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.

Tag: wemedia

Rebecca MacKinnon is moderating. Brian Reich on Kos, promotes candidates by so far he is 0-14. So either he has a great impact, or he knows nothing about politics (which is what Brian says he thinks). But there are lots and lots of people reading Kos and getting one perspective. And he says "there are lots and lots of political discussions that don’t rise to the level of cable news that are being discussed onthe web."

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.

Read more

Lex Alexander, Greensboro News Journal
Susan DeFife, BackFence.com
J.B. Holston, NewsGator
Moderator: Dan Gilmour, "We the Media"

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?

Read more

Jessica Coen, Patrick Phillips, and Jay Rosen on Media Gawking. Jay is moderating. He’s editor of Pressthink, and Jessica edits Gawker, and Patrick edits I Want Media.

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.

Read more

With:
– Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette.com)
– John Gerzema (Young and Rubicam)
– Dominik van Jan (NextNextBig Thing)
– Moderator Farai Chideya (PopandPolitics.com)

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?

Read more

Al Gore Addresses We Media
Originally uploaded by MC We Media.

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.

Read more

The next question I hear coming from moderator Jason Calcanis is how do you make citizen media a viable business.

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.)

Read more

Al Gore suggested that the good old days of media were when newspapers ruled. Craig Forman of Yahoo! notes this.Television in the early days, few networks, one-way information transmission, did not require much knowledge on the part of the viewer/consumer. Gore lauds the pre-television glory days of print, and there is some truth in that. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were far more news organizations, more newspapers. Many cities had more than one newspaper. But one could argue that even with several newspapers, the marketplace of ideas was populated by the few with access to the papers. I mean, printing presses cost money.

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.

Al is talking about the systemic decay of the public forum; for instance, the rejection and dismissal of science.

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.

Read more

Wow (again)! Al Gore is five feet away from me; Tipper Gore is six feet to my right. But enough about logistics …

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?

Al Gore and Andrew Nachison at We Media in New York
Originally uploaded by MC We Media.

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.)

tags: 1 comment

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!!!

Question – It seems that a lot of the people we are involving are already our core audience. How are we going to include more people into the conversation?

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.

Read more

Brown used the example of the NYT referring to the recent job cuts and asking how newsrooms are going to embrace the cultural change.

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."

Read more

Merrill asks the panel how they will bring in citizen voice, citizen ideas. Sambrook says it a vast and critical move in big media. He notes that the BBC relied on citizen voices during the bombing. His answer, though, is much more than that. It’s about how to teach and learn how to change professional roles and obligations. Listening as well as reporting.

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.

Read more