Jay Rosen’s latest is a retelling (as much as he was allowed to retell) of the latest coming together of blogs and “real” media to discuss where things are and where they are going. Jay finds some measure of optimism after the discussion between some A-list media bloggers and some A-list media bosses, in there among the usual carping about bloggers and demand for a business model.
(Asking where the business model is, is the way big media avoids thinking about how they can reinvent what they do. They are not generally interested, although when someone does discover their “business model” for them, you can count on it that they will jump all over it.)
I’m not sure of the continuing value of the coming together, in formal settings and conference-style surroundings, of those exploring (and pushing) the media revolution, although it can’t hurt to have those making the big media decisions listening to what folk like Jay, Terry Heaton and Tim Porter have to say. If indeed they are listening.
Jay’s piece seems to me to be a fairly accurate snapshot of what big media is currently thinking and, as I wrote, there are a few small slivers of optimism in there for those of us who love good journalism and are jazzed about the possibilities of it becoming better and better.
The only thing I take issue with is this:
Still, it was agreed: Big Media does not know how to innovate. What capacity for product development do news organizations show? Zip. How are they on nurturing innovation? Terrible. Is there an entreprenurial spirit in newsrooms? No. Do smart young people ever come in and overturn everything? Never. Do these firms attract designers and geeks who are gifted with technology? They don’t, because they don’t do anything challenging enough. They don’t innovate, or pay well. So they can’t compete.
I don’t think that’s entirely true. Small pieces of the media revolution are being brought to newsrooms and where they originally bubbled up from the bottom (a staff photographer such as Jen Friedberg deciding that multimedia would extend storytelling, or New York Times reporter such as Andrew Revkin packing a video camera along with his notebooks and pens), we are starting to see these little pieces come down from the top. Heaton’s work with television stations to create admittedly controversial videojournalists that replace traditional camera-reporter crews and change the relationship of reporter and reportee, is an example. The hiring of Adrian Holovaty, as editor of editorial innovations for the Washington Post, is another. The top-down driven change in Greensboro at the News-Record is a third. And there are more.
Jay and those at the conflab who said big media as a singular entity isn’t good at innovation are right, of course. But individual parts of it are, in ways small and large. And, if the pattern of past media sea changes is any indication, at some point, some maverick is going to stitch these small experiments together and unleash something major into the mediascape (think CNN, think USA Today) and the stampede will be on.
UPDATE: Tim Porter adds his impressions and reactions to the conference. So does Terry Heaton.
TAGS: JAY ROSEN, BLOGGING, JOURNALISM, RETHINKING MEDIA
