Milken Global Conference - Day 1

Props to my pal Felix for giving up his guest pass to me, allowing me to attend this otherwise inaccessible meeting of the mind melders. I have no idea what to expect from this crowd other than I’ll likely be the only person in jeans. I toss a sport coat in the back seat and roll across town to the Beverly Hilton for an experience. I’ve selected a range of panels to attend over the next three days, some relating to issues of planet saving and sustainability, others of a more media-based nature.
Today was purely the later – a discussion on the state of newspapers followed by Felix’ panel on economics blogging. Not the economics of blogging per say but straight up ‘citizen journalism’ economic news and opinion. And that discourse – the relevance and presence of blogs in the journalistic milieu- became the crux of both panels.
Some key take-aways: the guys who run newspapers don’t understand the internet. No big surprise there – the smart ones hire ‘kids’ to build ‘one of those’ and get out of the way. Another take-away: mainstream media doesn’t know what to make of blogging. They’re threatened, they want some, and they’re confused. As a result, the definition of ‘journalism’ as it pertains to the real rules of journalism - shield laws, the FOIA, accountability and protection of sources, credibility etc is in the hands of the courts. Take away #3, bloggers, at least the pro’s on the economics blog panel, blog specifically to Not be constrained by the Rules of Journalism – whatever they may be. This is an important disconnect between savvy internet user/contributors and the newspapermen – Journalism wants to fight blogging; the bloggers just want to write unfettered. Take away #4 – content is the only commodity that maters in media, the delivery vehicle is irrelevant. On to the show.
First up - The Future of Print Media: How to Adapt to the Digital Age- A polite mouthful to say – how do we stop the newspaper from dying. Panelists were heavyweights – Brian Tierney, the owner of the Philly Inquirer, Brian Greenspun, the president and editor of the Vegas Sun and Theodore Olson the former solicitor general of the United States from 2001 to 2004. The moderator, no less a powerhouse, Gordon Crovitz, Columnist and Former Publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
A lot of time was spent on what the two newspapermen were doing to move newspapers into the 21st century by using this amazing new thingamabob called the interweb. It came across at times as a bit of a pissing contest in so far as how to run a newspaper in the age of PC’s. To be fair, both men had some insightful points. Mr. Greenspun seems to have unwittingly tapped into a great idea – being the on-line news archivists for a city that most of the world is enamored with. On top of that, his newsroom is generating focused up to the minute reporting on what is happening right now, at any given second, in Las Vegas. Why? Because he can. His paper is unfettered by the needs of headline journalism, as it’s actually in effect an eight-page section of a larger paper. This larger ‘envelope’ is constrained by the needs of international stories, sports, national news, blurbs and headlines while the Sun, as a self-sufficient paper, can be whatever it wants to be – which is apparently to be a source of note-books out, man on the scene investigative story reportage. Greenspun sees the fact that they can position that content in even greater drill-down detail on the web as a great asset. One imagines his happy newsroom – full of reporters with great leads to chase down and leadership telling them go go go!
Mr. Tierney also has a web component to his newsprint business, which he quaintly if not presciently likens to radio in some ways. Tierney is not a man given to worry about cutting 40 reporters from his news desks if it means adapting to the new economics of running a media business. However he is cleaver enough to give his remaining field reporters video cameras in an effort to archive the most A/V content relevant to Philly as possible. He sees that the great commodity that newspapers – in whatever form – will, or should always have is content. Greenspun agrees. Bravo. Content is the bread and butter of newspapers. Newspapers can and should exist digitally and texturally – the broadsheet will not die. To the print newsmen pitched up here on their stumps, Goggle would not exist if the information behind a search hadn’t been predominantly generated by newspaper reporting. Therefore it would seem, the papers couldn’t go away. Or perhaps, the content can’t, but the device delivering it may change the economic formula a bit. As for monetizing the web, they see it as not a problem, merely an adjustment in strategy. Nothing inherently wrong there, unless you broaden the dialog. The economic impact of cutting loose workforce on the local economies of cities rolling in lay-offs of printers, reporters, deliverymen and other newspaper staff was not discussed. When it came down to net awareness, both of them enjoyed that familiar politician’s jokey style to aw-shucks away their respective lack of net suaveness. It’s for the kids, dontchaknow? Leading me to wonder, where are the modernized newspaper magnates? Where’s the Mark Cuban of broadsheets? I want papers run by folks who play in the same ballpark as the bulk of their current audience and ALL of their future audiences. The next generations, as they admit from the stage when referencing their grandchildren, are ONLY net savvy – they aren’t picking up a hunk of newsprint. Greenspun uses as his touch-point in arguing that print-news isn’t going anywhere the stats that there were once 1600 newspapers in the country around 1 hundred years ago and now there are 1400. He seems to not be connecting that to the fact that soon there will be an entire population that has grown up with the choice of not reading a printed page. Tierney and Greenspun see the monetizing advantage of the internet partially because they haven’t been given a choice, not because they had the foresight to take the bull by the horns when they had the option. Will people always want that familiar sheaf of paper to crack open with their morning coffee, or on the train home, or Sunday in the yard? Maybe, maybe not – but it’s the hang up on that issue and the fear it creates in old-method minds that stymies richer dialog about the state of Journalism, which is where the content really takes form.
