For the next two hours, each panelist led a small group discussion with members of the audience based on his or her place in the world of new media. The groups were given a list of questions to discuss and answer: First they were asked to consider the future as both an "additive world" where new tools will be added to the current environment and as a "transformative world" where the new tools have thoroughly transformed our life as we know it. In each of these situations, groups were asked to consider, What will people and society need journalism for? What are the new opportunities for quality journalism? What are the threats? What are the best and worst outcomes? Then everyone was brought back together and the panelists reported on what they learned.

The pervading thinking of the afternoon was that the key to journalism today, in 2010 and beyond is trust. As Pat Sullivan concluded, "We have to trust in ourselves and have confidence that even if the economy collapses and media collapses in the worst case scenario in 2010, we have to know as journalists that we can go out there and we can provide a needed service to people. We can provide information, we can put stuff into context, we can get back to the basic skills of this craft".

Richard Meislin said that media publishers, much of the discussion "dealt with the failure to find any kind of economic models that would support what traditional publishers currently refer to as quality journalism in an on-line world":

Part of the discussion was that traditional publishers, originally at least, entered this field more as a defensive action than as an exploratory one. I think there was a general agreement in the group that that has faded in terms of actually trying to find a role for themselves, but that the economic issues remain. I mean the fact is that all the traditional publishers have huge installed newsrooms full of people who are creating what they believe to be quality journalism, and they feel that there is both a public need for them to continue, as well as obviously, a commercial interest on their part.

We did not solve this issue, I'm sorry to say, although we certainly would have loved to. We could have gone home to our respective companies and gone into wonderful new positions. [Laughter] But what we talked about instead was what role traditional publishers should try to play to maintain quality journalism 10 or 12 years from now. Some of the things that we talked about were that we expected that quality journalism from traditional print publishers would in fact grow to something more multimedia. That there would be a sort of aggregate journalism producer type of person who dealt with data and video and audio as well as words and could combine packages in a way that took advantage of the best aspects of each of them. That stories don't have to be told only as words. That as bandwidth increases and technology gets better, people will learn how to package information as information the way that newspapers have hundreds of years of history putting together words in a confident, well portrayed, well organized way that makes them attractive to users.

The other area that we talked about [was] traditional journalistic organizations. Probably the most important role that we saw them continuing to have was as trusted filters for information. As the volume of information that appears on-line continues to grow at extraordinary rates, there is in fact a percentage in having an organization that has some degree of trust and credibility both to sort out what a particular group of people might want to see out of the huge mass of information to provide some credibility of accuracy and verification of information, that you know it's passed through hands that in some fashion you have grown to trust, and that is a role that I think our group thought was one that was worth continuing.

The other thing that we expect this evolution to provide is a huge number of options for people. The ability to look at information in hundreds of different ways. If you find something that's interesting you can drill down further into the source information or be sent off to another site where people are talking about it. Some of that is obviously happening now, but most traditional journalistic organizations aren't at the point where they're giving that kind of access to their readers or to pointing people to communities or collections of people that might provide alternate points of views to the ones that are being provided in the newspaper itself giving people more access to being able to respond to the things that the newspaper is writing and giving voice to those things.

To go back to I think one of the things we said this morning in the plenary session, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of groups that form every hour, but if you can't find them, their voice is no stronger than if they didn't exist.

The other thing that we talked about was the likelihood that there would be highly fragmented, much more personalized products. That people would exercise sort of a choice of journalism. I just want this piece, I just want that piece. And it would be delivered to them in a variety of forums including possibly being printed to their homes, to get to the question of what happens if print becomes too expensive or the distribution system becomes too expensive. Then the question was raised, what happens to the journalistic purpose of shared agenda in a situation like that the idea that one of the roles of quality journalism is to give people a common ground in which they meet and discuss issues that are of mutual importance.

Patricia Sullivan reported that those currently practicing online journalism have noticed that many of the young people entering the new medium lack grounding in the basics of the craft" reporting, writing, finding sources, verification." This group also believed that the way for online journalism to succeed is to communicate credibility and trustworthiness to users, which makes this lack of grounding especially troubling: I think there was agreement that we're in the midst of a revolutionary change. Somebody compared it to the industrial revolution in terms of communication. That we don't know where we're going. We kind of know where we've been. But we don't know the implications of this change for our culture and our work life.

There was some sense that there right now is a confusion [among] the tools, the sources, and the medium itself of online journalism. A point was brought up that some of the young newcomers to journalism Web journalists don't have the backgrounding in basic journalism reporting, writing, finding sources, verification, just all the things you have to learn no matter what medium you work in. So that was of some concern, that perhaps they were confusing the tool with a source. Quoting stuff from the Internet without actually picking up the phone or pounding the sidewalk.

Related to that, we're worried about the blurring of the line between searches and agents and what can you trust and what can't you trust. I think this is important because these are on-line journalists we're talking about who still have these concerns, and I think the public's concerns are even greater than ours in this medium.

There was a sense that really the basic way to get readers, to get eyeballs, to get page views, whatever term of art we choose to use, is to have credibility and to make stories interesting. There was not a lot of discussion of branding or being a site that people knew the name of from a previous medium. But it was a sense of, you build your own credibility out there.

We did have confidence in the future of journalists, particularly in online, because there's tons and tons of raw data out there, and somebody has to sort it. Even as we see the explosion of information, we're seeing less and less time that consumers, that readers, that users have to sort through it, to choose what they want, to make their own decisions. So someone has to sort it and focus it for them, but allowing readers access to the underlying assumptions that we use to come to the conclusions we come to.

