In the first part of the day, we heard from journalists articulating their vision of what new journalism can be, how it relates to the old, and what are some of the potential problems. Although there are differences in how each views the future of journalism, most agreed that many of the questions we must ask of new journalism are the same as those asked in the past: the importance of accuracy, fairness and honesty with your readers. Perhaps most important, the new media gives citizens more power than ever before to choose for themselves the information they receive. Today's journalists, then, have an even greater need to convince citizens of their credibility as public servants, or journalism will merely be one more source for information.

Orville Schell, Dean, U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Jim Risser, head of the Knight Fellowship Program at Stanford, opened the discussion by suggesting that journalism of the future should be a mixture of the values of old journalism with the technological possibilities and pluralism of the new media.

Orville Schell: "The truth is that the problems which confront all the new media are really the same. The challenge is to be credible, to do a good job, to do excellent journalism. The problems are speed, the bottom line, survival, how do we make going ventures out of these things? This is no different than what the LA Times is confronting when it's trying to get together people from the business side with the editorial side to figure out how to make a go of it...

"I think the challenge of us today and indeed in the years to come is to bring the varieties of old journalism, of good journalism, into new media and bring some of the technology, the very exciting possibilities that it poses in terms of diversity, pluralism, a great new vibrancy, a new frontier to old journalism... We should not be considering this divide as a divorce, but as a potential way to get together to bring the benefits and the positive aspects of each side of this equation into a new balance."

Jim Risser: "I believe, as most journalists do, in the old time-honored traditions of journalism, the role of eyes and ears of the people, watchdog over government and public institutions, and adherence to all the standards of accuracy and fairness and so on. At the same time, I very much believe in innovation, in methods of news coverage and technology and new ways of looking at things. Journalism, like any other institution, can benefit from change...

"The trick ... is we've got to employ the new technology while preserving the best of what we think are the old journalistic standards that so many of us have fought for and defended over the years."

David Talbot, Founder, Editor and CEO, Salon, does not see much symmetry between the two. He thinks that most of the problems in journalism today are problems of the old media and that new media is what will correct them:

"I think just about every fault you can find with media in America today has been creeping up within old media first. And it's old media that really has more to answer for. It's old media that's become obsessively market driven, that's been dumbed down, that's been celebrity driven, that's become sensationalistic, whose commentary is dominated by conservative mud slingers...

"It's the LA Times that's been pioneering in the kind of novel concept of having business managers sit with news editors to determine what the newspaper should be covering -- something I don't know of happening at any on-line publication...

"The fact is that on-line media is in a very infant stage, we're finding our way as we go along, but that we have begun to distinguish ourselves in ways that I think the old media can learn from. ...What I'm particularly inspired by is the possibility of groups of people splintering off from the old media as we did at Salon. People who are steeped in professional standards, that believe in multiple sources, and believe in hard reporting, aggressive reporting, believe in good editing, but feel hidebound by the constraints, the financial, political, cultural constraints of working within the old media, and strike out on their own."

Jack Shafer, an editor at Slate Magazine made the case that one of the greatest values of online journalism is the multiplicity of voices. We should welcome this change and trust the public to filter out the valuable from the propaganda:

"There's nothing very futuristic so far about the news media for me. In fact it reminds me of the turn of the century New York City where there were 65 daily newspapers, many of which published extras when there was breaking news. The readers really understood and could parse then, as I think they can today, what the truth value of all those various publications were. They understood the yellow bombast of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, and they knew the sort of prim, institutional responsible voice that they were getting from Mr. Ochs' New York Times.

"Every time there is some new media there is a lot of hand wringing, and there is the sort of establishment of concerned journalist groups and concerned reader groups who are horrified about any new changes in media. When the telephone broke on newsrooms, it was much disdained by established journalists because it really diminished the value and the skills of leg work -- going out and meeting with sources. Likewise when video cameras made it possible to make news with pictures, there was a great hue and cry that this was somehow tainting the media...

