More from the Online News Association conference in Toronto:
Yesterday the panel discussion on Becoming a community evangelist, with Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen and Rob Curley of the Washington Post (I moderated), went very well, with several people coming up afterward saying they wish the hourlong session could have gone longer.
The panel showed that you don’t have to introduce artificial conflict to get a good discussion going. Some noteworthy comments I jotted down:
Gillmor: "The cost of an experiment in this space is trending to zero."
Lasica: "In Silicon Valley we embrace failure. Fail quickly, fail fast, and move on to the next experiment."
Rosen said a lot of what newspaper people need to know about engaging the community can be gleaned from studying (or, rather, participating on) Slashdot.
Curley, who oversees the multimedia team at the Post, said he’s concluded that there are four main reasons why people go online: for things they’re passionate about; for practical purposes (to buy tickets or do research); to have fun; and for porn.
Curley also said that when he was in Sweden, the online papers printed a text messaging number on the front page and soon got hundreds of submissions from readers who submitted videos and photos of a particular news story. "It was the most fascinating thing I’ve ever seen," he said.
I did a video interview with Rob and hope to post it within a week or so.
A new community site launched by the Post, LoudounExtra, looks quite interesting and contains a number of social media features. I’ll be looking at it more after I’m back from Canada.
Blogging, ethics & journalism
The last session of Thursday was a 90-minute discussion about how newspapers should deal with journalists who blog (or want to).
In large type on the screen in the front of the room:
Should reporters be allowed to blog on their own time?
Should they be restricted to topics that fall beyond their coverage areas?
What about other personal publishing such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Platial, etc.?
It was fascinating to hear the various issues (ethical, legal, practical) examined in such detail, though I’m with Gillmor, who told me afterward, "Didn’t we move beyond this about eight years ago?"
At one point I stood up and argued that to reach the younger generation of readers, we need to embrace a new ethos of openness, of transparency, of letting go of the fallacy that reporters have no opinions and the notion that we endanger journalism if we reveal our true thoughts. Spirit and voice are what’s missing from journalism, I said, citing Andrew Keen’s comments from the evening before. People will trust us more if we step down from our pedestals and engage people on the same level.
Most importantly, I suggested, journalists need to escape from their cocoons and ask regular folks what they thought about rules that prevent reporters from having a personal blog, from marching in protests, from engaging in civic life. Most would be astonished at the strictures in place. At the same time, journalists, like bloggers, should use common sense in not blogging about their employers on their personal blogs and not blogging about subjects they cover unless they get their employer’s consent.
At the end, no consensus was reached, with many people agreeing with the idea of more disclosure and transparency and others clinging to the traditional notion that you give up certain things when you join a newsroom. Here’s a short writeup on the ONA conference site.
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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