There's a sense that the future of the medium lies with understanding it. And Joe, from ABC.Com pointed out it's like screenwriters in Hollywood. They don't get no respect. And the reason they don't get any respect is because they don't learn the medium of film. Those that do move on from screenwriting into being directors, so if someone says I just want to be a writer, don't bother me with this HTML, don't bother me with having to think about what the online media can do that I can't do. Those people are not going to have the kind of influence in 2010.

We were worried about news judgments in 2010, whether we're going to have the time or the energy to make the kind of news judgments that we need. We hope that by 2010 there will be better technology, that there will be recognition of journalists and journalistic values on the Web, and that journalists will get respect within technology companies. We agreed that we need to push for compelling stories no matter what the medium is.

What shall we do to make it happen? We said basically we need to recapture and grow or increase journalistic ethics. We need to teach the teachers and educate the newsrooms and basically provide examples.

According to Mike Slade, the online entrepreneurs agreed that big media is likely to have a strong presence in the online world for some time because they are the ones that can afford to spend the money there now: [W]e spen[t] a lot of time in our group talking about the places where the business model and consumer preferences meet and where they don't meet because it is easy to focus on just one or just the other

[M]ost of the news sites that are popular on the Internet are from big media and it's because nobody else could afford to do it. Nobody else could afford to have 100 or 200 writers or put up stuff from the dispatches of correspondents stationed in Cameroon or wherever. It would be foolish to try and do that on your own. So as much as many people have an innate and healthy distrust of big media, if you want coverage it's either big media or a godless, faceless wire service. There's not much other choice.

We spent a lot of time talking about that and we spent some time segueing from there into the sort of a provocative question which is that as you look at different generations. [T]hat is pretty pathetic that the median age of this group I'm guessing is 45 or older. That's pretty pathetic. The people we're talking about in the future, let's pick 2010 which is 12 years from now, if the median age is 45, we're all 57, and the median age is relevant, it's 20-25 now and forever, because those are the people who make stuff happen, right? By the time you're 50, you've already made stuff happen.

[A] lot of people who are 20, 25, whatever, what is news to them is very different than what is news to those of us who have been in a business like this for awhile or have more of a kind of an old world sensibility of it. Is that good or bad, and what does it really mean? It might be that news about video games is more important to this generation than news about Social Security reform, right?

So we talked a lot about different media types and where they're going that text versus video, what it means. The fact that the video is kind of over hyped right now because it doesn't make any economic sense to put it up there. It's a massive cost hemorrhage. It's a crazy thing to do right now. It's being done for show.

The last thing that's probably the most interesting is that we all kind of believe that basic news is a commodity, is so readily available and so redundantly available in so many hundreds of Web sites that original and niche writing or content will become more and more important and will rebound because it is the only thing that can be differentiated. So the equivalent of a Mother Jones should become much, much, much more mainstream as a natural backlash against all these big news sites not really needing to do all the same thing over and over and over again, which is what's happening. And of course it's cheaper and easier to do that on-line than in any other medium.

Jan Schaffer led the public policy group, which consisted of state officials, non-profits, university officials, city officials, some journalists. They concluded that part of journalism's role could be "lending some validity as you reach all the noise out there:" [T]he prevailing theme of our conversation really surrounded the equity issues of technological change, whether it's transformational or just additive. There were key concerns that we were creating two tiers of society here that would not have access to both the upsides and the downsides of the technological shifts.

We took that into conversations about what these access questions mean in terms of democracy, what it means to citizenship, what it means to journalists, what it means for the haves and have nots, what it means for democracy, government, what it means for journalists, and what it means to create a sort of common civic space or a common place where people could share a baseline of knowledge about things.

[T]hey thought there were a lot of opportunities [for journalists] in the new technological era. [I]nstead of just solely reporting in, or being a sole repository of information that some things that journalists could do would maybe be to redefine their roles as the people who pique your interest in something, point out issues, almost a search engine themselves that would link you to many other places on the Web that you could go much deeper for this information. But broadly speaking, you would be the drawer of an overwhelming kind of Cartesian sort of road map for people to find out more.

There was discussion about where journalists could add value even in a transformational kind of era, and this whole issue of what we in the business would call branding, what a consumer would call verification for accuracy in providing context. There was a lot of value for that as an aggregator of information, doing something that would sort of lend some validity to it as you reach all this noise out there.

I think that there is a lot of interest in what would be the public service obligations of the digital broadcasting age which will bring multiple channels on a lot of television stations. Should there be public service requirements for this? And what would that look like? As you know, a lot of the networks are fighting this intensely. Our group thought that, yes, there should. That these are public airways and that there should be some public service implications there and it was appropriate to require, even in a regulatory fashion

There was some question as to whether or not it would mean the end of PBS as we know it today if there were some public service requirements engaged in networks. There was talk about whether or not we could create sort of a cyber community square, although along with that if you are creating a community square it begs the question of your citizens of what is your community? Because this is a very global environment.

Among the worst case scenarios was this whole sense of the ability to chat, to e-mail, what kinds of implications it had on the broader, governmental sphere. If you have lower level bureaucrats answering queries or e-mailing back queries from citizens, and not everyone's given the same party line or not everyone's given the same line mandated by the mayor, what kind of chaos do you create in your community? Are there conflicting responses? Are there responses that bring liability issues or liability questions to the fore, or civil rights questions to the fore?

I think that there were also questions about civility versus titillation. Can you just say no? Should you just say no? Does it always have to be yes in a transformational world? Do you have to let everything happen just because it's going to happen?

[W]e have to find opportunities that define news in different fashions. And yes, we have to create cultures that allow failure to happen in the process of allowing success to happen.

