Last weekend’s We Make The Media conference has generated more debate on blogs and Twitter than any other journalism event in recent memory.
Ron Buel, the founder of the event, has now weighed in on the sometimes-heated conversation. But since the conference site doesn’t have a comments section, we asked Buel if we could repost his thoughts here. We invite you to share your responses to Ron’s words here in our comments thread; we’ll make sure they get heard.
More than 150 people came and went from our one-day conference at the U of O Center in the renovated White Stag Building. More than 50 stayed to the very end.
Never the Twain Shall Meet. Old White Guys who believe in traditional journalistic values – thinking, reporting, open-mindedness, ethics, that kind of old-fashioned thing – and technology-hip independent young journalists twittering away as the discussion ensued, even though it is they, not the Old White Guys, who will make the new reality of journalism happen in the digital age, or not.
The room was divided, and the action was divided. No one did a lot of listening to the other group, nor was there much effort to try to come together. Who would want to identify with the tweeters and their 140 characters that sound, from a distance, like those mean notes we used to pass to one another in the classrooms of our youth. Who would want to identify, on the other hand, with the grey-haired old fogeys in their golf sweaters, who don’t know a Facebook wall from a tweet, who just don’t understand the digital age. The old white guys (and gals) who are worried about what will happen to our democracy went one way, and the critical technology-hip independent young journalists went another way.
Three work groups were set up by motion of the whole body together – the two filled (somewhat) with old folks, focused on investigative reporting and saving traditional journalism values in Portland. They have more than 25 people who are working together on objectives, strategies and action plans. Plans like raising money, like thinking through start-up strategies, like liaison with OPB and the community media folks. Open follow-up meetings are set on December 8 and December 15 for the two work groups. There will be an effort to communicate between the two groups, now working independently, and perhaps they will join forces, perhaps not. Contact eharris@opb.org or ronb@donavoncards.com if you want to participate in either group or both.
What the independent, modern young journalists will be doing is not known by me, an old white guy. Will there be a concerted effort to establish a “News Incubator”? “An online and physical meeting space to foster collaboration among professional journalists and encourage innovation,” in the words of the motion which passed the whole group overwhelmingly. Sounds like a neat idea to me, one the planning committee of this conference would likely want to help to materialize. But getting ultra-independent bloggers and freelancers to work together and make this happen may not be unlike herding cats. Reaching out to others unlike ourselves is even tougher for us un-cool old white guys, because we’re so obviously set in our mainstream ways.
There was a fourth innovative motion that passed the group aimed at creating a state-level public records dissemination organization. This new team would gather hard-to-find records into a searchable database and make them available through a staff of 8-11 people. Revenue would be subscriptions, pay per document, pay for specific research and pay for subject-specific alerts. While people liked the idea in the plenary session, no one showed up to the work group, except the entrepreneur who proposed the good idea.
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Sounds to me like any group of people who think their way is best. Never listening to wisdom from either side. Well, just the way the world is working.
I posted this to Facebook over the weekend. I didn’t think the split between two groups was surprising. The cultural split between Baby Boomers and everyone else is present in every aspect of American life. I was more struck by what everyone in the room agreed upon–and ignored….
The most startling thing about the conversation at Saturday’s We Make The Media event was the amount of time spent discussing the internet, the creation of web sites and the development of social media sites like Twitter.
Why didn’t we talk about producing stories?
There seemed to be a pair of shared assumptions: that print was dead, and that we didn’t really know how to cope.
Radical thought: print’s not dead, and if it does die (which it won’t) it won’t matter much.
Stories were told before writing existed, before the printing press and before the paperback.
The question of how we get good stories in front of people, powerful stories that force them to reconsider their world, is a secondary one.
First we need the stories.
If there’s a critique that sticks to the media environment in the U.S. today it’s that too much redundant, ham-fisted schlock is bogging down the machine (thanks, Gawker Media), making it tricky to find the gems in the rough.
Newspapers like the New York Times force readers to scan their eyes past stories of import that they might not otherwise read. The same isn’t true of the Times’ web site, which is more self-selecting.
