Journalism's Future…

0 Comments on “Journalism's Future…”

1. #1 Seth Finkelstein
   on Jun 20th, 2008 at 10:11 am

   Err, who generally has the time, AND the money, to attend such bloviation-fests?

   If you mean “How come this isn’t SELLING SELLING SELLING a bunch of HOT HOT HOT Web 2.0 start-ups here?”, why does everything have to be about that?

2. #2 Jon Garfunkel
   on Jun 20th, 2008 at 2:15 pm

   Well, this 32-year old wasn’t invited. 😉
   Plus, as David pointed out, there’s been three over the last many weeks, and this is the second one in Cambridge. (I wasn’t invited to the Knight/MIT one either.)

3. #3 Dan Kennedy
   on Jun 21st, 2008 at 1:52 pm

   Jon: It was wide open. If you were on Shorenstein’s mailing list, you’d have known about it and could have come. There’s probably a place where you can sign up to get e-mails.

   There were some worthwhile presentations but very little interaction. I’m looking forward more to a New England News Forum event at UMass Lowell next Saturday. More here:

   http://dbs.hosting.crocker.com/wiki/index.php/Sharing

   Seth, to answer your question, it was mainly academics who are not teaching this semester. (That’s why I was there!) I did see a contingent of hard-working journalists from the GateHouse chain, hoping to pick up some practical tips. I’m not sure they got what they came for.

4. #4 Jon Garfunkel
   on Jun 22nd, 2008 at 8:55 pm

   Dan (amd Dan) — I’m being silly. Though I’ll add I’d been getting in the habit of just reading this blog for updates on new media conferences, and there was no post of the sort saying, “I’m going to a conference next week at Harvard, the topic is X, and given how my readers may know more than me, I thought I’d throw out a question…”

   I’ll sign up for the mailing list. (I thought I signed up for the MIT/Knight list, but missed their event the prior week. I was working besides.)

   I think Seth was simply pointing out that the young hipsters tend to show up at the dealmaking conferences and this simply wasn’t one. Also, as I sense it, much of the graduate studies in journalism are focus on becoming a practitioner (and less on doing quantitative research, as Phil Meyer of UNC has pioneered), so there may not be an active graduate student community. (I don’t know; I could be wrong.)

   Dan G., I regret to say that I’m disappointed in your post. My sense after all these years is that what we mean when we talk about blogging is essentially this: (a) you point to something smarter or deeper or wittier that somebody else has thought up; (b) you engage in a conversation with your readers; (c) the journalism thing– you report something novel and substantiate it.

   So I figure that there still might be readers out there who are slightly curious about the substance of this conference. So give a link out to Jen Lee Reeves of Mizzou:

   http://www.jenleereeves.com/2008/06/21/emotions-were-let-loose/

5. #5 Dan Gillmor
   on Jun 25th, 2008 at 2:07 am

   Jon, I’m working on a long piece about the conference, or at least one portion of it. Thanks for pointing out the Reeves blog.