Eddie Reed reported that the citizen's group felt that a journalist's role will involve creating community, in being "activists for an informed citizenry" and "analyzing numerous points of view:"

The role journalism plays in 2010: The group basically decided that strengthening communities is the key role that we can see journalism playing in the future. It's pretty much a role that we think journalism wishes to play now, but we most certainly can see the need for that. A lot of talk about fragmentation of our society and the concerns over that, so there definitely is a role there for a group or a body to, if not end that sense of non-connection, most certainly slow that feeling down a bit.

[Journalists should] actively inform citizens of each other's agendas, thus bolstering their capability of making informed decisions. They should [be] positively inciting citizen involvement in civic activity such as the Seattle Times' editorial pieces in the past on promoting the values of corporate giving, or their recent decision of making public education an ongoing editorial focus. [J]ust those two things in themselves have brought an unprecedented amount of activity and support to public education in our region.

Problems to which journalism is a solution: A lot of silence on this one, but we could come up with one. [Laughter] The problem? Shrinking access for diverse points of view in the traditional mass media. The solution that journalism could play, aggressively serving as a metafacilitator analyzing numerous points of view and putting them out to citizenry in such a way that gives credence to as many of these points of view as possible.

The other solution, leading citizenry towards better understanding of the facts behind the news.

[B]est outcomes for journalism: Activists for an informed citizenry. I don't know, again, how all of you feel, but I sort of feel relatively comfortable by various types of journalists that we have in our region, that that role is most certainly being taken seriously.

Reconsideration and promotion of ethics and [we] ...as citizens certainly have our part to play to get more out of the journalist end of things.

Worst outcome: A lot of talk on this one. Focusing too hard on revenue streams, and thus taking the eye off the ball of the aesthetic values of journalism. How to prevent that? Model the preferred outcome. A pretty simple statement.

Then lastly, the last question that was put to us, important choices that members of our group will need to make to help guide journalists' ideas a little better. Two things basically came to the surface on that. Question our underlying values of what's important to all of us in terms of the information we get from journalism. We all have complained about the Starr report, etc., but you know what? We all read it. [Laughter]

Now we have to ask ourselves, is that modeling the preferred outcome?

The broadcast group did not meet because no audience members signed up to be a part of that group. But broadcaster Gary Gibson offered a vision of the future not too far from where we are todaya mix of pictures, data and good writing. And he explained some of the differences between digital TV and HDTV: I've been struck here today about how few times I've actually heard the word television. I feel like I'm in a room with basically print people. I'm not quite sure why that is or why people weren't either interested to come here or didn't want to participate in any discussion about television.

I think ten years from now most of you people are going to be in a business that if it's not television, is going to be very similar to television, and it's going to combine pictures and data and writing, and people are going to access it with some kind of technology

The future role for a journalist is, in my mind, a journalist, an editor, a producer -- it's someone who can take the kind of information that is out there and continue to filter it, to interpret it in intelligent ways that's relevant to my life and your life. That, to me, is going to continue to be the role of a journalist. [T]here's a whole lot more information out there, and it's probably accessible in infinite[ly] more numbers of ways.

Katherine asked me to just say something about digital TV and what the impact of that might be. I think there's a lot of confusion about what digital TV is. To me, it's a couple of things.

One, it's sort of this transmission systems that's one's and zero's, just like information is transmitted for computing; and therefore, it is accessible to that world as well. It will be transmitted in the same way that online information is transmitted so the two become totally compatible and interchangeable. There are some differences about technical platform stuff that will be worked out.

In the form of television it means that in the space of your television set now, Channel 9 becomes Channel 9 A, B, C, D, they're going to have different numbers, but that capability of four times as much What do you do with that? Everyone has that limited scope of how much of that kind of information you want to access. I would guess probably most of you don't watch more than four or five channels of the 50 or whatever you can access today.

The other piece of it is HDTV. Digital TV is not HDTV. HDTV is a capacity to take the four channels that would be channel nine and give you one channel that has just this incredible picture quality, six channel CD sound, and the capability for information embedded in that. If you want to drill down and go to Internet sites or go to other information, that is all going to be in your TV.

But again, I just think TV on-line it's pictures, it's data, and it's good writing that are still going to be the basics of journalism, and personally, I don't think that's going to go away.

Abe Peck said that the alternative group concluded that in either the additive or transformative world, alternative papers would maintain their place in the future due to their authenticity and point of view. Their largest concern was what might happen to the story if text becomes obsolete: ... True to form, we came up with some alternative ideas to the structure. Not deliberately, but what can you do?

First of all, we had a diversity of alternative forums, we had a couple of alternative weeklies, we had a street paper, we had some gay papers, we had a couple of freelance people, we had a native American paper, so we had a roster. We spent a bit of time just kind of talking about the formats and politics and differences and similarities of these.

There was a perception, first of all [that] alternative media is growing. These papers thrive on satisfying coherent, precise groups of people, so they're kind of doing well with this. Some of the changes that are going on in mass media right now are fueled by a certain defensiveness, that the business model's not working, that paper costs are high not that alternatives don't pay for paper, but some of this was seen as defensive.

We talked about passion, that alternative papers have readers who are very responsive, who prize their papers, who complained a lot when cigarette ads were taken, as Mark Zussman ran into when he considered taking cigarette ads down at his paper. But that passionateness would allow the papers to continue, at least certainly through the additive stage.

The goals were seen as essentially the same. Linking people with stories, being part of a democratic society. And I think a certain different kind of interactivity than we've been talking about which is the interactivity of the medium and the mind. Reading can be redefined as an interactive act. I think that these papers prize that kind of interactivity, if you will.