Without a print product, any newsroom will have a hard time getting people’s attention.
Take a look at Steve Woodward’s example, The Lund Report.
As Steve Tweeted: “TheLundReport.com is truth-squadding Oregon health insurer claims, but what good is it if no one knows about it?”
If the goal is to create a miniature ProPublica in Portland (I thought it was strange that so many people danced around the notion — kudos to Emily Harris from OPB for putting the chips in), we need to be sure the mission is to write stories with high impact that people are forced to notice.
It’s not enough to aggregate state paychecks and list the top 10. The reporters will have to find out how the top earners got there, what the story behind their ascendancy is and what (if any) corrupt hands helped them on their way.
Without a print product, it will be difficult to build a brand and a following. That can be done online with the utilization of Twitter and Facebook, and through co-publishing. But no amount of marketing can sell boring journalism. The stuff needs to be riveting and powerful.
I wish the gathering of writers, photographers and broadcasters had dispensed with the notion that they were specialized tech geeks as quickly as they dispensed with the notion that they could actually make money by producing good journalism.
Doffing the idea that journalists will create the next Twitter could have focused the conversation on what journalists do well: tell stories.
Our group would really welcome help from the planning committee and the aforementioned old white guy with starting an incubator. There’s no reason for the divide between tweeters and the gray hairs. We have the common goal of advancing high-quality professional journalism in Portland, in whatever form it takes.
As one of the snarky Twitter Cornerites, I’m going to say something shocking here: I understand how Ron feels. If this had been my event I’d feel pretty sore too, and I would probably be just as cynical in my write-up.
That said, I do have to note that, as one Twitter commenter today said, it seems like Ron is lamenting the divide between the tech savvy and the old guard and then uses language about the former that only serves to drive the wedge deeper. Maybe that’s fair payback for some of the snark on the Twitter stream on Saturday, but looking at the Twitter Cornerites / incubator group, I see concentration on moving forward on positive projects. We’ve done the conference post-mortem, and we’ve hit the ground running to try and fix those things.
Bottom line, the conference had a lot of pitfalls and a lot of friction, but there’s no reason we can’t make something good from that friction, and just because there’s some major cultural gulfs between each side doesn’t mean we don’t have common goals or that we won’t occasionally cross paths and efforts to achieve them.
So I want to end it with this. I want to thank Ron Buel and Joe Smith and everyone at We Make The Media. The event may have been rocky and it may not have been what you originally wanted, but good things are coming from it, things that might not have happened without your efforts. Sure we may bitch and snark at times, but it was still a step forward. Don’t confuse our criticisms with a lack of awareness of that fact.
I’m going to dive right into Ron’s assertion that only the old farts are worried about democracy and “traditional journalistic values” — simply put, it’s a tad offensive (and I’m over 40!). EVERYONE is looking to chart a more stable, confident course through a murky, uncertain future.
What’s different, IMO, is that the techo-hip are focused on what’s cheap and within reach, and the “Old White Guys” are focused on solutions that are extremely difficult to implement. There is, I think we can agree, some urgency to this issue, and the more progress made, the better.
Any startup faces one unavoidable truth: at first, you will get it wrong. Either you’re totally off the mark and radically change direction, or you’re busy with continuous incremental improvements. In both cases, you will launch with an extremely imperfect product.
The trick is to embrace that reality, understand that there are customers who are happy to help you improve your product, and launch something — anything — as soon as possible, and start learning.
Given the availability of near zero-cost digital tools for production (text, audio and video), distribution and marketing there’s an opportunity to hit the ground running immediately.
If you’re serious about charting the “future of Portland media,” which clearly is going to require a lot of training, experimentation and growth in all aspects of the business — not the least of which is how to generate revenues — starting out with anything but the cheapest and most powerful toolbox (yup, the digital one) is, IMO, irresponsible.
Alex – thanks for showing some appreciation for the work Ron & the rest of the WMTM conference put in – since I’ve organized conferences myself, I know how it can sting when it feels like people are in ‘complain-only’ mode.
