A few minutes ago we finished our panel on Blogging and journalism at the University of Florida’s Symposium on Converged Journalism. There are 50 or 60 students and faculty members in the audience, but I’m not sure who is blogging the conference. (The setup didn’t allow for us to blog from onstage.)
I promised the audience, and those watching the webcast, for the urls of the panelists, so here they are:
• Kevin Roderick of LA Observed
• Jennifer Balderama, a copy editor at the Washington Post who writes Nonsense Verse
• Sheila Lennon, who writes Subterranean Homepage News for the Providence Journal
This morning we saw a riveting presentation from three photojournalists who covered the Iraq war. Julie Jacobsen of AP showed some amazing images of what was happening on the ground during the Iraq war. Lucian Perkins, a staff photographer for the Washington Post who has won the Pulitzer Prize two times, showed images he took from the front lines. An unembedded photographer, he captured riveting photos of the war’s effect on ordinary Iraqis. He noted that when the statue of Saddam fell, there were only 100 or so Iraqis in the square, and yet it somehow was pumped up to become the icon of the war. His editors kept pushing him to send photos of Iraqis celebrating in the streets — this went on for weeks — and yet the reality he and other photographers on the scene witnesses was a fairly somber reaction to Saddam’s fall with only sporadic outbreaks of jubilation.
David Leeson, a shooter for the Dallas Morning News who was emedded with a unit out of Georgia, showed 10 minutes of a 35-minute film short he shot in the desert of Iraq during the invasion last year. It just aired on a local PBS station.
I’m going to grab David and moderator Dirck Halstead of the Digital Journalist and run an idea past them that I’ve been noodling with: the creation of a video repository connected to the Internet. I’ve seen scores of examples of amazing video, created by “amateurs” and professional journalists, that never make it to television (most often) or that appear once and then disappear into the ether (as in David’s case). Wouldn’t it be grand to have a central place where we can point to brilliant examples of video verite — online diaries and snippets of real life created by ordinary individuals with a passion for storytelling? Hosting the video might prove an expensive proposition, but a Google-like directory of video would certainly prove useful, especially as we evolve toward a future in which we’ll be able to access material from the Internet on our television sets.
Now it’s the last panel of the conference, on entertainment journalism. Blog diva Elizabeth Spiers is one of the panelists. “I’m not personally interested in entertainment,” says Elizabeth, who jumped from Gawker to become the editor of the gossip pages for New York magazine. She’s clearly happy in her job; her deconstruction of celebrityhood and entertainment journalism is refreshing and honest. It’s a business, nothing more.
Elizabeth tells a story about sitting at a table with Regis Philbin and Liza Minnelli a couple of weeks ago and writing about it in her blog “in a not flattering way” while deciding the event was not worth a mention in the magazine. The publicist called and laughed about the anecdote she wrote about online. She added, “He would have been furious had it run in print.” Online gets a pass.
I took photos of several participants, including Elizabeth, but forgot to bring the connector to import photos from my digital camera to my Powerbook laptop, and so I’ll have to wait until I return home this weekend.
You can watch archived Webcasts of today’s panels here, but it will be several hours before they’re posted.
By the way, my blog hasn’t been rendering for the past two hours, thanks, I think, to Blogrolling.com failing to load. So I couldn’t show it during our blog panel. I’ll have to remove my blogroll at the left until I return from my trip tomorrow night.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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