Paneled
: Jay Rosen writes a great post suggesting that he, Wonkette, and I be fired from panels. He has some great nominees as replacements.
I’ll take it one step further: Stop the blogging panels. There’s nothing more to say that hasn’t been said (believe me). And the problem with these performances is that, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, they make us into monkeys.
Jay’s quite right that what matters more is talking about ways this will (or won’t) work as a business.
Actually the same can be said of the news business these days. In fact, it could be argued, that’s a more urgent discussion since the big guys have lots to lose and the little guys have everything to gain.
There are real questions to answer but I’m not hearing folks ask them.
I sat at the last Harvard confab — where we actually did, at last, get down to talking about new business models for news — and thought this should be the topic for the forseeable future: Let’s stop blathering and start building.
This weekend, I spoke with a guy who was helping someone with a presentation about the future of the news biz and we agreed it should include a clarion call to ask the tough questions.
And then, when it’s time to look for answers, start with Jay’s list of the people worth listening to.
: LATER: Rory O’Connor says in the LA Times:
Rather than fruitlessly debating whether bloggers are journalists, we should ponder how our newly transformed news environment can best function. Newspapers have a huge stake in this debate. Young people no longer get their news exclusively from the morning papers, evening network newscasts or other traditional outlets. Increasingly, they go online to find news ó and read bloggers that professional journalists deem so dangerous.