"What people have been crying for for the last 20 or 30 years is more voices in journalism. Everybody has decried the sort of consolidation of newspapers, the closing of dailies, the sort of conglomeratization of various broadcast properties. What the Web has provided us is exactly that -- more voices, more points of view, and a more free-wheeling approach.

"It's always going to be incumbent upon readers to establish for themselves what the truth value of the National Enquirer or the New York Times are. The promise of the Web is thousands of new voices, new points of view, great competition, and the threat is thousands of new voices, new points of view, and more competition."

Louis Rosetto, also values the plurality of voices possible in this new medium and the power it puts in the hands of the people:

"It strikes me that media today is basically the secular religion of our time. .. And that in fact what's going on now is the arrival of a new heresy, heralded by the Internet, by the fact that suddenly there are more voices accessible... What [Gutenberg] ended up doing was he got Bibles into people's hands and suddenly the Catholic church was disintermediated... You don't need the church to interpret that Bible for you. You can think for yourself.

"...The [new] medium is inherently destabilizing in this time because it's putting the power of interpretation, the power of getting at reality in the hands of everybody today, not leaving it in the hands of the priesthood of media that's been telling people for a century what's real and what isn't.

"The promise of new media to me is about democratization. It's about plurality of voices. About trying to arrive at reality. Forget objectivity. Objectivity is a construct to allow newspapers to get advertisers. What people really want today is reality. That's why media, I think, are falling down and why new media are going to succeed because they are delivering to people today who are swamped with a lot of noise, the ability to get at what's really going on. In that swirl of discussion is the essence of democracy is the essence of creating a new consensus in our society. It's not in Dan Rather telling us what the reality is today. It's in everybody talking about what Dan Rather said today. In that discussion is how the new popular mind is being formed, out of multiple communities, out of multiple points of view. I think that's the amazing strength of where we're going to now."

As a teacher of journalism at Berkeley, David Weir, former vice president of content at Wired Digital, has found that the changes taking place are a lot more than simply technological. Technological changes have forced journalists to re-examine the most fundamental elements of journalism, especially the relationship between business and news:

"In [our] quest [to form excellent journalists], we teach values, we teach principles, we teach ethics, we teach operating procedures.... We talk about a lot of things here at the school, [but] that conversation has been a relatively unbroken line with the past until recently. All of a sudden about three years ago, we ran smack into new media. All of a sudden we had to concentrate some of our energy and a lot of our time, talking about hypertext linking, talking about navigation ...

"At the same time ... we started realizing that there were larger questions underlying those sort of functionalities that we needed to probe. Is the relationship between us as journalists and our audiences undergoing some sort of fundamental shift?.. What's interactivity with the audience and what kind of potential is there for an emergence of the multiform storytelling and interactive storytelling, new forms of ways to pursue our craft?"

"One of our old cherished values is the church/state line. We don't do that stuff. We don't talk about business. That's for those other guys, the guys in the suits. That moment may have changed. Or has it? If we don't figure out the business plan, is the business plan going to be figured out for us?... And if that happens, who's going to be determining what excellence in journalism is? What's our voice going to be?"

Adam Clayton Powell III, Vice President of Technology and Programs at the Freedom Forum, pointed out that the church/state line was not always solid in traditional journalism either. It is just that the Web makes the conflict more apparent:

"David Weir talked about one of our cherished values being the church/state line. Well that's really being erased. ...We see the Los Angeles Times deliberately and openly exploring the breaching of this line...

"At new media, as with many other processes, the breaching of the church/state line is simply more obvious because new media are more transparent.

"Some of these conflicts have been there all the time and we simply haven't noticed them or haven't chosen to talk about them... Does anyone really think that a newspaper automotive or travel section is an institution that has the same kind of separation between editorial and advertising that we hope goes on in the A sections?.. The New York Times book review section that we get every week on Sunday had ads for books and book stores for years. The New York Times book review section on-line has ads, except now the New York Times actually gets more revenue depending on the sales of the book. So suddenly you have a qualitative difference there which could set up as at least an appearance of possible conflict.

