![@Chicagoist Editor Marcus Gilmer listening intently to old media execs [pic]](http://www.windycitizen.com/files/imagecache/logo/marcusgilmer.jpg "@Chicagoist Editor Marcus Gilmer listening intently to old media execs [pic]"){kind=logo}
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The Independent Film channel sponsored a town hall discussion about the future of journalism held at the Newberry Library yesterday. Here are photos from the event, which featured a short address from Lisa Madigan and a panel of media luminaries including the editors of the Sun-Times, Trib and RedEye, Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame and Chicagoist editor Marcus Gilmer, seen on the far left in this photo.
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Note: I included the @Chicagoist in the headline as blatant Retweet bait. This is probably setting a bad example...
I was at this event yesterday. There were dozens of heavy hitters from local and national media, all talking about what's going to happen to newspapers. Observations:
1. I noticed lots of students in the audience. I think this was a good move as it kept the event from feeling too insidery. I sat at a table with a handful of Medill undergrads and a really sharp Chicago-based reporter. Had it just been the same old faces I see at these sorts of things I think the event would have suffered a bit. Good work, organizers.
2. The common themes among old media panelists were:
-Original reporting is costly and inefficient.
-Google must pay us for the privilege of linking to our fancy content.
-We're out of ideas for how to serve small businesses on the web so we're going to try to get money from our readers and distributors (Google).
-Maybe if we create one mega-site for all our newspapers and put it behind a pay wall, we can dole out the subscription fees and afford to pay for costly reporting.
3. The panel discussion was a bit too short considering how many heavy hitters they managed to pull together in one spot.
Anyone else check this out? What say you?
I swear I was paying attention...
I thought it was great to get those names together, but I feel like at the end of the day we weren't any further along than before, though it was good to hear from the people we had on the panel. Also wish the Q&A had been longer, especially considering the younger audience. I think that was a really smart choice on their part, to target the j-school crowd.
Blatant retweet bait a bad example? I think not :-)
As for being out of ideas about how to serve small businesses, I feel sorry for both the small businesses AND the newspapers. Oy...
The outlook of the future of journalism is quite frightening. The whole idea of paying to view newspapers online is not unheard of. I spoke to the Dean Heider of Loyola University Chicago about this topic and he informed me that at one time the New York Times attempted something like this. He told me that the New York Times tried charging a fee for viewing some of their big columnists and its editorials online, but that didn't go to well with the public. Dean Heider also suggested an interesting concept for charging online. He suggested a low, flat rate for a month to view a newspapers concept online. I think this idea maybe promising and is certainly where the future of journalism will head in order to survive.
Definitely agree with the "mega-site" approach. I was watching the senate committee hearings about the future of journalism couple of weeks ago, and the majority of the panelists agreed that a subscription-based service must be industry-wide.
Here's more on the committee hearings: http://tinyurl.com/qgcv4v
For those who didn't get to go, WBEZ has audio from the event: Click here to visit their blog.
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