With Chris Csikszentmihályi, Ben Fry, Matt Carroll, and Martin Wattenberg

Alberto Ibarguen, Eric Klinenberg, and Henry Jenkins

"The pictures told the story of all of them, from different planets, representing different ethics, united by a common bond - the galactic Co-operation."

"Once you find your place in the galactic Co-operation - and I assure you that it is an important place - your fighting will stop. Why should you fight, which is an unnatural occupation, when you can push?"

"Specialist," Robert Sheckley

We've had to remain largely mum on the Future of News and Civic Media Conference, just held this week here at MIT--such is the reality of a popular-but-invitation-only conference and one whose big news, the announcement of the 2009 Knight News Challenge winners, was embargoed until the last minute.

But I'd like to use this here website that I manage to thank the 200+ attendees, especially those from the Knight Foundation, for an amazing three days of barcamps, camaraderie, invention, and, of course, prize-giving.

Here, assembled, is but a slice of news about the conference.

The winners: http://www.newschallenge.org/winners/2009
The attendees: http://civic.mit.edu/knightconf/attendees
Photos by Knight's Kristen Taylor of new Challenge winners...

The lucky and talented Knight News Challenge winners have joined us here at MIT this week to explore “The Future of News and Civic Media.” As they arrive, I am preparing to depart. This farewell post for C4FCM is inspired especially by them and by four experiences here this spring:
…MIT Prof. William Uricchio observed that old media make us feel like “a passenger in the back seat of the car, howling at the driver.”
…Phil Balboni debated a skeptical MIT student about news “objectivity” at Balboni’s new online GlobalPost venture http://civic.mit.edu/watchlistenlearn/video-c4fcm-lecture-series-the-fut...
…Harvard’s Shorenstein Center handed out prestigious Goldsmith investigative reporting prizes to mostly old media folks http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/news_events/archive/2009/goldsmith_a...,

Over the past few years, a great deal of effort has been invested by traditional news organizations in making their websites look and feel more "social."

I suspect that many within the industry have moments of doubt about the whole process, especially when they compare their industry's own efforts with those of companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. These companies appear to have more resources and fewer constraints, and add features in a rapid and casual manner that sometimes looks effortless to the outside observer. (It isn't.)

However, if we compare CNN's website today to that of CNN five years ago -- or do the same thing with many other newspaper websites -- we can see that there's been significant progress.

In 2004, most newspaper websites were vehicles for one-way communication; there was no way for a reader to leave a comment. Many sites were even frustrating to link to, as stories had permalinks that weren't so permanent.

Recently over at Populous we've been grappling with a few huge questions--none of them are new but they have interesting facets when put in the context of a college (or community) newspaper:

1) What is the exact relationship between user generated content and news gathered by a newsroom?

In larger-scale newspapers, there are comments, large maps and photo uploads. We, at the Daily Bruin, where we'll be testing our software, have a readership that can interact with the content on a local level (notwithstanding the epic amounts of sports fans and alums/parents visiting the site from around the country and globe) so rather than a spread out community, our readers generally live next to each other in dorms and congregate in large auditoriums and stadiums--what does this mean for the way they will develop online content and read hyperlocal news?

2) What are new revenue models for news or old ones that can be reconfigured online?

How this experiment in non-profit investigative journalism is working, and whether it signals a new model for news. Funded by a rich couple from California, ProPublica aims to replace the investigative heft that is leaving the media landscape as newspapers depart.

Witness uses DIY video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations.

Three journalists, publicly, have been proposing new models for newspapers' financial survival in the face of Google's aggregating all web-based articles:

The Media Equation (David Carr)
Dinosaur at the Gate (Maureen Dowd)
How Newspapers Can Survive in the Internet Age (David Denby)

The tone in each is unmistakably defensive, but need it be? While I understand the fear in newsrooms, none of the three pieces acknowledges the fact that Google News has driven more traffic to the New York Times website than it would otherwise have, and only one of the three intelligently discusses Google's legal fair use---the fact that Google, with the exception of AP articles that it has licensed, only uses snippets of scraped articles and directs readers to the source for the full thing.