"What we're also seeing as emblematic on the Web is we can make connections more obviously. Those of you who read automotive sections, you may not read many of the articles ... in your quest for the classified ads looking for a used Toyota. But when you're on-line, the editorial and advertising is right next to each other. It's harder to avoid, almost as hard as in broadcasting."

The journalists' role will have to change with technology. "When every news event is routinely offered live on the Web, and cached so you can go back and look at it all again, what is going to be the role of journalism? ... People watch C-Span and then read some of the articles written about Congress, and the two don't necessarily track. When you see that expanded to every major news event and every minor news event and every Jenny who puts a camera in her bedroom or office, we're going to begin to see a very different kind of role for journalists and a very different standard for journalists to meet."

Katherine Fulton, a Principal with Global Business Network, also thinks that the whatever lines used to exist between business and news are quickly dissolving, and news and journalists should gain an understanding of how the business works, or they will not survive:

"This little piece of paper is on many of your chairs. Probably some of you can't find it anymore. If you have it, hold it up here for a second. Hold it in your right hand, close your left eye, focus on the little cross, and slowly move the piece of paper toward you until the circle disappears. There will be a moment when you can't see the circle. Got it? That's your blind spot...

"I discovered mine in a big way when I helped to start an alternative newspaper in North Carolina which I'm happy to say survived. My blind spot was I thought I was a newspaper editor. In fact, I was in the business of connecting buyers and sellers. That was the business we were in. That was how we paid for great reporting.

"I think that as a business... that's our collective blind spot, that the money to pay for great reporting has to come from somewhere. We've lived in a kind of cocoon in sort of mid-century to late-century where radically non-commercial ideals could live inside enormously successful commercial institutions. Newspapers that could have essential monopolies; television networks that were essentially monopolies of a different kind. That cocoon is now shredding.

"There was a great philosopher who once said that convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. I would actually say that some of our convictions blind us collectively to understanding what the real promises and threats might be.

"I've been on sort of a passionate quest ever since to try to understand the larger ecology of how economics are changing, and how we will actually pay for great reporting in the future...

"The first thing has to do with competition and with how the journalism business is changing. The most important thing is every business is changing. We have somehow had the sense that we're different. Actually, talk to the people in banking, talk to the people in healthcare, talk to the people in practically any industry that I've looked at, and all of them are facing a kind of fundamental change of rules of the game driven by technology, driven by globalization, driven by deregulation, by a lot of factors. I think that we can learn a lot from looking around at other industries and seeing how they're changing.

"One of the things that's happening is ... your business can become a feature of someone else's business. Encyclopedia Britannica's business is almost wiped out by CD ROMs. Local news may become a feature of other businesses.

"Number two, we have to think about where we make our stand because the one-size-fits-all model is breaking apart throughout the economy. Holiday Inns, Burger King, Woolworths -- business after business, there's just radical segmentation going on. There are tremendous disturbing effects for the democracy. But if we make our stand for the mass market and the mass audience, we may lose, and all the sources for great reporting be wiped out.

"What flows from that is my third point, which is the sort of ecology of electronic commerce, which is that we're not actually going to be in one business, but many. And that we're not in one new medium but many new medium. What happens to how cars are sold, how books are sold, how houses are sold, how information is sold may actually be very different kinds of businesses, and we may have to collect them together, the whole ecology around us is changing.

"...I'm not worried about the New York Times, which has actually already figured out that it's a niche market. I'm actually worried about local news. We're going to have to examine our assumptions and our blind spots about things like the JOAs of the future may be cross-media, may be local television and local newspapers. The words like navigation, broker, curator, facilitator may have to come into the lexicon of journalism because information is no longer scarce, but attention is. And finally, I think as a business we have to collectively look at the future of non-commercial journalism and media because that model is endangered as we all know as commercial. And some of the things that we don't like to think about doing, like getting involved in political debates to say journalism may be necessary."