Tim – you speak for me as well. It’s not an either-or issue. I care deeply about democracy *and* I believe that digital tools will be SOP for whatever modern journalism evolves into, for example. While these two values may not live in harmony, they also don’t *have* to compete with each other, nor should they be perceived as such.
Finally, I’m still getting a kick out of being a hipster technology rabble-rouser, just because I use Twitter. (I’m *47* years old, damn it!) But I also don’t think you can use age as an excuse, either – the incubator group isn’t having their discussions in super-secret, and you don’t need an engraved invitation to participate. You just need to follow along via email – a technology that’s accessible to almost all, in this day and age.
Because it’s inline with both Alex and Tim’s remarks, I wanted to point to Michael Andersen’s comment at Nozzl Media. I think he nails the idea that the battle that some saw happening, didn’t exist.
Hey, thanks for the nod, Abraham. And good points, Alex, Tim, Betsy, others.
Like Alex, I sympathize with Buel’s disappointment and frustration. But he definitely perceived a sharper divide than I think there really was.
BTW, I’d like to echo this from Tim. It’s a great business-related point that helps push past the name-calling and into substantive matters. It concisely hits an important substantive disagreement in the room Saturday. I hope, if Ron ever responds to this thread, he’ll address it.
I only know about this event from the tidbits I’ve gleaned from the web, but the impression I’ve been picking up is that the problem here is the same as it has been across our economy. That problem is that the ways we have done things for so long in business are less effective than flipping a coin, but because the times were good we could afford to be really bad at business and congratulate ourselves on how smaht we all were at the same time. This applies to government as well. Now that times are not so good our superstitious rituals don’t work anymore and so we do dance the economic rain dance harder. Because we all thought we were so smart, we never bothered to check to see if we were right, or to see if there was a better way to do things. As Walt Kelly said through Pogo so many years ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
I agree with the others in their support of Buel and the organizers of the conference. As one professional (employed) journalist said after the conference, “It’s hard to convince a room full of skeptics. Reporters are paid to be skeptical.”
So it’s a tough go for anyone who tries to get something new off the ground, because, in my view, faith (or hope) is necessary to any new venture that is trying to be grassroots. A big public process is always going to draw a lot of fire, especially when it involves reporters and journalist who are use to putting others in the crosshairs.
I’m glad to see that through the initial and immediate critique there might be some momentum building. Ultimately if its a grassroots approach that Portland is going to take towards addressing the current crisis of journalism it’s going to take a whole lot of people to pull it off. Those of us who believe that journalism and the fourth estate are essential for democracy need to stick together other wise entropy may win the day.
Thanks for the words of encouragement from those who offered them above.
What needs to be done in Portland, IMHO, is something that IS very difficult to achieve. In the last dozen years since leaving Nike, I’ve been involved in several entrepreneurial efforts. Putting together something new for Portland that makes a difference will involve months of hard work by many — before start-up. People will want to get paid for their journalism, and money has to be raised to that end. It’s true that publishing on the Internet is much less expensive than printing on dead trees and trucking them around. So if you talk to Kramer at MinnPost or Donohue & Lewis at Voice of San Diego, you discover that almost their whole budgets go into salaries, and they both are spending more than $1 million a year on staff, Kramer in his second year and Donohue and Lewis in their fourth in San Diego. I see where my friend David Brewster of Crosscut in Seattle is starting his non-profit with about $250,000, including $100,000 from Gates’ Foundation — that’s not enough in my opinion.
What I like about Voice of San Diego is that it asks to be judged on its work, on the quality of its investigative and enterprise reporting. That’s what I think should happen in whatever comes out of this conference in Portland. I know there were a lot of quiet people who were present at the conference who are bloggers and freelancers and who love the independence of doing their own journalism, or perhaps they were recently laid off or took buy-outs, or were recent graduates from J School. People who love the craft should be MOST interested in finding a way for the community to fund and sustain the most important part of the journalism we’re losing in Portland, and believe me, we will continue to lose it in the next decade. Demographics don’t lie about that.
