We Media '05, Post 1: The opening session
I spent this past Wednesday up in New York at the We Media '05 conference, sponsored by the American Press Institute's Media Center and The Associated Press. It was held at AP's new digs on West 33rd, which, I must say, look like a Hollywood set designer's idea of what a global wire service's world headquarters should look like ... and I mean that in the nicest possible way.
The speakers ranged from former Vice President Al Gore and the heads of some of the country's biggest news-media organizations to, well, me. The crowd was overwhelmingly white and wealthy, largely male and middle-aged or older, and pretty sure that the universe of citizen journalism, blogging and other forms of participatory media, in some form, is where we are, and need to be, heading.
As you might expect with such a crowd, the most urgent questions could be boiled down to: How can we make money off of this? That came up even in my session, about which more anon. It might or might not comfort you to know that you probably know as much about the answer to that question as any of the suits in the room did, or were admitting to.
In the first session (audio here), one of the speakers either was or was quoting (I'm not sure which) Chris Willis, co-author of the 2003 report "We Media" (*.pdf file here, HTML version here). His point was that although some of us might have utopian visions of "citizen journalism" in which lay people burst forth with well-documented, well-written pieces to contribute to the Web sites of traditional media, the typical person wants to participate in some way in the public conversation but doesn't necessarily want to be, or be thought of as, a "citizen journalist." I don't have any indication in my notes that the speaker discussed the ramifications of that fact. I do have a note to myself to determine whether our Hometown Hubs approach is the correct way to serve such readers. Now that we have our second weekend of Hometown Hubs: Summerfield under our belts, I'm pretty sure that is, if not the correct way, at least one correct way to do so. I'm open to suggestions on others.
The speakers briefly discussed the geek tools that are not only making contributing to the conversation easier but also making it easier to find contributions by subject. I'll spare you the gory technical details, but photo-hosting sites such as Flickr, "tagging" code from Technorati and Web syndication figure heavily into the mix. They noted that after the South Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, people in the affected areas found their voices through blogs and "exhibited the instinct to be storytellers."
Are we moving from a media-consumption culture to a "contribution culture"? I sure hope so, because we've got our chips placed on that particular part of the roulette table.
UPDATE: (10/12/05): Per Mike Orren, the speaker was indeed Willis; passage above that mentioned him has been edited to reflect that fact.