John Markoff, West Coast Correspondent for the New York Times, sees the potential for a complete change in the type of public service journalists provide:

"I tend to want to sort of remind you that this whole thing we call new media is really based on the silicon-based technologies. I'd like to belabor that point for just a couple of moment. Silicon is an unstable element. So here we are, we're three years into this and we're all wringing our hands. I just wanted to put this in perspective in the sense that i's been three years, and this is the horseless carriage panel...

"... So right now what's new media? New media is people sitting at desks in front of boxes, right? That's largely the sociological exercise we're talking about. The visionaries, the people that are sort of far-seeing, think that maybe that's going to shift in awhile to slightly larger boxes and people will be sitting in [bark] loungers. That's sort of the extent of the thinking from the sociological point of view. (Laughter)

"A decade ago... Here at Berkeley they were talking about wanting to give students these things called 3M machines. That was '85, '84, everybody wanted a million operations per second, a megabyte of memory and a million picsiles. Now we're really disturbingly close to what I think of as 3G machines -- a gigaop of performance, a gigabyte of memory, and a gigabit of band width. So that's the framework in which we should be having this discussion. But I don't think anybody has sort of clocked how quickly that's coming and how pervasive it's going to be.

"There's this corollary to Moore's law, and Moore discovered that not only does density of transistors go up every 18 months to two years, but the cost [of factories] go up at that rate. So what does that mean? One is that the fastest computers are going to be the cheapest computers; and that the only people who are going to build those computers are the kinds of companies that put things under Christmas trees... The other is the interesting sort of next stage that we should look at is not so much band with, per se, which is coming ... but the sociological consequences of symmetrical band width. Because the most interesting thing on the horizon, and it's only four or five years away, is broad band CDMA. So what does symmetric band width mean?

"People talk about Matt Drudge, so Matt Drudge came when we could all put up Web pages. But I think the interesting thing is not Matt Drudge, but it's JennyCam. JennyCam is the future...

"Sort of the negative potential is that journalists become video repackagers, because why do you need a journalist when you can go there yourself much more quickly and much more accurately? That's perhaps the downside. The upside might be that the only role left for journalists will be investigative journalism because everything else will be public, and why would you need to have somebody tell you something you can find out easily for yourself?"

In interviewing applicants to be reporters for his new magazine, The Industry Standard, Jonathan Weber noticed a significant change in the the focus of today's young journalists, and as a result journalism may be at risk of losing what is crucial to the craft: a passion for reporting and writing:

"Coming from a kind of tradition where there were a few jobs out there, it was literally kind of a small club of ten people who covered this stuff. Nobody could get a job. What's happened over the last several years with Web journalism ... with print journalism in the form of Wired, in the form of a lot of technology trade publications [is] there's been a real explosion. I've seen a lot of people who have a lot of very diverse and interesting kinds of experience in different kinds of media who have been part of very fast growing organizations.

"The flip side of that is that there has been a real gap in what I expected in terms of some of the kind of aspirations and sort of focus on craft and skills of a lot of the people who have come through. In doing this magazine, we're a business news magazine. It's really a pretty traditional kind of magazine model, a weekly news magazine. The people I was trying to hire were people who would do relatively traditional kinds of beat reporting, business reporting, and who were really good reporters and really good writers, and so people would come in and we'd talk and I'd say well, what do you want to do? We're doing these things. And they would say well, I really like editorial and I love the publishing environment and whatever you've got, I'm kind of interested. I'd say do you want to be a reporter, do you want to be an editor, do you want to be a feature writer? What kind of things do you want to do?