[T]hese papers unanimously saw themselves as not objective. Mark Zussman's phrase was there is liberation and intelligence when you're allowed to connect the dots.

One of the issues that was talked about [was] that these papers would still remain alternative even if the mainstream became more alternative, or started putting out different products. As you may know, there are [d]aily newspapers that put out alternative sections, priority art sections, etc. The feeling was that authenticity and point of view would carry the alternative papers.

One of the issues that's going on in alternative papers is chaining. There was a little back and forth there about do you want a multiplicity of ownership versus some chains put out better papers than some independents. In an act of noblesse oblige, nearly everyone in the room rooted for mass media to continue. [Laughter] There was one dissenter, who would not [mourn] an end to journalism that pushes "capitalist lifestyle, cynicism crap, and hopefulness. I'd rather have trees." [Laughter]

Moving to the transformative stage there was a feeling, again, that these papers would in general continue. First of all, on the equipment side you're dealing with some small papers The same people who complained about the Internet and technology being class-based in terms of that you need a computer, also seemed to subscribe to a libertarian trickle down economics. In other words, obsolescence is our friend. Every time someone upgrades, they get new equipment. So there would be a continuity there.

This wasn't all fairies and bears. There were a couple of fears. One was, what happens to story? If the technology really becomes pervasive. This group really did not spend a lot of time thinking through new forms of story. I think the group is quite content with the stories they're able to tell right now. If reading becomes an issue, right now people feel fairly insulated. However, as Tim Keck said, if people stop reading, we're finished. So there is an investment in text. This may be we merrily march off a cliff if the technology does shift to the extent that some people think it will.

I think more profoundly, though, and perhaps tying it to some of the other things that were said, especially Eddie's group, was that there was a concern over a loss of history. There is a feeling that the cascade of technology leads to a certain kind of rush to judgment, a certain kind of amnesia, a certain kind of life in the present without a past and perhaps even without a future. And people, especially people committed to story as the alternative journalists were, were worried about that.

There was a feeling that online communities were illusory and were faux communities in some ways, and there was some fear about the implication if physical community faded in terms of virtual community

Leigh Bardugo led the discussion among young consumers who recognized that they were not necessarily the "average consumer." Nonetheless they too felt quite certain that the biggest thing they would be looking for in the year 2010 is someone to trust. And that very well may be "a columnist who's already established in traditional media who is over 40:" The first thing I want to say is that the idea of the young consumer was one of the things we talked about in the sense that that's an important distinction to make. We do have a different perspective, in part because we're spry, but in part ... because we also have different interests, we have different concerns, and we have a different view on the Web technology and journalism.

But we also had to accept the fact that we represented an elite, and there was no way around that, as much as anybody in this room does. That was a big stumbling block in the first part of our session because there was a real sense of who are we speaking for? Yeah, we use the Internet. Yeah, we read the paper. We're not necessarily well informed. We're better informed than a lot of people. The only way we could answer that question was to say, as the people in the room, what's our role as consumers, and what are we going to demand of you as journalists?

We came up with sort of a possibility for how to tame the tangle of the Web, which we recognize may be outdated in a few minutes, but we also tried to look at it in a best case and worst case scenario.

One of the big issues we came up with was you've got to trust somebody. If we can't trust the search engines and we can't trust the filters and we can't trust the agents and we can't trust anybody, we don't know who's bought and who's sold, and we don't know any of that. So at some point we have to say okay, we trust a source.

So what we can do is say it's up to you. It's up to you as journalists. We need voices. We need a voice to rally around, because as much as we can talk about credibility and objectivity, what about accountability? There's no accountability on the Internet, and I think that's what really worries people. There's this stream of technology; there's a stream, of this vast amount of information and you don't know where it's coming from. Who's to say... Now you see Drudge and you can say oh well, he's sort of accountable and sort of not. Maybe Fox News will get a little peeved at him, but there's no way to really negotiate that, so we want accountable people. We want to see a voice, a columnist who's already established in traditional media who is over 40, who is somebody we respect. Whether it's somebody who's in mainstream media or alternative media, whether it's a community activist who has a powerful voice and has something to say, somebody who already has a level of credibility and personality and to a certain extent celebrity.

We want those people to fill that void, to have voices on the Internet where they say I'm a gathering point. I suggest these five other journalists. I suggest these links. [S]omebody or some site which can be held accountable, and it's not based on some corporate idea of what's cool or what's hip or what's on the edge, or MTV telling us what's really going down. It's really about saying I read this person's work, I know who this person is, I know where they came from, I know that I share the same interests, and creating the community where people all over the world, in theory, who have these same interests, could gather.

In the same way there's a danger attached to that which is something that a lot of people have touched on, and that's the danger of creating a virtual community that has no real life application, and that's the challenge to us. It's to say it has to apply.

The only reason for the Web, as people who give a damn, is to look at the Web and say if I can talk to 50 people I'd better be meeting one of those 50 people. I'd better be talking to one of those 50 people; and ten of those people better come with me to go lobby for such and such a thing. It has the potential to create connections that weren't there before; it has the potential to create a forum and a platform for voices that weren't there before; and it has the potential to say I, as a member of this elite, who has access to this, have these concerns, and I'm going to use my voice and I'm going to use the voice of this person who has more authority than I do, to express those concerns. I think those will also create instant markets with instant demographics that people can sell to. Maybe. [Laughter]

James Fallows said that the traditional print journalists were in a way "whistling past the graveyard" because having "a sense of community useful information to navigate their world some connection with the outside world; those are things that traditional journalistic reporting and editing skills should address:"

There were a couple of surprises that came from this group. One was there were a couple of TV broadcasters in our group and the surprise was the amity that existed between the print and TV broadcast people because we felt we had common problems.

