Lots to digest from the Blogging Journalism & Credibility conference. Check out the Bloglines aggregator and Dave's aggregator of people blogging it, a del.icio.us link feed, transcripts and audiofiles from the conference, and the IRC chat transcripts as well. Not everything's posted yet, but will be soon. Audio coming Monday, hopefully. Note that Wikinews now has a page on our conference. (hat tip to Sandhill Trek)
An incomplete roundup of my favorite concluding ideas:
Jay Rosen says "the forces of denial are in retreat." Mainstream Media (aka MSM) - at least the smart, forward-thinking leaders in the industry - are no longer in denial that the news business is in a credibility crisis, that the business model is disintegrating, and they must change radically. "Bloggers vs. Journalists" is a dead issue. We're all in this together, we're all part of a new, highly inter-dependent ecosystem. None of us can function without the other any more.
On the blogger side of the equation, I hope this conference can help dispel feelings out in the blogosphere that the MSM is dismissive of - or out to destroy - the free blogosphere. News executives in the room made it clear that they take it very seriously and see their future very much dependent on the way in which they work with independent citizen-communicators. (Note I deliberately avoid calling them citizen-journalists.)
John Palfrey believes the real drivers of media transformation will certainly not be media executives and editors or even the A-list bloggers, but the ordinary people (paid or not) who are out there communicating on the web every day - putting out information, ideas, opinions, images, sounds - and experimenting with new ways of communicating to whoever might be interested.
Jimmy Wales says the future of Wikinews is unplanned, because it will be shaped organically by its user/contributor community. It will become what the community needs and wants. It will be determined over time by trial and error and experimentation.
David Weinberger said lots of brilliant things, as usual. At the end of Saturday he said one thing in particular about blogging journalism and credibility. First of all, most bloggers are not trying to do journalism and aren't interested in having what they do defined or pigeonholed. In fact, it's impossible to define or pigeonhole anyway. He also made the point that what drives and shapes this new world of online participatory media is not credibility; it's "interest" - what ordinary people are interested in talking about.
Maybe that's why we were unable to make any headway when it came to actually defining new standards for credibility in this new emerging media ecosystem. Credible practices will evolve organically, you'll know them when you see them and they'll work. We can set guidelines that make you more likely to achieve credibility if you follow them, but human trust is an amorphous thing. And as the MSM has certainly learned, the formula for building and keeping trust is constantly shifting. If you turn your standards and practices into a template and stick to them doggedly without adapting, you'll wake up one day to find your credibility gone, and you won't know why.
At the same time, I believe you can take either a fatalistic approach or an activist approach to this evolution. We can actively work to make the evolution of the new media ecosystem as fair and inclusive as possible. As Weinberger says, the interests of the people communicating on the web will drive the evolution. But if this "interest" largely represents the interest of middle-class, white, affluent, early adopters, we are in danger of creating a feedback loop that would become less and less inclusive of people who were not in on the conversation at the beginning. Some of us are looking at ways to broaden the global conversation with such projects as Global Voices and the Digital Divide Network.
Another issue relates to the economics of new media, which are clearly far from being worked out. Dave Sifry of Technorati was telling me after the conference that he wished we had talked more about the future business model. While Jeff Jarvis talked about it some on Friday, we didn't get down to specifics of how you build a profitable and credible business model in the new media ecosystem. On the other hand, our Saturday discussions kept coming back to a major business and legal factor that has a huge impact on the shape of our information ecosystem: intellectual property regimes.
What is free on the web and what do you have to pay for? What is copyrighted under a traditional license and what is put out under a creative commons license? The decisions being made by the people who are putting original content on the web - whether paid professionals or volunteer citizen-creators - will have a massive impact on the quality of the free, open public discourse. Does a media company gain greater credibility (and thus profit) over the long run by freeing up their content and seeking other ways of gaining revenue, instead of walling off their content behind paid gateways? Some of us hope so and argue that to be the case, but do we really know?
I agree with John P. and others that while the future belongs to the grassroots, this is an important moment for socially-responsible leadership. Leadership by software and hardware toolmakers, a-list bloggers, media entrepreneurs, educators, journalists, and news executives. We talked mainly about editorial-type decisions and their relation to ethics and credibility. But what kinds of legal and business decisions will help shape the new media ecosystem in a way that strengthens our public discourse and reinvigorates our democracy? We clearly have no answers.