"That often prompted a somewhat quizzical look like they didn't quite understand entirely the question. I really wanted the people who came in and said I want to be a reporter. I just want to go out and cover a beat and find stuff out and put it in the paper. I didn't really see very much of that kind of ethic somehow. Not because people didn't appreciate that ethic, but that they weren't quite tuned into that as kind of a craft thing...

"I think that some of the basic craft things of really good reporting and really good writing are things that everyone can agree are valuable and deserve continued sort of attention and support."

As technology moves forward, Denise Caruso, Columnist for the New York Times, raised the possibility of having a kind of "stamp of good journalism" for the Web which might help gain the public trust that traditional media has lost: "I started talking in 1994 about this thing that I really think needs to happen, if somebody could make this happen it would be great. We need to actually think about some kind of -- I know Zachary's going to rip me on this, but sort of the Milk Advisory Board of Journalism. A bug that says "journalism practiced here". And that you'd be able to click on that and then people on these Web sites can tell you what it means to them to practice journalism. 'We check our sources, we aren't just publishing hearsay. If it's an opinion, we tell you it's an opinion.' I really think that the American public has completely lost faith in journalism for a very good reason, and I agree with David [Talbot] that old media likes to give a lot of grief to new media because they're very threatened by it, and I think actually much more of the fault lies in how things have been practiced in the old media.

"I've actually tried to get Columbia Journalism Review to let me write about that, and they won't let me write about it. They're terrified. It opens up a big can of worms."

Also, she sees the journalist's role quickly becoming that of a synthesizer of information. "If I am wearing a camera [and] am able to record everything in my environment, there are a couple of things we have to remember. Number one, as is with television journalism, you still only see what's in the frame of the camera. So what a journalist needs to do is be able to describe context or find a way to synthesize a number of different points of view that are providing direct knowledge. If I'm walking around turning my body around so I can shoot this whole scene and there are a number of different people doing that from different points of view, one thing that a journalist might be required to do is to synthesize those things and put them in context. Coming up with a point of view and synthesizing a lot of different information became more valuable to people who didn't have very much time, than news itself which has become, clearly has become a commodity."

Unidentified voice: [job of the reporter] "I've never really understood this notion that somehow the ability to view something yourself will reduce the need for journalists. Our function is to look around the world and filter things and understand things and present things in a way that people can hopefully understand and digest and get something out of. People obviously don't have time to witness every event that happens in the world, and therefore they will pay, hopefully, for people who will be out there and help them look at the things that will be interesting to them."

Louis Rosetto added that both the consumer and economic bases for mass media are dissolving. New media must create a new foundation: "...It isn't just new media that has a problem with its business plan, it's media in general. ...What is the role of media going into the future? And how is it supported? What is the economic foundation of it?

"There are two things I think people should think about. One is the implications of precision targeting of advertising, that the whole foundation of mass media is the unaccountability of the ad spin. When you add accountability to the package then you find, I would imagine, a general erosion of ad support for capturing large audiences that you can't really measure or quantify the kind of returns you're going to get. Which means that the advertising is going to migrate to those people that can deliver audiences who are going to support the markets that the advertisers want.

"The other thing is this idea of tiny news... This is a ... George Clooney observation about tiny news, that to get any personal value out of television journalism today, you've got to expend an enormous amount of effort to get a very little return. Humans don't do this indefinitely if they have an alternative. The alternative is to go to someplace that will deliver more value for less effort and that happens to be in the interactive environment where you can tailor exactly what you want to get to.

"So the economic foundation, the advertising foundation of mass media is eroding and the consumer side of that is also eroding at the same time. So the question then really is not whether new media has a business plan for the future, it's whether mass media has a business plan that can support itself in the future."

Long-time journalist Betty Medsger asked, "I had a sense from some members of this panel and from earlier speakers, too, that there's a certain pleasure taken in thinking of a dichotomy of old media and new media, us against them. It seems to me that that is an old discussion and that in fact there's a lot of merger of the two media that has already taken place. Maybe one of the things that should be discussed is what is the result of that synergy."

