Aspen
: Through no good work of my own and sheer dumb luck, I find myself in an august group of leaders in journalism at Aspen, including Kevin Klose, head of NPR; Steven Erlanger of the NYT; Lawrence Grossman, former president of NBC; Walter Isaacson, former editor of Time and CNN; Rob Prichard, president of Torstar; Norman Pearlstine, editor-in-chief of Time Inc.; Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report on TV news; Frank Blethen, publisher of the Seattle Times; Merrill Brown, founding editor of MSNBC.com; Chris Dixon of Gabelli; Esther Dyson; and more I’ll meet.
Damn, I hope I don’t embarrass myself.
I probably won’t blog too much from the session until it’s over and then I won’t bore you with the details. Tonight was just the get-to-know-you dinner and it yielded good conversation at my table about the future of media. Before we started arguing micropayments and such, the get-to-know-you question was whom do you trust in media today (other than your employer)? There were many votes for NPR, the NYT, the improving LAT, with nods to the Internet and — surprise, surprise — not a single vote for FoxNews; interpret that as you will, and I know you will. My answer was, for me, predictable: I said I have learned to trust the voice and judgment of my fellow citizens.
Saturday morning, I’ll give a brief spiel on technology and the newsroom and I plan to concentrate on citizens’ media; the new speed of receiving and delivering news; the ubiquity of the distribution of news (read: rss, mobile, broadband); the new architecture of information (namely, we now search and link; we used to wait for the news to come to us and now the news waits for us to come to it); and, most important, the new culture of transparency that demand transparency from media. I’ll let you know how it goes.
If you have words of wisdom for this group — be nice! — then leave a comment.
