Day one highlights included Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor explaining his new project, a community site for the over 50s and how even he is struggling for funding, Reuters in Second Life and Pressthink's Jay Rosen on how blogging is just the first wave of the new "soft power" of participatory media.
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9am:
Richard Dreyfuss made an unnecessarily prolonged appearance at the WeMedia in London last May; this year we have to make do with Craig Newmark but at least every news publisher in the room wants to hear what he has to say.
WeMedia is one of those conferences Americans do particularly well. It's a respectable cross-section of the great and the good from all the big-name media organisations discussing the intersection of journalism, citizen journalism and digital media.
Later today, Reuters will give a presentation on its work in Second Life and tapping the "collective intelligence" of virtual communities, and Pressthink's Jay Rosen is one of the speakers exploring the increasingly powerful flow of information that combines the media with user-created content.
More updates from Miami later this afternoon and tomorrow, as it happens. Watch this space, as no-one seems to say anymore.
09:12 People are drinking cawfee and we're due to start in ten minutes. Legion bloggers here including JD Lasica, Shel Israel, John Burke, Tish Grier, Mark Glaser from PBS Mediashift...
09:22 Fire alarm. We have to clear the room.
09:23 Fire alarm cancelled. Everyone sits down again. The organisers, Dale Peskin and Andrew Nachison of iFocos, start the intro and say they had hoped for a spark, but not that kind.
09:33 Doing one of those "hands up" intro bits, Nachison shows there's a wide mix of people from news organisations, broadcasters, web advocacy, web-based organisations and even a head hunter. First session: how communities real and virtual are changing through the media.
10:24 Naked Conversations author Shel Israel said that online communities are very much real, and not virtual. Communities created online create lasting, meaningful friendships and connections.
The communities aren't gathered around particular sites, whether it is YouTube or Flickr, but by shared interest. Geography is becoming irrelevant. And the influence of those communities and groups is becoming far greater than traditional media.
MTV's rewards
Ian Rowe from MTV said every aspect of their business is changing. It's no longer enough for MTV to tell its audience that AIDS in Africa or the war in Sudan is enough, because its audience have their own ideas about issues and problems that they want discussed. MTV wants to reward its users for contributing their ideas and material, which might be video about a local recycling programme, for example. "We play an important role in normalising behaviour, so we want to give people the opportunity to take action on what they care about and reward that behaviour."
Millions of conversations
Rich Skrenta from Topix said the internet is the first two-way mass medium the world has seen, and enables millions of simultaneous conversations. Though moderation is a challenge for bigger news organisations, he gave an example of a newspaper site that had received 250,000 comments since introducing a feedback system. The site may have struggled with this editorial change, he said, but that's a quarter of a million comments they might not have had.
700 hyper-local news sites in the US
Jan Schaffer of J-Lab said a lot of hyper-local journalism are less about journalism and more about community and participation. They don't present conventional news stories, but more a mix of news and "schmooz", driven by the passion of the writers. That "passion space" is an area that journalists find hard to enter, so these local news sites are bridging a gap in traditional media.
Many of these sites don't make money, but, in a survey conducted by J-Lab in October, 70% of these sites said they were successful because they defined that success by their value to the community. In some instances sites campaigned on local government issues and even increased voter turnout. The same survey had identified 500 hyper-local news sites in the US in October and have discovered 200 more since then.
Serving communities
Lisa Stone from BlogHer said blogs have given women a tool to write about what they care about and what they want to talk about. Blog Her, which is a network of blogs covering news for women, lists 8189 blogs and has 60 editors. Those conversations are the real future of news, she said. And it's not all discussion about the correct way to cook a turkey.
Jennifer Carroll from Gannett said the company is reacting powerfully to the trend for citizen journalism: "All we need to do is welcome it and make it easy for anyone to interact with us."
11:23 What will the media world look like in 2012?
Ian Rowe said that in 2012, MTV will have a very different relationship with its audience. Right now, MTV decides which programmes to show and when to show them, but in 2012 there might not be long-form content. "They want short form content when they want it on their device of choice . We're going to have a lot more input from young people in terms of the creative process." But it's exciting that people have platforms that empower them to speak out.
Newspapers need social relationship entrepreneurs
Jan Schaffer said these hyper-local news sites aren't replicating existing businesses, but creating something new from missed opportunities. It pains her, she said, when newspapers see a successful hyper-local site and try to replicate that. The investment might be better spent employing a social relationships entrepreneur.
Where's our local news?
Rick Skrenta said that in aggregating mainstream news and chopping it up into zip codes on the site, there are often areas with no coverage. But that's just not right. "We want members of communities to come together in a shared online space, to, get on with their neighbours and to drive social issues home. There's a technical, social and economic architecture that has to underpin it and we haven't figured that out yet."
The end of the religion of newspapers
Very busy session that flitted around between different subjects, as openers tend to do. But Shel Israel made the most memorable closing statement:
He said the religious aspect of newspapers will disappear - the addiction to the dead tree smeared with dead berries produced by a gas-fueled press. There's a media/Media split in the room and he's aggravated that the Media people in the room are talking about how "we will deliver them" new services but that's not quite the point.
"You don't organise this - it is self organising and had been for some time and you need to join the conversation. This is not about whether this is journalism or not. It's about a human, social revolution that has begun - and you should be looking at what the media world looks like in 10 years."
13:14 MoJos - mobile journalists
The late morning session on tapping collective intelligence brought up an interesting point on the process of newsgathering. There's often an expectation in newsrooms that journalists need to be at their desk working the phones to get stories, that if you're out of the office you might not be working enough.