Denise Caruso, responded: "The thing that's interesting about the synergy question I think for large media organizations in particular is that the economies of scale are really sort of at odds with each other. You see big companies like Time Warner with Pathfinder. They can't make enough money on that to really put a big investment behind it because you know it's so much cheaper to put things on-line, they're having a hard time figuring out what do you do with this asset threat you've got.

"It presents a really interesting opportunity for organizations that do... I guess the new term is transmedia. That have properties in a number of different media, and figure out the best way to use them.

On the speed of the new media:

Denise Caruso: "Jack says nobody wants to be last, but when I published a newsletter, I can tell you right now, I loved being last. I wanted something big to happen right when I was going to press because that meant in three weeks I could look at everything everybody else had written and say why they were wrong... If you've got the luxury of having a bunch of different media, you can do all of it. You can break the wrong story and then correct it and then commentate on it and then be there to film it, you can do the whole thing."

Unidentified voice: "...how Kissinger drew all the really powerful and important Washington journalists inside his orbit. He would charm them, but it was always on background, and it was all this confidential sourcing. Whenever they were about to break a big story, Kissinger would bring them in and seek their counsel and say oh, that's not really true. When you go back and you look at those years, the absolute best reporting about national security reporting happened outside the orbit of Washington, D.C.; happened outside of what we would now call the old media. There were guys like Seymour Hersch that were doing it on a wing and a prayer, magazines like Ramparts breaking powerful, important stories, because they didn't have access, because they weren't inside. To bring us back away from technology, away from marketing, away from advertising, and talking again about journalism, that's one of the great promises of the Web... I think they'll always have the established mainstream media at a kind of disadvantage.

"You talk to anybody who works at a big daily or at a big television network, they're forever bitching about the levels of editors that they have to go through, all the gloss that we as responsible and I guess concerned journalists think is important. But a lot of that, a lot of what we have lacquered onto the top of our craft prevents the truth from being told. I think that will be one of the salutary things about the Web."

A member of the audience asked a question about the problems that new media, just like old media, might have covering the broader community which she sees as "a real possible threat to democracy."

Adam Clayton Powell: I think if you look at high schools, 78 percent of U.S. public high schools are currently wired; 63 percent in minority and low income areas. That's far more than high school students reading newspapers. Perhaps especially in low income and minority areas. So actually, new media to some extent reflects the elitism of old media, but it has become more pervasive precisely among those age groups where old media aren't reaching.

Katherine Fulton: "When we were desperately trying to make a business out of the Independent we went to talk to Clay Felcker, and he looked at our paper and he said, you know, you've got to write about your readers. Because we were constantly writing about migrant workers and all these people that were social problems, and wanted to bring it to the attention of our readership. The question is can the segmentation be fought and how within commercial media or non-commercial media? Because the question of what happens to what's been called society-making media as opposed to segmentation that is about selling products to people is a fundamental, deep concern I think for the future of the democracy."

David Talbot: "I don't share your concern, and the reason is I don't think that there's ever been a time in which publishing a newsletter could be cheaper. I really fail to see what the fuss is about."

On aggregators:

Unidentified voice: "My bigger worry is you go to Yahoo for say coverage of President Clinton's visit to Africa, so you want to look at some African newspapers and news sources. It turns out if you go to Yahoo and click on Africa, they miss most of the newspapers in Africa. They don't have them. You've got to actually get out there and find it yourself. So I think one problem with the aggregators is the illusion of completeness."

Denise Caruso: "Absolutely. I think the top three search engines, the statistic I heard is that they only crawl a third of the Web sites on the Web. I don't think most people who use the Web really understand that they're not getting anywhere near all the stuff. I usually use at least three search engines if I'm really looking for something. So I do think it's a problem."

Quality Journalism Online - Forum Summary

Session 1: New Media--the Promise and the Threat

Session 2: Examples of Excellence On-Line

Session 3: Credibility on the Internet


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