In no particular order, these are the things I’m looking forward to discussing at BarCamp NewsInnovation Portland tomorrow:
What is journalism? Every conversation starts with a foundation, or core premises, and I don’t believe we’ve gotten to that point yet in this shindig about newspapers dying. Considering it’s a fundamental paradigm shift we’re going though, I think it’s going to be important to start at square one and build up.
The model for the ideal digital news organization. There’s a lot of ideas bouncing around as to how newsrooms should change, what the business models are, and what their websites should look like. It would be really sweet to come up with a master list of all of these ideas (and then have someone experiment with them…)
Transparency for building trust. The first group to take the concept of an “open source organization” and apply it to journalism wins five dollars. I’d enjoy covering strategies and techniques (a la the CoPress Team Blog) for completely opening a news organization.
If you can’t make it, we’ll be livestreaming and liveblogging the whole day long. It will be epic.
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Nice ideas. Something I’ve thought of that kind of fits under the “model for the ideal digital news organization” is this:
Working with the assumption that a news org. needs advertising just how much should the news orient itself toward attracting advertising? Disregarding the desires of advertisers probably isn’t good for drawing revenue and sustaining oneself, but creating such worthless sections as “Travel” and “Dining & Wine” that cater toward businesses doesn’t make a lot of sense either. Looking at those sections of the NY Times it seems as though they’re more about product placement than news.
Just a thought. Enjoy tomorrow, sorry I can’t make it.
Daniel, I would love at one of your meetings is all of you discussed how we can start getting the kind of ad revenue from the Internet that we did from print. I’m convinced the best ideas for this will come from people like you who grew up with computers, aren’t hindered by the print-only past and so eagerly enter the future.