The Philadelphia Experiment
For the first time in decades, major U.S. metropolitan newspapers are being sold by a chain to local owners. At the same time, a working group of citizens in the city where American Independence sprang are considering what the next news organization will look like. On Thurs., July 29, 2007, a group of Philadelphia editors and bloggers engaged in a 90-minute teleconference with MGP2006 participants in Amherst.
4:40 – Densmore What you see is a live video conference between the University of Massachusetts campus in Amherst and the Annenberg center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philidelphia and gathered in these two video conference facilities is a collection mostly of main stream media and a few other folks who are all really interested in something that happened today in Philadelphia.
12:35 Warren One of the thing we all seem to be more interested in talking about in our little group is repairing local news and remaking local news and one of the things that we tried to do when we got together in October is to imagine local news without print.
15:15 A reporter who’s working at a paper is not going out to get information on a 900 word story they’re going out as an info gatherer. Their going out with a minidisk recorder and tier going out possibly with, not a hi-def cam but some kind of video camera and they have a good knowledge of online databases.
16:20 – Amy Webb
I don’t think that people don’t want to learn to use this stuff, I think that they need to be approached so that they themselves are motivated to want to use…. Whenever you talk about something, I immediately want to try out whatever that is… It requires somebody like him or somebody similar to come in and make that stuff accessible and also investing in the right technology. You cannot send people out with little Olympus 300 recorders and expect that they’re going to work.
16:55 – Carl Martino I don’t think that the Internet is necessarily a different medium like radio or like television where it’s just a question of publishing content in a different format that fits the medium. Tim O’Reilly coined this the architecture of participation before he coined the term Web 2.0 and he used it in regard to software in the piece in regard to the internet in I think back in 2003. That’s what the internet really is and what it represents it’s a participatory environment and the people that are using that environment have an expectation to participate. So when information is posted to the internet its not information that is frozen in time, its alive and people expect some level of opportunity to work with that information beyond just reading or interacting with it, but maybe molding it and reusing it in some other way.
18:00 – Martino That’s where news media, in my opinion, needs to invest in, is in tools that enable editors to actually interact, not with the audience because the audience isn’t the audience anymore, but interact with their participant. People who are reading and wanting to participate in the news experience.
33:57 – Wendy Warren The Daily news just hosted a forum on Casinos in Philedlphia, we’re about to get slot parlors, and it’s a terrible idea, its just going to look awful…. We hosted a forum on this and covered it, but our coverage was very minimal compared to what the independent media did. We invited a lot of the local bloggers, we invited a lot of local independent media. We sponsored the event, everybody covered it then everybody linked to everybody’s coverage and commented on each others coverage and it was just amazing. (34:20)
Martino – 36:00 Everyday you hear this journalists vs. bloggers discussion occurring when that discussion shouldn’t… it’s a silly and distracting argument between two groups of people that aren’t as dissimilar as people want to think, and want to do their best to serve their communities.
49:55 – Webb My point is this idea of pushing content out and getting stuff back, I mean, that’s what we’re fundamentally talking about. Unfortunately we’re all locked into this concept that blogging and podcasting like there’s nothing else you can do with technology.
51:00 – Warren We are doing 2 things at the same time: we are dreaming of a future that does not exist at the same time that we’re practicing the reality that we’ve got.
1:20:35 – Amy Webb But it’s the message, not the medium. We need to start thinking beyond a separation between what is newspaper, what is magazine, what is television. We need to think of ourselves as information brokers. ….. is what matters. (120:57)