Webolution: We'd All Love To See The Plan
So we'll begin, the guy at the podium said, the huge black blast door in the Microsoft Auditorium at the Downtown Library eased down its track, slowly cutting off our view of the lobby, and we shivered.
"I wish the P-I were here," said the Stranger's Josh Feit at one point. "This is what they do really well." Oddly enough, the Seattle P-I, the hands-down leader in news on the web around here, wasn't on the Washington News Council's panel of experts. Maybe that's what happens when a news advocacy organization agrees with the local sheriff's department that "negative" things are better left unreported.
So the panel included (pictured, from left) Cory Bergman of KING-TV, the Citizen Rain meta-blog, and (in some way) HS Game Time; Josh Feit from the Stranger who said "The Slog is the paper," Robert Hernandez, senior producer for the Seattle Times website; Alex Johnson, senior producer and reporter at MSNBC.com; Joan McCarter from progressive yapping & news site DailyKos, and Chuck Taylor, the sole full-time, paid staff at Crosscut, the regional news aggregator.
The session was moderated by Merrill Brown, a management consultant and chairman of the board of NowPublic.com, "the world's leading citizen journalism company," who kept referring to people picking up the Stranger at QFC. He launched the discussion by telling the audience (the assumption was that we were all journalists) not to get down about shrinking news holes, downsized staff, and losing subscribers faster than Big Tobacco sheds long-time customers. Why? Because there's an ex-reporter who started a site and now he's really popular and online ads support him.
If there was a sigh of relief it was inaudible. More on a ghostly appearance by Charles Mudede, attracting the younger demographic, and the difference between journalism and blogging after the jump.
Our favorite moment came during Josh's presentation when, introducing the Slog, he scrolled down and left Charles Mudede's post on "The Now" center-screen. "We don't really edit the Slog," Feit said, in what we feel must have been an unconscious association with Mudede's particularly impenetrable prose that day, containing as it did no reference to Star Wars or visuals of attractive women in stages of undress. ("monkey" commented, "It was about sentence #3 that I blacked out and an hour later woke up in a puddle of my own drool. I think I should get LOTS of credit for even making it to sentence #3.") Then, none of the panelists were all that adept at getting their pages to display, and the Mudede post kept reappearing and they'd give up and leave it there.
Feit was in an enviable position when the topic turned to those elusive younger readers. The average age of the DailyKos reader, Joan volunteered, is 45. "Anything the Times touches, for the 18-40 demographic, becomes uncool," admitted Robert. Both he and Alex agreed that part of the solution is to hire people from that demographic rather than have older people sit around and try to figure out what they're thinking this week. "We don't really have this problem," shrugged Josh. Chuck's response was something like, "Screw the illiterate little punks," and Merrill scolded him for his bad thoughts. The children are our future.
It quickly became apparent that no one had a longer-term plan for news on the web (or proof that the web audience would make up for print-edition subscriber revenue), except perhaps for MSNBC.com, which has aspirations to blow past CNN as the one-stop source for global multimedia news coverage. "The web is not a medium," Johnson stressed, "it's a delivery platform." He believes that medium-agnosticism (providing video, text, photos, audio) is the key. "Any job in journalism will eventually be online," he predicted.
As for concerns over what's journalism and what's blogging, it looked like everyone agreed that readers can tell the difference between a sourced news story and opinion. (We don't agree with that at all; some can, some can't.) But on that topic, a number of panelists mentioned that training for "citizen journalists" was a priority for them. If anyone's upset at missing out, the discussion was taped and should show up on TVW within a few days.
Now, some interesting comments we don't have time to flesh out into paragraphs:
Robert: "Some newspapers love their articles more than their readers do."
Alex: "Comments aren't scalable."
Chuck: "We're supplemental media for news junkies."
