13 points from CJR’s 2008 Changing Media Landscape panel

The recent annual “Changing Media Landscape” panel at Columbia University’s Journalism School discussed the state of new media and the direction of newspapers and magazines.

I’ve quoted and paraphrased below some of the points they made:

1. New and traditional media are moving from a period of peaceful coexistence into a ‘conflict model’.
   Jacob Weisberg, chairman of Slate
2. Newspapers will remain valued for their ‘elegance, portability and durability’.
   David Cohn, founder of the crowd-funding investigative platform Spot.us
   [In my view, each of the above three qualities will erode in the near future.]
3. Journalism will survive the death of its institutions. Journalism is a process, i.e. a series of acts–not a product. A newspaper is a product.
   David Cohn
4. Reporters at major newspapers, for e.g. the New York Times, jokingly call their paper, ‘the print version of NYT.com’.
5. The roles at newspapers have always been diverse, but today, you have some journos writing 140 character copy or less for Twitter, and making changes to stories in minutes; while other writers are crafting 2000 word features over several weeks.
6. Reference to a book, Here Comes Everybody on the mass amateurisation of news.
7. The different skills going into producing new and traditional media are divergent enough to warrant entirely different job specs. Slate.com don’t hire traditional journalists for new media roles: “People who haven’t made the transition aren’t going to make it. The tone, the syntax, the way you use links and multimedia, the way you use technology…it’s too big a leap now.”
8. Understanding new media is not age-dependent. The new media people were a smaller army, more and more we are competing with the traditional media for the same ad dollars, for the readers, and for the best journalists.
9. Newspapers and magazines as a whole are not going away. But in the meantime lots of them are going away. The short term environment will remain tough and competitive. The transition will accelerate.
10. Want to start and maintain online conversations? Kick out the men.
11. Humour and brevity are foundational to web video.
    [Okay, that’s pretty obvious.]
12. Video advertising: Fifteen seconds is okay. Thirty seconds is too long. The advertising medium is still evolving.
13. Check out these Global Internet Usage Statistics.