Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

We call out items for two lists, without debate, about what about current journalism should stay and what should go. (I didn't start recording in time to get most of the first list. Sorry.)

What should stay:

Integrity
Speaking truth to power
Commitment to facts
Accuracy
Be a witness
Balance

What should change:

Truth should be acknowledged as plural
Acknowledge the interactive tools
Drop the arrogance of the assumption your audience is stupider than you
Learn to listen
Embrace the customer as innovator and partner
Publicly-traded media companies should change their message to Wall Street to include serving the public trust as part of their mission
Less "silo-ing" of topics
Gutlessness
The fear of looking partisan ("We should only be afraid of being wrong.")
Stenography
Stop passing off infotainment as news
Transparency!
Change the way corrections and clarifications are handled
Learn from Jon Stewart—blurt out the truth
Reward people for collaboration
Independence from politics and product placement
Revisit copyright
Work more with journalists from other outside the US
Drop the US-foreign distinction

Jeff Jarvis reminds us that these lists do not represent consensus, just ideas called out from the group. [Good, because there are a couple of items on the list that are far more important than others and which would require major changes to implement. It was intended just as raw material.]

Matt Thompson explains how he and Robin Sloan at the Poynter Institute came to make EPIC, a "documentary" about the future of media. (I blogged about it here.) They recently updated it and added a more upbeat ending: ordinary citizens making media via social networks. "I hope we can learn from communities like CraigsList and MetaFilter"

Susan Mernit (moderating this session): Are you saying that the readers feel like they have an ownership stake...?

Matt: "People are bowling alone but they're Everquesting together."

Me: The hardest thing for me to explain when I talk with mainstream journalists is the sense of some sites being ours and others being theirs: CraigsList, Wikipedia, even Google feel like ours, no matter how irrationally.

Merrill Brown: I used to feel that way about my hometown paper. I wonder if a paper-based medium can recapture that...

Jay: People used to think of it as our newspaper. Now it's the newspaper. That's because journalists have sought authority by separating themselves, rather than by connecting. They know and we don't. Papers set up boards where readers could have "their say" (ghetto-zing them).

Jeff Jarvis: (Citing a reader of his blog) Newspapers have to stop thinking of themselves as things and start thinking of themselves as places.

Craig: People are overwhelming trustworthy. They'll point out problems. There's a very small number of crazy people. You already have people in your organizations who know how to deal with them. Some can be turned around/ Some have to be barred from the site.

Susan asks which technologies can make real changes. People talk about blogging, content management,

Jeff Jarvis talks about how easy it is to do video from your laptop, turning everyone into a possible contributor to mainstream TV networks. And then he says, memorably: You're going to find a lot of airtime given to Michael Jackson and not very much blog time.

Rebecca: We're too focused on computers. Our communication devices are being distributed far more broadly than that.

Froomkin: It's blogs. Blogs are highly evolved. They're the alternative the media have kept demanding of their detractors.

Matt: Newspapers don't make much of the tremendous amount of information — names, quotes, photos — streaming through them. Why isn't all this put into a database?

Jay: Blogs aren't a big technological advance. But they give our blogs a look as professional as MSM pages. The most interesting tech goes horizontal, enabling there to be self-informing publics.

Halley: We don't need better buggy whips.

Andreas Neus: Audible voice is tremendously important.