media: Behold the Power of US.  I am a Tanzanian blogger currently based in the US.  I maintain two blogs.  My primary blog, Jikomboe, is in Kiswahili.  Jikomboe has become an inspiration to many other African bloggers, journalists and writers interested in creating a multilingual cyberspace. Kiswahili is spoken by about 100 million people in Africa. My second blog, Digital Africa, is in English. It deals with issues of media, politics, culture and information revolution in Africa.  I occasionally contribute to the Global Voices weblog.

I believe that a conference such as this one should strive to reflect multiple and diverse global experiences. One of the promises of advances in new media is the possibility of amplifying stories, experiences, and voices from the South, which are normally marginalized in the mainstream media. My participation will be a step towards creating a truly inclusive participatory media.

Ron Mwangaguhunga
Editor, The Corsair
http://ronmwangaguhunga.blogspot.com/

I am a New York blogger and cultural columnist for Razor Magazine who regularly covers the evolving landscape of broadcast, digital and print journalism in this age of interactivity. As a media gawker, virtually all of the conversations on the “We Media: Behold the Power of Us” schedule are of interest to me and my fifteen thousand weekly blog readers.

The Corsair blog has been tracking the rise of citizen journalism, from the digital camera footage sent in during the London bombings to their role in the new CBS Evening News format. The conversation on that emerging phenomenon with Dan Gillmor, Susan DeFife and Lex Alexander is an event that I would like to attend and blog about.

The “Culture, Politics and Buzz” panel with Ana Marie Cox, Dominik von Jan and Farai Chideya of Popandpolitics.com, where I am a contributor, is, likewise, a conversation that I would like to hear.

Finally, the opportunity for social networking and creative collaboration is too great to resist. 

I am, as the We Media Behold the Power of Us registration form says, “seeking to tap into the shared knowledge and the collective intelligence of the connected, empowered society.”

Steven C. Podd
Principal, Nesaquake Middle School

I have always been interested in all media and technology my entire career in education. Formerly, I taught media/film/TV technology classes in high school, and work hard as an administrator to insure the faculty and students are aware of the latest technology in computers and media opportunities.

I have been in the forefront in my district in trying to establish a pilot program for TV technology and use in my middle school. My school is now wired and I am planning to introduce classrooms to classroom TV connections, and student TV productions in the near future. I also enjoy introducing media and technology to my graduate students who are training to become future administrators.

I would be very interested in attending the NY City conference on October 5 as the turn-key person in administration in my district for this area. I am a media "junkie" and would be fascinated to attend such a prestigious conference.

John Schott
Chairman, Cinema & Media Studies
Carleton College

I’m delighted to join the most advanced thinkers and makers in the We Media revolution to share ideas about the import and future of this extraordinary transformation in the production and dissemination of news.

My immediate goal is to guide the creation of an all-campus “blogazine” at Carleton College (a private liberal arts school in Northfield, MN), in which students will tell their own stories about campus life and post them daily to the publication. Students will work as single-camera reporters, audio journalists and photo essayists, telling stories with the full range of interactive narrative techniques. This project, probably the first of its kind, should be online by mid-fall, and will be a formal publication of the college.

Additionally, I am looking forward this winter to presenting a class on the rise of personal media and the cooperative citizens journalism movement. This class will include critical commentary and discussion with hands-on production. It will feature a multi-class unit with Chuck Olsen of Blogumentary.

As a long-time executive producer for a national public television series, I am developing a national series on The We Media Revolution. I am eager to meet the “movers and shakers.”

Additionally, I am looking for ideas about how to expand and maintain my weblog portal to information and perspectives on image practices in the Middle East, Camera/Iraq <www.camerairaq.com>. For many visitors, this has become a key link to critical perspectives on the visual image in the Middle East.

Elina Shcop
Founder, Kaleidoscope of Living (KOL)

A few years ago, I pondered a question: How would the understanding of a global Kaleidoscope of Living (KOL) alter the way citizens introspect and interact? What would the world look like if our combined cultures were so intertwined that each of our "living" rituals blossomed from a collage of cultures? What if we could recreate the paradigm of global civilization? KOL, a pending non-profit organization, aims to build a network of global citizens who educate, influence and enlighten each other about the rituals and ideals of their respective cultures.  Written by citizens, advocates, educators, students and visionaries, KOL will create a forum in which citizens discuss "living" through the perspective of the multitude of existing cultures.  How do peers celebrate lifecycle events in India, Chile, Japan, Russia, Spain, Rwanda, Turkey, etc…?  The KOL blog aims to provide citizens a global collaboration of values, ideas and action to help them relate to one another on a humane basis, understand the "life" of inhabitants of the world and, hopefully, respect and admire each other’s differences.

