A new type of generation gap was in evidence at this year’s Online News Association conference in Toronto last week. The gap was not defined by age in years, but by attitudes toward journalism in a digital age–particularly among experienced (mostly print) journalists who viewed the transition to online news platforms with trepidation. Moving news online was not the problem; interactivity, or engagement with the audience, was. The biggest bogeyman appeared to be “UGC” (acronym alert: user-generated content). (For a cranky but amusing comment on UGC, see here.)
The dilemma, voiced again and again in many sessions, was how to maintain traditional values of journalism–balance, fairness, accuracy, authenticity, leadership, accessibility, credibility, judgment–amid the barrage of online user-generated content. How does one manage an overwhelming amount of material, and a potentially unruly public? Some comfort could be found by pointing to successful online communities such as Slashdot and DailyKos. In a number of cases, having a human presence–a moderator–created a more trusting and more self-policing community. Prohibiting anonymous posts was widely considered to be absolutely necessary. Other dilemmas for the traditional journalist generation concerned economics. How can we give content away for free? What is a new business model? Can our online site save the failing print-journalism bottom line? Unfortunately, there was little help with the economics issue at the conference, with the exception of one session where the audience was told to “follow the money.” The speaker described a site that had done amazingly well financially, though I found the site to be rather poor in quality and the speaker’s ideas somewhat lacking in “journalistic values.” Not so comforting for traditional journalists.
On the other side of the generation gap were the New Media Gurus. Again, the distinction is not by age (although many of this group do happen to be younger than the Traditional Journalists). The online generation are the ones who have a vision of the possibilities the Internet affords. They tend to be committed to open sharing–adherents of the open source movement (although that’s not a requirement)–and have confidence in the wisdom of the crowds. Or at least they have confidence that the community can be the source of good information–interesting and useful and sometimes surprising stories and visual media. Some of the finalists and winners of the Online Journalism Awards are good examples of organizations that have managed to snag some of the new generation gurus for their organizations and had the guts to let them carry through on their projects. More than once I heard editors saying that their approach to the online issues was to hire a bunch of really young people.
Although I heard sniping from people in each group about the other, there was general recognition that we need both and we need to bring them together. Both of the keynote speakers–Hilary Schneider from Yahoo! at the beginning and Michael Oreskes from The International Herald-Tribune at the end–recognized the need to bridge this particular divide, and to branch out even further from delivering news into community involvement. These two bookend presentations seemed to really understand the issues, and offered some solutions. A few of the sessions in between also seemed to offer some understanding, but most spent more time defining problems than suggesting solutions. It seemed to me as I sat through the presentations and discussions that the establishment of the Center for Future Civic Media is particularly timely, since one of the special opportunities of the Center is “to transform our understanding of the Fourth Estate from one focused on special, professional classes of people who have the skills and resources to investigate powerful institutions, to a Fifth Estate where everyone is able to pool their knowledge, share their experience and expertise, and speak truth to power.”
This year’s Knight Foundation News Challenge Winners presented a brief description of their projects at a pre-conference session. The ideas and projects that are underway from this group (another disclaimer–one of them is the Center for Future Civic Media) have great potential to bring true convergence and Fifth Estate presence to Online Media. While the pre-conference session was useful and informative, it was not attended by most of the people who attended the full conference in the following two days. While several of the winners were panelists in sessions, it would have been very interesting to hear more from other winners about this ongoing work. Perhaps next year…