Notes from BarCamp Philly News Innovation Conference
As an activist, writer (occasionally), and Drupal developer, it only makes sense that I'd spend a beautiful Saturday at the News Innovation conference.
The subject is the future of journalism. The print newspaper is dying. Newsrooms are being slashed. Meanwhile the social web is growing. How can we preserve the elements of journalism that are necessary for democracy? How can we take advantage of this shift to push those elements further? How can we have a more diverse, accurate, just and responsive media? What are the social and technological configurations that can get us there?
My experience in community journalism and Drupal:
Some notes from the conference:
Hyperlocal news enterprises
Hyperlocal news sites are cool. These are both hyperlocal news sites that serve small towns in New Jersey.
Knight grant funded community journalism effort in Chicago. A social justice oriented enterprise (im told) that trains community members to report and publish their news:
Newspapers Engaging with Communities
The folks at Philly.com are also cool. During their presentation Wendy Warren (Editor) cracked the egg of the the relationship between Philly.com and the mediasphere surrounding it. She used a fried egg metaphor. The 'pros' are the yolk and bloggers, citizen journalists and media producers are the egg part surrounding that. There wasn't enough time to really get into this.
Couple of interesting notes:
- Chris Krewson reported that the Philly.com staff tweet about what they are going to report on after their editorial meetings.
- http://blog.pennlive.com/news-vote/ (people vote on what to cover)
Sustaining Journalism
Since the majority of folks here are journalists this was the dominant meme. As Wendy said in Philly.com's presentation "we've got to focus on what our value is and we've got to figure out how to work with the community."
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