Terrific deadline reporting, Randy... I'm just afraid the students assigned to cover the panel will be intimidated. One quibble with what a panelist (me) said... Newsroom jobs were slipping away long before online, thanks to mergers of news companies and declines in readership... I blame TV and the infotainment industry more than I do online media. I like to think online is part of the solution -- that "newsroom positions" are on the rise -- if the computers we're sitting at count as a "newsrooms" when we use them to report the news.
(OK, the "job" part is harder to come by... but a lot of reporters were never in it for the money anyway. Check out the opening to this story: (link...))

Randy,

This is an excellent summary of what was said at the panel today. Thanks for doing it. (You should have stuck with J-school.)

Good point about revising. The larger characteristic, I think, is that the web is organic -- which may be part of the interactivity thing (or may not). I'll have to give that one some thought.

 In any event, it was good to meet everyone today.

 Jim Stovall (JPROF)

Impressive - both the conference and the reporting.

The "MSM", to gratuitously generalize, has indeed made big strides in embracing the Internet. But I'm wondering if it's really made significant progress in coming to grips with the online "community" - as evidenced by that horrific story on bloggers and their readers in last weekend's Washington Post.

I see a lot of new "Web 2.0" bells and whistles (I can listen to Thomas Friedman's column in a podcast! Joy!), but the basic paradigm is circa 1996. My reaction to both my local paper and the big metros more often than not is "meh."

My own and younger generations' apathy has been written off as Gen-X/GenY Attention Deficit Disorder or Bush Derangement Syndrome - i.e., that we need to be entertained and/or pandered with partisanship to pay attention. But I really don't feel that "anger" or ADD is keeping me away from the mainstream press; I just find the output shallow and dry.

I recently came across a new book on online communication,"The Wealth of Networks", which argues that mainstream outlets are genetically indisposed to taking on topics of real political significance (he takes pains to say that its a structural problem, not a lack of effort or imagination on journalists' part):

First, advertiser-supported media need to achieve the largest audience possible, not the most engaged or satisfied audience possible. This leads such media to focus on lowest common denominator programming and materials that have broad second-best appeal, rather than trying to tailor their programming to the true first-best preferences of well-defined segments of the audience. Second, issues of genuine public concern and potential political contention are toned down and structured as a performance between iconic representations of large bodies of opinion, in order to avoid alienating too much of the audience.

Presenting information in a spoon-fed, watered-down form, the author argues, "does not lend itself well to in-depth discussion and dialog" and therefore hinders efforts to create an interactive online community.

Anyway, food for thought. The book is available for free in in PDF format  at
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page. The quote comes from chapter 6 in the section entitled, "Commercialism, Journalism, and Political Inertness" (page 31 of the PDF).

I think it's obvious that some newspapers and television have adapted quickly to providing online news versions of daily reporting - the KNS and most all the local stations operate well-made sites loaded with news and information. However, many of the other papers in this end of ET truly don't seem to get the picture - they'll have two or three stories from the day's edition, no editorials and little space for interaction with readers. What is prevalent are ads. Many of these papers seem to see web space as just another ad space and ignore the online community. Perhaps this is just a case of smaller towns typically lacking the skills found in larger cities, or perhaps this is just an example of being limited in the understanding of the online world. Wrenching news out of most smaller ET communites remains a chore and the public again is kept ill-informed.

As a consumer of content almost exclusively via mobile device (although not at the moment), I have always been happy with WBIR, since they have a good mobile website. I would have liked to have been there to commend Katie for that. Jack Lail, however, has disappointed in that regard. I used to read the KNS on my PDA, but they have since disbanded support for their mobile site, or at least they had when he last responded to an email I sent to KNS about that very subject. I'd be interested to know what motivated WBIR to maintain a mobile site, and what motivated KNS to discontinue theirs. I certainly hope fitting content to the small screen is in the future for online journalism.

I just noticed that Jack Lail posted links to the stats he mentioned at the meeting:

(link...)