A second surprise was the sense of hopefulness from this hardened group that I'll build to in a moment.

Third is the synergy across the chasm of the generations with what you've just heard from the young people's group about a possible solution to our problems.

Since we are old, grumbling newspaper people and print people, we spent quite a long time going through all of the things that were wrong with our business. The eroding sense of the local community that print has been both a victim of and in some sense a facilitator of. We described the nightmare news consumer of the future someone who read only the New York Times and NPR and had no connection with the geographical territory in which he or she lived.

We had quite an extensive discussion of the parochialism of the U.S. view of the rest of the world and how the news media affected this; about the recruiting problems for our business, not being able to bring in kids quite as good as the ones that came in 15 or 20 years ago [laughter]; about the arrogance of the journalistic class when dealing with average citizens. Some people pointed out shock, just shock, that reporters didn't answer complaining e-mail from readers. Those with a broader perspective pointed out they never answered paper mail either, so there was a continuity here. [Laughter]

There was some discussion about how even when we do the best journalism people don't seem to read it. And also how some of the blessings of technology that's available to us, especially Web research, may take some of the juice out of journalism. When it's so easy to find things sitting in your room you never leave your room. You never get sort of the authentic flavor that comes from going outside.

We had our best and worst case scenarios.

But what we actually discussed is whether our work, as some of the most traditional practitioners in this field, was likely to change in any of the scenarios. Surprisingly, I think many people felt that our basic work would not change the skills that we had [T]he questions to which journalism is an answer, that is people having a sense of community, people having useful information to navigate their world, people having some connection with the outside world; those are things that traditional, journalistic reporting and editing skills should address. They're collecting information, putting into shape being selected, being the kind of filter. So there was perhaps a whistling past the graveyard sense of optimism about the way that in the various scenarios people with our sorts of skills would be able to vend those skills.
The models might be different. It could be the penny a hit model where people pay for looking at your screen. It could be we're all working for niche publishers, etc., etc. But the optimism was a sense that our skills had a future. The challenge that went with that was the sense that the challenge of producing higher quality journalism lay principally with us. If we didn't like the way things were being done, then we could do it better.

[T]he rosy scenario and the nightmare scenario: We discussed whether we as practitioners have any ability to change which of those scenarios our society's ended up with. Some people, including me, said no, we did not. We were sort of grains of sand being pummeled by larger tsunamis blowing in from someplace. Others more optimistic said yes, that we did have the ability to change things towards a better journalism future. These might mean instrumental steps like news councils, which could help address some of the problems that people had. It could mean doing a kind of journalism now that explained to people why bonds of community were important and why the services we provided mattered. There was the illustration of the Grand Forks newspaper after the flood where the editor said that his mission was to rebuild the community rather than to cover the news.

The most touching aspect of this, and the one that brings me full circle to the youth panel is that one non-journalist member of our panel said that if only we'd let the public know us as people then they would want to read our publications and pursue our work. I stifled my laughter at that point, but I realized there was actually an important point to it. That if we are seen as something other than a godless, faceless AP; if we are honest in trying to explain what we do and the mistakes we make and the effort we're going through to provide useful journalism; then in a way from print publications to the Web, we may have a future in giving people the information to make sense of their world.

Tim Gleason, Dean of the School of Journalism and Communications, University of Oregon visited each small group and commented on them as a whole:

[W]e noticed how early in the conversation many of the groups seemed to be. You all weren't grappling so much with finding answers as much as you were with trying to figure out what the questions might be. That varied from group to group, but it struck all of us that this was a very exploratory day.

Clearly, everyone was talking about a different audience, a more interactive audience, an audience that would have more control over its choices and would be making much more active decisions about what material would or would not be read or viewed. And there also were, in many of the groups, discussions about the distance between the audience and the institution. [W]hat does the audience want? Nobody really seemed to know. It's as if the audience was out there. It wasn't us. It was someone else. And that, again, seemed to run through many of the discussions.

[T]he groups seemed to be past the church/state question in this sense. No one seemed to be having a discussion about whether economic models and economic concerns should be having a significant influence on the journalism that would be done, but rather were trying to determine how those economic models would affect journalism I would argue that five to ten years ago if you got together a group of editors, the discussions were not about the economics of the business as much as they are today. No one seemed to be challenging that, that the economic issues were driving the equation.

There seemed to be consensus that it is a consumer driven economic model. Again, these were not decisions that we were going to make and then the consumers were going to accept, but rather that the consumers were going to drive our decisions.

A major question that was asked under this economic model, and it's one that many of the speakers earlier have addressed, will it support quality journalism? That seemed to be very much an open question.

The other question was will the economic model allow the potential of the technology to be reached, especially if it pertains to access?...

Katherine Fulton: Think about what that might mean, and how it might happen. Because actually if you think about what it takes to strengthen community, it might mean journalism, but it might mean a lot of other things.

Leigh Bardugo: I want to say one thing because I feel like I've misrepresented the youth in that there was a lot of cynicism in terms of what could happen, what the result of all these segmented ideas were, of all these known bias sites or communities, and thus that with the freedom and the anonymity of the Web are you creating an environment where hate is a lot easier, and where it's much easier to be disrespectful of another human being or of another cause or whatever in a really rapid way.

Eddie Reed: A tone in our discussion, and I think a number of others, too, was whether the economic fundamentals would make it possible over time still to have the local communities that journalism had served and helped foster; whether economic forces larger than any of us are making it difficult to sustain local journalistic operations. If they are not sustainable, then the question is how else the information flows within some community.

