Media conference data dump

Fortunately other people have more energy than I do today... like David Weinberger, who has live blogged session 1, session 2, session 3, and session 4.  The Media Center people have also live blogged the whole thing here. Why duplicate their work? ;-)

My highlights:

Bill Weiss, CEO of the Promar Group, echoed something John Palfrey said at the BJC conference. "Since the age of the caveman," he said, "most change comes from the edge of the radar." In other words, the real innovation and revolutionary new ideas are coming from users and media practitioners (professional and non) who are out in the trenches doing stuff and figuring out new ways what they want to do.. not necessarily thinking about the huge grand scheme of things. (In other words, they are the kinds of people who will not be at these conferences...)

A number of people pointed out that news companies are horrible at technological innovation, because they are not structured to innovate. They're structured to keep doing the same thing. They have no good mechanisms for experimentation - R&D or "product development" as they would say in the tech industry. News companies are also really bad at collaboration - not only internally, but cross-industry.

Gem of the day from Jeff Jarvis: Online news sites should stop thinking of themselves as "things" and more as "places."   

Self-effacing comment of the day from Craig Newmark of Craigslist: "I've only ever had one idea."

Jan Schaffer of the J-lab points out that there should be a market and a demand for good, original journalism. Problem is, most professional news media do way too much "me too" journalism: duplicating the same stories and not doing truly original, investigative work.

My main beef: The question of whether "mainstream media" will survive, or whether it should survive, or in what form, or how, is irrelevant. I don't care. I'm sick of arguments about that.
What I care about is whether journalism - the process of hunting down factual information and verifying it - survives and thrives somewhere, somehow.

Technorati tags: whosenews, media.

Comments

[Jon Garfunkel]

"Problem is, most professional news media do way too much 'me too' journalism: duplicating the same stories and not doing truly original, investigative work."

It would be nice to study this quantitatively-- analyze both old and new media. Some more details in Media Architecture Research Questions.

[Jon Garfunkel]

regarding Jarvis's "gem," it sounds so, oh, ten years ago. Remember cyberspace? It's still there. Nonetheless, I'm waiting for newyorker.com to become more of a place and less of a thing.

[Ruby Sinreich]

Your beef is well-put and right on track, Rebecca!

[Alvena]

Your site is very interesting and helpful.

[Lynda]

Good Job ...Well done