Nichelle Stephens
Blogger
http://nichellenewsletter.typepad.com/

I have been blogging for two years, and I have used my blog as a way to communicate to my friends and people who share common interests in art, book, food and music. Blogging has been a vehicle for me to express myself creatively and articulate my opinions. The wonderful thing about it is I know that there are people out in the world who can relate to me. Blogging destroys the lonely planet. Recently, I served on the advisory board of BlogHer. At the BlogHer conference, I lead an open discussion where we talked about how African Americans and Latinos can use their blogs to citizen journalists to report on news in their communities and to voice their opinion. I am passionate about blogging because it is important for everyone to have a voice.

Yahoo! is a conference sponsor.

We are very excited by Al’s participation because it will bring heightened interest to our conference, which is intended to be a major step in advancing The Media Center’s mission to help create a better-informed society.

Al joins an amazing line-up of speakers, including:

Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist
Farai Chideya, Founder of Pop and Politics
Dan Gillmor, Author of "We the Media"
Andrew Heyward, President of CBS News
Larry Kramer, President of CBS Digital Media
Ana Marie Cox, Editor of Wonkette
Richard Edelman, President of Edelman PR
Tom Curley, President of The Associated Press
Nick Kristof, NYT Columnist
Watts Wacker, CEO of Futurist

See our full roster of speakers here.

In an eye-opening and inspiring exploration of the We Mediascape, the program will include sessions on "We Media and the Collaborative Society" and the "Business of Collaboration."

Media sponsors include: Ogilvy PR, Red Herring, Digital Media Wire, Producers Guild of America and Guidewire Group.

Full conference information here.

Program details here.

Fellowships cover the full registration fee ($695) for the conference, including conference meals and materials. Fellowship recipients will be responsible for their own travel and lodging expenses.

To apply for a fellowship, send an e-mail to gpan@mediacenter.org, with:

1. “We Media Fellowship Application” in the subject line
2. The applicant’s name, title and organizational affiliation at the top
3. A statement of no more than 250 words explaining why the applicant wishes to attend

The deadline for fellowship applications is 12 noon, Monday, August 22, 2005.

Leading thinkers and innovators at the intersection of media, technology and society will participate in series of conversations on the phenomenon of mass collaboration, focusing on such topics as citizen journalism; activism and democracy; media gawking; culture, politics and buzz; marketing; and trust networks.

Program details here.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Lex Alexander, Citizen-Journalism Coordinator, Greensboro News-Record
• Merrill Brown, Founder & Principal, MMB Media LLC
• Jason McCabe Calacanis, Chairman & Co-Founder, Weblogs, Inc. Network
• Farai Chideya, Founder & Editor, PopandPolitics.com
• Jessica Coen, Editor, Gawker
• Henry Copeland, Founder, Blogads.com
• Ana Marie Cox, “Wonkette”; Editor, Wonkette.com
• Tom Curley, President & Chief Executive Officer, The Associated Press
• Susan DeFife, President & CEO, Backfence.com
• Rick Ducey, Executive Vice President, BIA Financial Network; President, SpectraRep
• Richard Edelman, President & CEO, Edelman PR
• Craig Forman, VP & GM, Yahoo! Inc.
• Dan Gillmor, Founder, Grassroots Media Inc.; Author, We the Media
• Paul Ginocchio, Analyst, Deutsche Bank
• Seth Green, Executive Director, Americans for Informed Democracy
• Andrew Heyward, President, CBS News
• Ellen Kampinsky, Senior Editor, Glamour
• Larry Kramer, President, CBS Digital Media
• Nicholas D. Kristof, Columnist, The New York Times
• Rebecca MacKinnon, Co-Founder, Global Voices Online; Research Fellow, The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard
• Susan Mernit, Senior Vice President, 5ive; Senior Fellow, The Media Center
• Craig Newmark, Customer Service Rep & Founder, craigslist
• Patrick Phillips, Founder & Editor, I Want Media
• Scott Rafer, President & CEO, Feedster
• Brian Reich, Director, Mindshare Interactive Campaigns LLC
• Jay Rosen, Founder & Blogger, PressThink; Associate Professor, New York University, Department of Journalism
• Steve Rubel, Blogger, Micro Persuasion; Vice President, Client Services, CooperKatz & Co
• Richard Sambrook, Director, BBC Global News Division
• Karen Stephenson, President, NetForm
• Dominik von Jan, Director, NextNextBigThing

Register here.

For more information and to enquire about sponsorships opportunities, contact Gloria Pan at gpan@mediacenter.org or at (703) 715-3301.

More info on the event is here | Click here to register.

Now, whether you can attend or not, we’d like to hear from you! What questions or issues would you like discussed by a particular participant? By all of the participants? Please post your comments below, and we’ll make sure they see it!