Heard While Outsell-ing: Report from Media Giraffe
What We’re Seeing: Call it the Innovator’s Delight. Attend a conference of outsiders, those not consumed with protecting legacy news businesses, and you hear and see a whole other attitude. Last week’s Media Giraffe conference, held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, spoke volumes about optimism. Yes, the Giraffe conference organized by Web vet Bill Densmore brought together those stretching their necks out a bit. The first-time conference was a mix of Silicon Valley can-do, try-anything culture tempered by New England realism, a realism stoked by a couple of centuries of village-sized, town meeting democratic values.
In the three-day talkfest, involving a couple of hundred people working in the vineyards of community-oriented newest media, numerous ideas emerged worth the notice of larger media struggling to adapt to the new world. Among them:
- NYU professor Jay Rosen offered his phrase that resounded around the conference. Talking about the every-which-way conversation that the blogosphere has enabled, Rosen talked about "the people formerly known as the audience," borrowing words from Dan Gillmor. It’s no longer a send/receive world, emphasized Rosen. His increasingly influential comments are posted on his PressThink blog.
- iBrattleboro.com issues this greeting to local users: "Welcome to your original locally-owned citizen journalism site. Read and write your views, reviews, news, interviews, and more. Pick a story and cover it." You can test how well any of these user-generated sites are working by the number of items, their recency, and the number (and utility) of the comments made. This three-year-old site has gained critical mass – 3 million page views in total – working well for a small, fairly like-minded community. Innovative features include a visual calendar well-populated with local events of all kinds, and a "what’s hot" feature that shows the 10 hottest posts, comments, polls, stories, and links at any given time. Think it is just about community events, or apple pie recipes? Think again. Reporting – that’s right, reporting – is growing on the site as it gains traction. This is a model any news medium, large or small, can learn from. For a good, quick rundown/comparison of citizen journalism efforts, check out an Online Journalism Review piece from last October, which summarizes 10 of them.
- What is professionalism?", asked old pro Phil Meyer, who serves as Knight Chair in Journalism Professor at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I talked with Meyer, a Knight Ridder veteran, about this basic question. As bloggers intensely debate ethics, trying to create rules of the new road, they tread a familiar path. This is the path journalists long ago laid out, with much success over the last half-century. Now as Internet delivery, real-time communication, and citizen journalism efforts change the map, new directions are needed. It’s clear that as amateurs try on professional standards and professionals work increasingly with "amateurs," new standards will emerge – well-disclosed and well-accepted by readers.
- What’s a rallying cry of the "group formerly known as the audience" in the new age? "Transparency." That was the key point of Pew’s Lee Rainie, who said that it’s important to allow people to see through the now-crumbling walls.
- A Giraffe seminar focused on "the new ecology of the newsroom." As one veteran daily editor – one of the handful in attendance – talked about the futility of covering a metro-sized audience with hyper-local reporting, seminar participants picked apart how a newsroom could be built, or re-built, for the new era.
In Outsell’s Opinion: It’s important for media professionals to deeply understand the wellspring of creation outside their own companies. Participating in such events as Media Giraffe is one way; inviting in prominent local community-builders and bloggers is another. It’s time for media companies to take the lead in answering the questions those formerly just in the audience care about. Build new newsroom models. Figure out five ways to make your news production process easier for the public to see. Develop new standards of what’s fair and what’s professional, given the tools and timelines of the Internet era.