Katherine Fulton: I'm not saying it's a good thing, but local could become a feature of other businesses. In other words, instead of local publications carrying national and international news, we may have some of these dominant players who in essence have local affiliates.

But community, of course, is not just about geography. One of the other things is these sort of deep niches in particular interest areas that could form.

Audience Question: [I]f the fundamentals of our whole economic system are going in a direction that isn't a direction we want to go in, then isn't it somebody's responsible to sort of pull in the reigns a little?

If you say the market fundamentals are such that we will have no more reporting of local news because it's not feasible [I]implicit in everything here, was that the market is god, and I'm not sure why the market necessarily should be god. I don't like to just beat my head against something just for the heck of doing that. But it doesn't seem like the market is working in many ways

[T]he journalists don't have to say this is the direction we're going, so how can we serve that? I want some leadership from them.

Abe Peck: Just before this train gets too far out of the station, the last time I looked nearly every city had a city business magazine or a city magazine or a city parenting magazine or a city computing magazine and certainly at least one alternative paper, if not two. [J]ust because some mass newspapers are going metro rather than local, I'm not quite sure that it's over.

There is a lot of local journalism, and including on the Web. The Chicago Tribune, for example, is making a lot of synergy bets on a whole digital city structure where it's a metro area rather than what we used to call the core city, but they're doing tons of local stuff.

So I'm not so sure that we won't see multiple journalism models.

Audience: I would agree with that. In my mind, local becomes more important as opposed to less important.

Mike Slade: The definition of what local news is is an interesting thing, too. Probably, whether it was in the good old days or now, most of what is consumed that is local is not news about like how many potholes got fixed or the school budget passing or not, but it's like what's a good restaurant, what's to do this weekend. And there's plenty of ways to get that. In fact one of the things that's been the anchor of a lot of the portal Web sites has been things like that, that are relatively easy to get and easy to program, and they've put them up there, people personalize it with their zip code, and they like what they get.

But it's interesting to think about who's fault something is and how to fix it. Take news consumption on the Internet which 30 or 40 million people do now. It isn't a question of what the news organizations are focusing on. A lot of the consumers don't go to any of them for their news.

It isn't like they chose Channel 2 instead of Channel 3. They chose this thing from Mars called Yahoo [whose] news department would fit into the front row here

That's one thing to think about, is it isn't just a collective oligopoly changing its course, it's something that has nothing to do with the oligopoly showing up

Eddie Reed: I don't think that journalism as a craft has ever lost its sight on community and community issues. If that was the case then I would have given up on America a long time ago and gone to Italy, which is really one of my favorite countries. [Laughter]

I think that what we're sensing mostly is just an anxiety of uncertainty of credibility of new sources. It's on us so quickly, it's so large, it's so loud. And to quote Leigh what do we trust?

Actually, if I'm not mistaken, I think that the craft of journalism really has thrived in this onslaught of new electronic toy stuff. Primarily because I think that the citizenry as a whole can trust the sincerity of the journalist craft in fostering a sense of community, in projecting community issues to the point where we can really make some sense of things.

Katherine Fulton: Let's drive this point a little further How are we going to have information about local politics? About local fire, local emergency management services? These are not commercially attractive niches you talked about [If papers] succeed, great. If they don't succeed, what will happen to that information?

One of the things that I've found quite interesting today was the energy in the citizen groups around new ways of meeting those needs. We assume that somehow journalists have to meet those needs. It may actually be non-profits and non-governmental organizations and new kinds of journalism that's very hard to imagine right now. But there really is quite a serious issue that can't... There's a kind of caricature here that somehow it's a terrible thing to think about business.

What we're talking about is the money it takes to put people on the street, to verify information, to do reporting, to find real sources It's a full time, professional job, right? And either people have to be willing to pay for it or you have to support it some other way. So far there's no indication that people are interested in paying for it in any way... At least mass audiences.

Richard Meislin: [J]ournalists may without say a large newspaper with a budget, who provides eating funds to the three reporters who go off for nine months and study the Hospital Corporation of America? Who does investigative journalism? Who finances it? Who would go into journalism as a "career"... And one of the things that those companies do is provide people regular salaries during the fallow times when the stories aren't coming out. Unless you're prepared to create some kind of structure where people get royalties, or people get advances against royalties to do journalism, which is, God knows, hard enough to arrange if you're writing books, there is a public function that these companies provide. It's not just to make money for their stockholders.

James Fallows: [J]ournalists will survive because their skills are useful. There would be some losses, though, and not simply to the media companies. One, we talked about some of the local information that might not get reported.

I think in addition to what Rich is saying is that foreign news would be presented in a far, far, different way.

One of the best things about the New York Times, in my view, is that it starts the paper each day with six or eight pages of foreign news, even though every market signals that people don't want the stuff. They won't buy publications if you put it on the cover; they won't read it, or they say in reader surveys. But it's important. It's sort of a public good that I think institutions like this provide.

If that media institution fell apart you would find specialized foreign investor services and foreign gold buyer services and arms dealer services with news about Saudi Arabia or whatever. You would have economically connected foreign news, but no sort of public foreign news of this sort

Katherine Fulton: There was one conversation which I listened in on where people were talking about the power of how fast people process information and learn using multimedia at the same time. [Y]ou read a poem and you listen to it at the same time, and how much more powerful that is when you're doing both of those things at the same time. I found myself thinking about the opportunities in the midst of all of this crush of stuff, that there may actually be some powerful opportunities that are as much experiences or more powerful experiences for people to learn, to process information, that is the opportunity side.

The scary side is that everything is sped up so much that we can't make judgments that fast. There's a real gap.