It was perhaps naive and un-sophisticated of me to expect those who showed up at this conference to both recognize this need and all want to help. I WAS and AM disappointed that there are but 25 people who are working forward on the two groups going for the creation of a new entity to do this work. I fully support, however, the creation of an incubator and the “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach, and would like to help however I can in that lower-cost, more immediate effort. In my mind, funding is needed both places.
I know a big, new democratically-created non-profit entity coming out of an open public conference is more than a little idealistic, and that the conference was frustrating to more than me.
Even though I don’t like most of the journalism practiced today at the Portland Tribune and The Oregonian, and even though I detest the Pamplin/Clark politics, I think Steve Clark is right in a way — we have to continue to think about how we can get the “market” to monetize what is needed. Hence, my own belief in video journalism on the Internet AND on TV for this new non-profit organization. TV is where the money is today in PDX, not in Internet advertising and not so much in print advertising.
It felt good to write what I wrote on the WMTM website about the division in the conference, but it was perhaps self-indulgent. I know it is in the best interest of the community that divides of culture and age and gender and race be overcome and minimized wherever possible. It would be miraculous to see young and old come together to do the right things in Portland. I much admire the Bus Project where this actually happens.
Incidentally, Joe Smith and I are not baby boomers like the 47-year-old who writes above. We are in the Silent Generation. Just for the record. We are REALLY old white guys.
ha! Joe Smith, silent? polite, yes; silent, no.
seriously, if 25 out of 130 people remain active post-conference, i think that’s a good ratio. especially given who the 25 are and what their goals are. “incubator” is a term that’s been used by a number of folks, and the conference itself served as a great incubator. for me, it opened up doors that i might never have even known about; the possibilities for my future, because of WMTM, are pretty incredible. thanks for doing this and making possible all that is going to follow.
It’s a shame that so many of the comments following the We Make The Media conference have been focused on the divide between the younger and older people in the room.
I know some of the people in the “younger” group. They are hard working professionals who are just as dedicated to journalism as I am.
Then there are those in the “older” group who really do get, or are at least trying to learn about blogging, Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media. We realize the ground is shifting and we’re trying to make sense of it.
Speaking as one of the old farts, I think this is one of the most exciting times ever to be a journalist.
I agree that the “divide” is important, and something we need to acknowledge. But the obsession with it, and the self righteousness of some the comments serves no good purpose. All they do is pump up the egos of the people who said those things.
What we have here is a great opportunity to learn from each other. Every person I heard speak at the conference had something useful to say, even when I didn’t agree with it.
The “old white guys” who got this thing off the ground deserve our thanks because, if nothing else, they got us thinking about the future of journalism and after achieving that stepped out of the way.
The “young and hip” group deserves our thanks because they reminded us that the future is not just about new technology, but new ways of how we interact with that technology, with viewers and with each other.
Thanks for speaking ‘from the heart’ here, Ron. I was shaking my head throughout the conference (silly me, left my laptop at home) for many different reasons, many of which have been repeatedly rehashed on different blog posts and tweets.
I stand with TA – I think 25 is an outstanding number…and be sure there are more who will be on board once they know what that board is. Though I left 3/4 of the way through, I am excited about what has evolved outside of the conference. And, like Dennis mentioned, I wouldn’t focus too much on the age. I definitely fit into the older camp, but have been posting/distributing video stories for over 3 years on the internet and have embraced most forms of social media as they arose.
The resulting incubator idea may not have been your intent, but I’m very excited about its prospects and possibilities – and looking forward to collaborating and sharing ’space’ with other journalists, writers, bloggers, and content creators. And, it will be very interesting to see what kind of new business model arises from this new kind of journalism.
I’m really glad you weighed back in, Ron. I hope you’re right about the revenue potential for quality local video. And of course everyone would be overjoyed if people now pursuing a VoSD-like news outlet can find their footing and funding. (And I’m pretty sure it’d have no shortage of cynical journalist applicants; to herd cats, move the food.)
I’m trying to put my energy into the “incubator” project and into my own small startup, but I’d like to stay abreast of the “new entity” efforts, at least enough to know if I can be of any help at some later date. Does anyone know the best way to follow this?
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