If the delegates at the Marriott hotel in downtown DC looked prosperous and happy, that's because they were attending the American Dental Association conference. Next door at the American Society of News Editors annual conference, attendees looked more like the patients in the dentists' waiting rooms: anxious.
It hasn't been a happy couple of years to be a newspaper editor in the US. Plenty of teeth have been pulled in the form of journalism jobs lost and a few venerable newspapers – although not as many as feared – have gone under. Last year the society even cancelled its annual meeting because of the industry's parlous finances.
The sense of nervousness was evident in the reception the editors gave Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, when he opened the conference as keynote speaker on Sunday night. Rather than pepper Schmidt with questions about future business models, delegates asked politely about the company's relationship with China. (When Schmidt was asked a single question on the subject, regarding Rupert Murdoch's hostile remarks about Google, Schmidt brushed it away: "I think it's best to look at Rupert's comments in the context of a business negotiation.")
But Schmidt did have a couple of pieces of advice for the assembled editors. One was a mantra of "mobile first", meaning that content will be increasingly consumed on phones, Kindle and iPad-style devices – "That's where the action is, that's where the growth is, it's a completely unwashed landscape" – rather than via websites on PCs. (The following day the New York Times reported that Google was working on its own version of the iPad.) The other was to embrace collaboration. "Everyone is your reader ... everyone is also your competitor. But also, everyone is your partner," Schmidt said. "Figuring out when to compete, when to collaborate, when to go solo, is one of the difficult questions."
Delegates heard a very similar message from the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger (full disclosure: my boss), who addressed the conference at lunch today. Reprising his Hugh Cudlipp memorial lecture from earlier this year, he described the Guardian's efforts to become a "mutualised newspaper", which he partially defined as "less driven by search engine clicks and more about getting people engaged". He outlined 10 principles of the mutualisation of news, as thrashed out by Guardian staff:
1. Encourages participation and invites or allows a response;
2. Is not an inert, "us" or "them", form of publishing;
3. Encourages others to initiate debate, publish material or make suggestions. We can follow, as well as lead. We can involve others in the pre-publication processes;
4. Helps form communities of joint interest around subjects, issues or individuals;
5. Is open to the web and is part of it. It links to, and collaborates with, other material (including services) on the web;
6. Aggregates and/or curates the work of others;
7. Recognises that journalists are not the only voices of authority, expertise and interest;
8. Aspires to achieve, and reflect, diversity as well as promoting shared values;
9. Recognises that publishing can be the beginning of the journalistic process rather than the end;
10. Is transparent and open to challenge – including correction, clarification and addition.
"There's the realisation that journalists are coming to, slowly, that we are not alone," Rusbridger said. "There are many other people out there doing what we are doing." Just as Schmidt suggested, Rusbridger urged editors to work in harness with those outside mainstream journalism: "All the time we aren't behaving like this, all the people who would like to unbundle what we do will set about unbundling us."