Patricia Sullivan: I'd like Joe to tell the story that he told our group, the online group, where that came from, about a previous job he had creating CD-ROMs that spoke to this very thing.

Joe: At some point in the future when we have more band width it's possible we'll be able to tell stories in ways that we don't know now and use the right medium for that particular job. If you're doing emotional things you'll use video to show the flood victim or whatever. If you have a long, reasoned argument to use text and things like that.

I was lucky enough to create an interactive documentary about Robert Frost for his publisher, Henry Holt, and had access to a lot of very wonderful video and audio clips and text and letters and poems and manuscripts and everything else. One of the most gratifying things for me is that I worked very hard to integrate the material in the editing process so that I did what I just said to use different media at different times. And people have said to me oh, I loved that part about where he goes to visit the Atlantic Monthly, that video about that. I'll say well thank you, I'm glad you liked it, but it wasn't a video. That was a little article that we wrote. People actually do forget what the medium was and to focus on the story and the information. That, in my mind, is the thing to shoot for, for some of us.

Katherine Fulton: ... What happened in our culture with television is an entire new language and way of communication developed [With] MTV, we took 20-30 years to really begin to do the things that the medium could do that was quite different, has its own language. And I think we're probably at the very beginning of what the language is going to be. How stories will be told, and how people will learn in it, and especially with this very strong visual component.

Gary Gibson: The difference in this very topic has been very obvious to me in the sort of generational thing. We did a series for kids, a science series, and it's got all these enhancements. Besides the TV picture, down the left side are a bunch of quiz questions going on, there are all these sites that keep coming up at you. A nine year old boy I watched do this with this thing in his hand, watching the TV all the time, he could click onto all these questions, run up and down these things.

At the same time we showed this to 50-, 60-year-old women. Several of them just said I can't do this. This is too confusing. I don't want all of that. Give me the picture...

If you think actually, about what may be some of the biggest breakthroughs in the next 20 years in science, they're likely to be in cognition. And in how it is that the mind works, how it is that learning happens and memory functions and all of that. And I think it's likely to have some real impact on media. So again, parking something that's in that sort of upper right hand corner that's about innovation, there's something here about cognition and learning and speed

Audience Question: Do all of you accept that our present economic system is the one that needs to last? And what would be the best economic system, the best possible scenario of an economic system for 2010 if you could choose it?

Patricia Sullivan: I'll reframe the question is not what's the best economic system because that's not what we're here to talk about. But I think we have to trust in something, to quote Leigh. And we have to trust in ourselves and have confidence that even if the economy collapses and media collapses in the worst case scenario in 2010, we have to know as journalists that we can go out there and we can provide a needed service to people. We can provide information, we can put stuff into context, we can get back to the basic skills of this craft

Eddie Reed: Our economic system will survive because of what it is it's evolutionary, it's not revolutionary. We are willing to consider changes, and we change.

Journalism will continue to survive, but not in its present state. It's not a guild, it's evolutionary. We certainly see that. As these new tools come about and develop, all we're really talking about is an evolution of the process and the real debate, I think, or the only debate really, is how many of us are willing or will be around long enough to contribute to that evolution and appreciate that evolution?

Mike Slade: [I]n terms of the journalistic culture either we're going to get more and more concentration, in which case you could wind up with a roller ball like scenario where everything's corporately sponsored and we live in the land of the video news release rather than independent journalism. This panel would say that's bad and we would probably try individually to resist it.

The Web's often described as libertarian. You might get some libertarian forces coming out of the Web. Or perhaps some controls on concentrated media coming from the citizenry that would tend to slow this concentration down.

It's interesting, in our group we talked about alternative media which is chaining up. Some of the best papers are chain papers, so big is not necessarily bad. At the same time, when you only have one or two or three or five major companies running either the portals or running the outlets of journalism, that's probably not so great.

Katherine Fulton: Filtering. We've got community, we've got something about cognition. This filtering thing comes up a lot We know some of what that means, but what might that mean in a world where actually the technology is incredibly much more powerful than it is now, where already you can go online and the software can learn your preferences?

Mike Slade: Certainly I think history would show that people have craved filtering, whether it's a right brain or a left brain or an Intel processor doing it, they've always craved it.

But I have to say that it's hard to imagine a bunch of algorithms replicating the skill of an editor. It really is hard to imagine, and I know a lot about it. A hundred engineers times five years working on this stuff just in our company alone. It's hard to imagine that occurring any time soon, just because of what we know of the complexity of the human brain and how much people crave that. They crave the proxy for their interests ... They'll say I like that. That editorial sensibility is part of me now. I like that. I'm like that. I don't think that will change any time soon. That goes back to people reading Nancy Drew mysteries or even before that.

Richard Meislin: One of the things I think will probably happen is there will be better and better vehicles for people other than editors, like your friends and acquaintances, to provide those kinds of recommendations to you.

One of the things that's on the New York Times site which nobody knows about because we haven't promoted it very well, is a site called the Navigator, which was named that before there was a Netscape Navigator. It's actually the New York Times newsroom's homepage. It's basically 100 sites. It's a list of 100 sites, and from those sites you can find a lot of really relevant information on the Web that's good for reporters.

When we put it in front of focus groups, focus groups go crazy for it. They love it. And it's such a simple thing. It's no more than a list of 100 links that are kept up to date. But in the world of the Web at the moment, that's a novelty.

Katherine Fulton: I want to ask you, I want to involve everybody in this Think about was there anything new and/or significant that you learned [today]?

The second thing is, is there something that you now think you ought to do that is new? It might be simple, it might be big.

