Chicago Media Future Conference Post-Mortem

I may have been a little detached compared to the average attendee at last weekend’s Chicago Media Future Conference.  Then again, the last time I wrote something for print that wasn’t a book, was early 2005.  People were genuinely getting worked up, relative to what you normally see at a tech-related conference.  In many ways, it reminded me more of the interaction that goes on between the panel and audience at a comic book convention (I’ve been on a few), in terms of emotion overcoming order and, to a degree, common sense.

People were so wound up, as everyone started to sit down, somebody passed out fliers about what the topics were and what he thought the panelists ought to say.  He wasn’t part of the event.  Maybe he was just mad he wasn’t asked to be on the panel.  I really don’t know, and I can’t decide whether I think it was funny or psychotic.  It was a good indicator of how riled up people were going to get, though.

The show consisted of two halves that an often testy audience wanted to blend together: the first panel was titled “How do people consume the news, and what do they do with it?” The second was called “How do you make money selling the news and who is willing to pay for it?”  Naturally, people were getting excited and asking “but how do you make money” questions instead of things actually related to news distribution.

The panelists for the first panel were:

• Rich Gordon; Medill Readership Institute; Director of Digital Technology in Education, Medill School at Northwestern (your academic/newspaper escapee)
• Andrew Huff; Editor and Publisher of Gapers Block (Localized mix of original content and link-blogging)
• Amanda Maurer; Social Media Producer, Chicago Tribune (you’ve heard of the Trib)
• Daniel X. O’Neil; People Person, Everyblock (Aggregating links and other information based on things like street address)
• Hilary Sizemore, Interactive Content Manager at Barrington Broadcasting Group (operates a number of mid-to-small market TV stations).

If you come in on this from the tech side, this is kind of an obvious discussion.  While RSS feeds weren’t mentioned, they did discuss a little about social media and search engines as driving factors.  After a fashion, they talked a little about aggregation vs. original content, but that really didn’t get very far — that part of the discussion was co-opted by what I’ll call “over-wrought print sentiments.”

Particularly in the Q&A session, people were spending as much time making statements as they were asking questions.  Common themes included:

• The Tribune and Sun-Times have abandoned real news
• If we don’t have the Tribune and Sun-Times we won’t have public interest investigations
• We hate corporations owning newspapers
• How dare some of you people write things for free

It was awful.  I almost walked out.  At the intermission, I was told it was actually an upbeat discussion for a modern journalism conference.  Ah, sweet pathos.

EveryBlock’s O’Neil made a pointed comment that journalists were being a little too “tight.”  And he made a gesture that evoked a clenched sphincter when he said it.  I completely agree.  People need to step back off this a little and spend more time listening and thinking.

The takeaways were probably:

• Yes, as some of the coverage slips from shrunken staffs, independent/alternate outlets (bloggers, if you want to make a gross generalization) will pick up some of the slippage
• The newsroom shrinkage may be drastic, but newsrooms weren’t always as large as they grew to be in the ‘80s.  (This would fall under being “tight.”)
• Social media is on the upswing
• Search engine traffic isn’t always local traffic, but whether this is good or bad depends on your perspective
• Public interest stories do tend to break, regardless of whether major media outlets are the ones initially breaking them
• One of the questions is how exactly do people find these breaking news items floating around and the answer appears to be a combination of aggregation sites, social media and good old fashioned word of mouth

There may have been more points, but I was glazing over from so many audience members making angry, rambling statements, I could have missed them.

I would add something that, perhaps, did not come across:

• Just because a publication might run a story about kittens to get traffic, does not mean they are automatically going to abandon all public interest reporting

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