Future of Media Summit Blog

Newsrooms are laying off staff, print journalists are being asked to use video cameras, bloggers are going professional, and sub-editors are writing headlines for search engines. Who will the journalists be and how will they earn a living?

Gen Y don't want to read papers. But some say the newspaper is the best browser - selects the stories for you to read, rather than you going online and searching for only the stories of interest to you

Currently the revenue for media companies comes from newspapers and online is being funded - this balance will evenutually change

Newspapers are not as 'green' as online?

Is the future of journalism only in the hands of journalists?
- It will have to involve people who don't consider themselves journalists today
- Newspapers as a technology will have to adapt
- Most people won't read it front to back but will choose what they want to read
- Green nature of newspaper publishing - allowing people to purchase only the sections they want thereby customising newspapers for the audiences that read them

Skill and professionalism involved in journalism
- The more likely user generated content will come in the visual form (rather than video) because making text requires a lot more work - being a professional journalist requires a certain expertise, it's a craft.
- Blogger is a columnist, not a journalist. You can't be both.
- Need to clearly identify 'reporters' versus 'bloggers'
- But, a blog is just a tool, a piece of paper or web page - some bloggers use the tool to report. Right now I'm using this Future of Media blog to record what is being said during today's panels, rather than to simply express my opinions on the topics

Why don't journalists like bloggers and why don't bloggers like journalists?

Craze of blogging - everyone wants to have a blog
That will settle down so that only the people who really have something to say in a blog will make use of one
Need to move away from the idea of thinking that blogs are just a place for people to say 'this is what i think'

People are stretched right now in the amount of time they have and the amount of information they have to absorb (like Ronald Regan insisting that documents he had to read consisted of no more than one page)
Journalists will become more required to be sythesisers of masses of information

Fairfax Digital has employed senior, well-known journalists to write for SMH/The Age Business Day (online business site). If you have a blog that has enough credibility and funding then you could employ journalists. For now it is traditional media that are the main employers of journalists, however this will change

What is the business model for the future of journalism?
- Imcumbent of journalists to break news, but as is human nature there is also a tendency to cut corners to save time
- Surprised if we see the same continuing pressure of newspapers over the next few years and no change in the status of journalists
- Journalist at The Australian says she writes for online as well as the papers. When a story happens she has to quickly write the online story - is this the future of journalists? Reporting in a multi-media world
- As newspapers driven by revenue and costs start to shed staff (e.g. LA Times has gone down by about half in the last 5 years) the quality and quantitiy of stories go down
- Correlation b/w the number of jobs in the industry and the quality of the output

Decline in newspaper market in America
- No one has invested in them for years - no glossy liftouts like in Australia
- Pressure on revenues requires them to cut, cut, cut
- In Australia we have 3 very large print companies with huge earning bases from which to fund new ideas
- Most of the cost cutting has gone into getting rid of the salaries of people
- If we go into online, theoretically reducing paper already reduces costs
- Jobs are there for people with certain skills - movement from print to online
- Police force tends to lose people at certain ages, but then they go into similar jobs (e.g. driving instructers, security guards). This could happen for journalists too

CONTROVERSY! Bloggers don't pretend to have objectivity, journalists do
- Journalists have let us down in the last 10 years or so with the focus on Monica Lewinsky, etc
- Trying to set up a dichotomy b/w journalists and bloggers, but blogging is just a tool
- Where a journalist will go off and research people, an individual has already blogged about it
- False dichotomy to say that blogging and journlism are opposites? They are just different?

Branding - you read something in The Australian and this guarantees a certain credibility for the content. With blogging the wheat is being sorted out from the chaff gradually. Some bloggers are gaining credibility, others are good for a laugh but you wouldn't base your opinions on what they say

Would journalists be happy being paid on how many page impressions a certain article gets? i.e. paid on performance

Conversation with US panelists

Is objectivity attainable?
- Values of journalists: fairness, balance, choose stories that matter and not the stories that get the most page views (we know what stories those are already). It's okay to have some Big Macs occasionally, but if you have Big Macs too often you become one sick person
- Do we all agree about the notion of fairness?
- Importance of certain stories
- Goal for all of us is to become more educated and informed about the world around us, rather than just focusing on the stories or marketing products that we want (avoid star gazing)
- Is such thing as too much of a good thing
- Formula for reaching mass audience with the Big Macs and also providing the content that will clean their arteries of the cholestoral! Don't know how to convey the important stories with this news medium of online