Audience: I was struck that it seems to me that a lot of the answers that will perhaps come will have to be arrived at with a group of people who represent all of these constituencies, whereas it may not have been the practice of journalistic organizations in the past to give as much thought to that sort of panorama of viewpoints. With new technology posing such huge questions, it will be most important to get the full range of viewpoints in any business plan as well as the basic ideas in journalism.

Audience: As a journalism organization, I would just follow that up by saying that one of the things I learned and was pleased to learn, I think, was that everyone here really seems to believe that there is a real need for what journalism is providing in 2010 and that the quality journalism is what's going to eventually win out and survive. What I think we can do as a Committee to answer that is to try to have as much of our organization focus on multimedia activities and conversations that include as broad a range of journalists as we possibly can, because we're all going in the same direction. That may really be what ends up being the most valuable to people

Audience: One sort of parting thought that we all might think about is in 2010 we've talked a lot about the media and about the economic implications of journalism and management techniques, even, but who will want to be journalists and how will they be trained? Even why will anyone want to be a journalist?

Audience: The stunning fact that got me, in fact I've repeated it twice since I've met other people, 65,000 Web sites created every hour; in 1992 there were just 50 nationwide. I don't think we ought to lose sight of the fact that each of us are individuals and that we count. And if we don't care for each other individually, I don't care how many numbers you make, we're going to be lost.

Audience: What this made me think about, and this may be somewhat Polyannaish, is my 12 year old step-son more than anything else, and how better equipped he is to tell a story than many of the people in this room because when he goes to tell a story now, he uses every medium to tell the same story. In that integration of medium he reaches different audiences and communities because of what they're able to see and hear and comprehend. He's able to cross cultures. And he's a world citizen at age 12 precisely because of the kind of exposure that he's had. I'm actually going to go home and talk to him about some of the things here. I actually think, with all due respect to Leigh and the young people's group, that the young people's group is too old

Audience: The thing that struck me the most in the conversation was the great focus on technology. I'm an engineer, and I'm really bored by it. I really came to hear about quality journalism. It really concerns me. And I can understand profitable journalism, which I thought this was mostly about. If you want profitable journalism you have to think about what technology will work, your own job, your own place in that. There's a legitimate discussion. It just wasn't the one I came for.

Quality is an attribute of the content. Is it truthful? Is it relevant?

Mike Slade: Before you go on, we just applied some journalistic filtering up here to the 65,000 Web sites per hour number, which implies 569 million Web sites per year. I don't think so. That's about twice the number of Web sites there are, first of all, and the Web's been around for about three years. And second of all, that would imply that one out of every ten people on earth created a Web site this year. Well, the sheepherder in Sudan or the grieving widow in Iraq... So I'm just saying, beware of what you hear.

Katherine Fulton: Interestingly, I'm the one that introduced that into the conversation...

Audience: I'm with Seattle Sidewalk. I started out being the restaurants producer. We have 2,000 restaurants on-line. This is a really complicated thing to do. You have no idea how emotional people get about food. And if you give like their favorite restaurant a bad review, they're pissed, and they're pissed at you. [I]n building the database we had room for more and we wanted to get feedback from readers. So when readers sent e-mail in and said wow, you should check out this restaurant, this is my favorite restaurant, it's in my neighborhood, I go there all the time; and sure enough, I took that, assigned a reviewer, and actually got it reviewed, put it on the site, hunted up their e-mail, e-mailed them back and said he, remember when you e-mailed me about a month ago and you said we should review this restaurant? We did. And by the way, you might like these other four restaurants, they're very similar, blah, blah, blah. I can't tell you how many times I've had people tell me that's the first time they've ever gotten a personal e-mail from a Web site.

I don't think anything of it, and I probably send out about maybe 150 e-mails a week to readers. I answer personally. It's a lot of work, but to me I feel like it's really journalism. It's time consuming, but I have access to this information, and we have, you know, 8,000 pages on my Web site. People aren't going to be able to navigate that. [S]o I have to go sometimes and be that scout and ferret it out and hand deliver it to people. [I]t goes to that whole thing about credibility What am I going to do? What am I going to read? Who can I trust? Who can I trust to spend my time with? I think that's the question that we all have to ask ourselves, no matter what it is. Even if we're putting up information about sports or the weather.

Katherine Fulton: What you just were talking about is a way of building community that journalists may be involved in that may be quite different from what they have thought of their function in the past

Mike Slade: I've got to tell you, it's pretty amazing to think about if you are a consumer of any kind of news or things that journalism stands for, what's available to you for free just with your little Web browser and 20 bucks a month. There's nothing like it in any other medium and there certainly wasn't anything like it a few years ago. It's mind-boggling to think about ... I'm sure you could find that story about Iraq on 100 Web sites if you looked for it ... [Laughter]

I think it is easy to lose sight of the fact, forgetting one second at all losing money, how much choice there is available to people versus any other kind of medium. How empowering it A is, and B, seems to people. Forget about how scary and complicated it is. It's amazing. It certainly wouldn't work in any other economic system.

Mike Fancher, Executive Editor of the Seattle Times briefly summarized the day: Today I think we heard that even though we recognize the real power of journalism clearly, it is shifting away from those of us who are the makers of the news reports to those of you who are the consumers of the news reports; That that's not necessarily something we need to think of as threatening; That the journalists in the future who are really going to be successful are the ones who embrace that change, facilitate it, help the users of journalism take full advantage of it, help them shape it, without, without losing our own commitment to standards and principles and the values that have traditionally guided journalists. There is a ground here that we can walk together that will produce really wonderful journalism, wonderful communities, and create trust where maybe it doesn't exist today.