Of the two models, Greenspun’s drill-down and put boots on the ground summary seems the most valid for my interests: giving journalists a place where value is placed on writing good, solid information, with sidebars, ibid’s, bibliographies, notations and all the textual journalistic tools that can now be creatively purposed on the web through video, audio, text and images. Everything a good reporter does in the course of ‘getting a story’ and ‘following up’ are materiel for digital content. Archives, photography, interviews, diagrams can all be placed in greater detail on the web than ever possible on the printed page. Great for a very unique paper in a very unique market, but can that model apply in a city like Baltimore, or Salem?
The most interesting points came from the lawyer, and I never thought I’d say that. Olsen brought up the crux issue, right at the end. If the content is the commodity, how do we define journalism? Is it Journalists, adhering to an ad hoc set of regulations? Is a man recording a candidate’s semi-private discourse –as happened to Obama two weeks ago- no less news than had it been a Journalist ‘infiltrating’ the event? What if he had just written about it afterwards as fact, regardless of the recording device? As a result of events like this it must be asked, where do citizen journalists’ and bloggers fit in to the equation? Up until a decade ago, there were clear differences in how Journalists were treated under the 1st amendment. Governance was affected to protect the fifth estate so that it could effectively do its job – report the news. Free speech, as it applies to reporting, has garnered things like shield laws to protect sources, a Freedom of Information Act to allow transparency and other ‘tools’ of the news business. Should these laws apply to bloggers; citizens with an opinion and a mouthpiece – the web - that can potentially reach millions? How do you regulate, and as such define What Is News? Not newsworthy, but news – reported, researched, considered information presented up until very recently in sources- newspapers – that are considered sacrosanct providers of truth. The waters are murkier now because what is News means placing value on Who is telling it, by virtue of where it’s presented. The internet has redefined not just the delivery vehicle, but also the very engine generating the content fueling it. Journalism is on the blocks here, not newspapers. If content is the principal commodity, control of that content becomes paramount. With the web comes a paradigm shift in ‘readership’ – the audience is not only reading, they are participating.
Which is exactly what the next panel was about. Econobloggers: Real-Time Information and Analysis From the Keyboard Next Door. What interested me in this panel was the continuation of Olsen’s points from the previous – what defines Journalism as it pertains to blogging? The bloggers on the panel were all economic experts from academia, the professional sector and yes even journalism. The moderator, a traditional newsman, seemed mildly bent on chastising the more outlandishly opinionated econobloggers for not being conventionally journalistic in their approach. To which the retort across the panel was, in a nutshell, they aren’t blogging to be journalists and blogging isn’t journalism, however it adds valuable conversation and should not be dismissed. Hallelujah. Did anyone else in the room hear that? These folks are writing blogs to escape the constraints of mainstream media. Within topic-areas that they know a great deal about, they’re commenting on the reporting of the majors, adding their own opinion, bringing forth public discussion of private dialogs they’ve had with presumably knowledgeable colleagues – in short, journalism, perhaps in very Herodotus-like terms. No one told the father of history what to write, he just wrote what he heard and saw as he set about purposefully observing. Anyone mis-reading the blogisphere as News is missing the point. Blogging is like interactive op-ed. The readership determines the value of the content. The blogisphere contributes to the discussion of news – sometimes through informed, enriched opinion and sometimes through mad rants- occasionally from the same source. It’s up to the reader to use it as a resource; these ‘professional’ bloggers are providing links to mainstream stories as well as the research and dialog around them. The power of the internet means when you read something interesting, you can find more about it instantly. On a blog, it might be linked in for you right there on the same page.
How to mete out a new set of rules, or adjust the old ones to fit this new model is something that should not be left to the courts alone to decide. If bloggers are suspect in the eyes of the mainstream media for their potential anonymity, why shouldn’t mainstream media be held accountable for presenting contracted spokesmen as pundits and experts? Recent headlines in one of the granddaddy papers, ironically, point to the pentagon as contracting source of supposed independent TV News experts in the Iraq War. There was a time that liberal minds may have considered it lucky if the editor of a major newspaper listened to Dylan. Well, the times they are-a changed. The power of the internet means the audience decides upon the validity of the content they’re receiving, it’s just that no one is encouraging them to participate in that way.