The Evolution of Journalism

Tonight I attended Mediabistro.com’s panel on “The Evolution of Journalism”.  About half of the attendees were journalists and the panel was moderated by Joshua Benton from Harvard University.

A lot of the discussion centered on free versus paid, content aggregation versus content production, and the last moderated question was around the future of newspapers in 2 years.

Here are my favorite soundbites from the 3 panelists:

Bob Buderi, Xconomy

• It’s about the quality of the audience not the traffic numbers
• We get a lot of traffic just by linking to good Boston Globe stories
• In 2 years the newspaper industry will still be in turmoil
• Death of the printed newspaper is exaggerated
• We’ll see more specialization – only very few can be broad and general
• We’ll see more partnerships and collaborations
• One of the beautiful things about media is people are coming up with all sorts of interesting ways to monetize and grow

Bob Kempf, Boston.com

• “Free” counterparts will rise up, aggregators will rise up
• What are we doing that’s not replaceable by citizen journalism?
• There is as much journalism in curation of content as there is in producing it in the first place
• Newspapers have been aggregating content for over 100 years
• Everyone wins with content aggregation because of the traffic it drives
• The Huffington Post has done a terrific job balancing original content production vs. aggregation
• Newspapers will, I hope and pray, they all exist [in 2 years] and will be more reliant on their digital platforms
• True platform convergence will start to happen (video, mobile, devices, kindle, etc.)
• News organizations will be smaller and far more specialized

Laura Fitton, Pistachio Consulting

• Small businesses tend to get the best ROI on Twitter (extends the people in their immediate view)
• The more genuine your content, the more people are interested
• We’re seeing the rise of the importance of curation vs. content production (“do what you do the best and link to the rest” – Jeff Jarvis)
• Are you serving the need of what people are looking for?
• Twitter and social media are an incredibly powerful way to find sources (for Journalists)
• People can become blind to [pay for post] as they have to banner ads
• Information, both the content and advertising, will come from many more sources being curated
• If a brand is trending on Twitter Search, that means there’s a news item up and that “citizens are recognizing a story”
• I wouldn’t have any following if I wasn’t extraordinary authentic all of the time.
• Serve your audience rather than build your audience

And the best soundbite:

[“We’ve been focused so much on advertising as the source which helps companies sell but what about turning it around and helping people to buy.” – Laura Fitton]

While the surface was merely scratched on the future of the printed newspaper and the role of citizen journalists, I would agree with Boston.com’s Bob Kempf who emphasized that newspapers must rely more heavily on their digital platforms.

And while it's hard to predict the future, in my opinion, we must look no further than the word “news” in newspaper. The act of publishing has become instantaneous. If we want news in its truest form, then we’re going to consume content from sources (still reliable) that deliver it to us as it is happening. How news gets published is key.  While I do believe there is a role for print in our future, when it comes to news content, I can’t imagine that the second word in newspaper (“paper”) has a lasting future.

See all the feedback from the event on Twitter at #mediabistro

Comments

[John Torres]

Thanks for the notes, Mike. I'm really interested to see how this will all turn out. I don't really have any ideas on what will happens but I'm sure I could about it for hours. It's so cool to be living through such major transformation in how we stay informed.

[Mike Proulx]

I couldn't agree more, John(and nice to hear from you, dude). It's hard not to wonder what content consumption and media distribution will be like in 10-15 years.

[Nathan Ketsdever]

Thanks for the great panel summary.

I just noticed Current Tv's integration of Twitter (I think they do a # search and insert 5 recent posts from Twitter on the subject--for instance Ira Glass if you are viewing a video on Ira Glass)