That's a reversal of the foundations of community journalism where reporters would be expected to get to meetings and groups, to talk to people and root out stories. Technology actually enables mobile reporting that could see a return to those practices. "Through technology we can get back to what used to happen," said Chris Nolan of Spot-On.com.
"The newsroom has left the building."
The same technology has made it harder to find people though. People don't gather in the same of places and I wonder, given that community is no longer defined by location, if the web and online communities are the new places to have that kind of presence and initiate those conversations. Not to replace meeting in person, however, but to supplement it.
Chris added that her news site business is built around Skype, and she hasn't met many of her writers.
13:20 Some of that "networked journalism"
There was also a good example of crowdsourcing, or networked journalism - the collaboration of professional journalists and the audience.
Michael Maness, VP of strategic planning for Gannett's newspaper department explained how the company is moving towards an online model of information centres rather than news sites.
A reporter at a town hall meeting in Fort Myers saw some townspeople so upset by the actions of their utility company that they were in tears. Several people, after buying property in the town, had been slapped with a massive connection fee by Cape Coral Water & Sewer Assessment company - some as much as $47,000. The site immediately put a call out for stories and experiences about the company and had a significant response.
Maness said it was evident from the public meeting that this was a passion point.
"The arrangement is we do the FOI, you do the grunt work and that builds a foundation for everyone to talk around that issue," he said.
"That is where we have seen the best citizen journalism. We have to think about how we involve people from the beginning."
He said the project is careful to avoid the word "journalism" because that word is too big. "We say help us, get published and tell us what you know."
12:50 Reuters in Second Life
Reuters' demo of its Second Life experiments clashed rather inconveniently with lunch, which meant they had to run through the whole thing again later in the day.
Why is Reuters reporting on unreal things?
Unreal? You could say the same of the web, said Reuters' Second life reporter Adam Pasick, but these communities and these users are very real. Second Life's currency can be exchanged for US dollars - and those are very real and now around $1m per day. There's also now a much-publicised SL millionaire, Angie Chung, who has amassed SL assets of more than $1m.
Given Reuters business news commitments, that seems to validate the SL experiment. "It's not just a PR exercise, says Passick, but a valuable, effective way to engage with a new audience." Reuters can use its expertise to help business people, for example, who want to understand and explore that market."
3:45 Blogging is just the beginning
Jargon alert! Now we have soft media to describe blogs and independent, non-professional media. But that's actually a pretty good term. Can we use that in place of "citizen journalism" please?
Chuck DeFeo of Salem Communications, owners of townhall.com: Getting your voice on talk radio in the 80s was a big thing, and the blog phenomenon is a much wider extension of that. (Incidentally the talk radio tradition in the US goes some way to explaining why blogging is proportionately more developed in the US than the UK.)
Jay Rosen of PressThink and NewAssignment.net defined soft power as people power. "The power we have when we are united isn't in money or guns, it is in the strength of us being united. Our world is being changed by one powerful and simple fact - the cost of sharing and finding information, of collaborating and making things is plunging. People can generate this power and get things done."
Blogging is just the first form of this self-publishing revolution, and alerted us to this shift.
The tools necessary to play in the media universe used to be owned by the media companies and now they are owned by the public at large. (I think we've been here before.)
NewAssignment.net is about the connections between the audience, about real reporting in this horizontal dimension online. "How do we bring that together so that you can have thousands of people working on one story? It's an elaboration of this shift in power."
Rosen said that over a coffee with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales recently, he said that Wikipedia is only possible because the community already understands the structure of an encyclopedia. A community has certain shared values and objectives that define their purpose.
Rosen was almost agitated when the debate shifted to old vs new rules. A whole set of new dynamics doesn't mean the old rules are going anywhere - it's not that easy.
"Everyone wants a formula but there isn't one. It's a case-by-case thing."
5:45 Finding the money in the new space
It was hard to find the focus in this afternoon's panel session on investment which butterflied around from subject to subject.
Other than the headline plays - the YouTubes and the MySpaces - where else is the money in this new space? O'Malley pointed to tripadvisor as a site that has successfully monetised communities by integrating them with relevant, targeted and useful advertising. Rafat Ali got (another) name check from Chris Ahearne as an example of an independent, successful new business based providing content for a niche community.
Monster founder Jeff Taylor is following that model with his new project Eons.com, a community site for the over 50s.
"The idea is to target an audience that no-one else is looking at, and use the right people in our company to serve that audience. It's a media play and a brand positioning play."
He admitted that he's picked a tough audience who aren't as "viral" and may only forward the site to one or two people, rather than hundreds as a younger audience might. Since launch in July 2006 the site has grown to 560,000 unique users and 12m page views. Six advertisers had put in $5m before the site was live, and that reflected the value of that community in a commercial sense. "I worry about advertising crack - you can't just spend and hope, but find the value in the community. If it's the right proposition, corporations will take the risk with you."
And for the next six months?
The panel recommended focusing on mobile rather than web-based services. Jeff Taylor said the definition of an entrepreneur is when everyone thinks your ideas are crazy and you still act on it. Even with his tracker record as Monster founder, he found it really hard to secure funding for the Eons project and has seen 50 VCs in trying to secure second-round funding.
Taylor gave the old/new media analogy of the day referencing a 1907 motoring magazine that advised car drivers how to deal with horses: turn the car off, get out of the vehicle and let the horse pass gracefully. If the horse needs help, give a gentle "woah". If the horse won't pass, take hold of it and walk it past the car, then restart the auto and drive on.
So maybe the challenge is to partner a horse with a car. Maybe.
