|
Knight Digital Media Center
CNN.com's Mitch Gelman and Yahoo News' Neil Budde at last night's KDMC panel in Los Angeles. |
Last night I co-chaired a panel at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism:
It's a conversation, Stupid! Blogs, Wikis, Social Networking, UGC meet Journalism. (It was webcast live, and the archived video will be available online soon.) This panel was part of a multi-day seminar from the Knight Digital Media Center,
Journalism in a 24/7 World: Decision-making for the Online Editor, in partnership with the
Online News Association.
It was an amazing, lively discussion -- although I did, of course, voice my loathing of the term "user-generate content" (UGC), which is think sounds mechanistic, abstract, and even disrespectful. "Contributed content" works much better, I think.
Anyway, the panel included USAToday executive editor Kinsey Wilson, Yahoo! News editor in chief Neil Budde, CNN.com vice president and senior producer Mitch Gelman, and Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson. My brilliant co-moderator was Michelle Nicolosi, assistant managing editor for interactive at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
I'm working on a transcript of the session which will later be posted to the KDMC site. In the meantime, here's a compelling exchange from the end of the event. It started with a question from Jan, who's working on a masters in online journalism at USC. She asked: "Where do you see the role of contributed content five years from now -- not just online, but in print and broadcast, and at the national and local levels?
Davidson (Newsvine): "Production values will go up. Right now, you'll see great contributed videos like from the shooting at Va. Tech. That's great because it captures an important event -- but it's still 320x240 low-frame-rate video, which does come out looking a lot like the Zapruder film. How long before cell phone have little high definition video cameras?"Nobody worries much about production values [for contributed content] right now, but this will become a bigger deal. As time goes by we get hungry for higher quality. I think you'll see a rapid improvement.
Nicolosi (Seattle P-I): "I think we'll ask readers for more sophisticated kinds of content. Right now I'm getting ready to launch a tool to help readers create multimedia slideshows. We can get so much more sophisticated than, say, send us a photo."
Wilson (USA Today): "We're already starting to see that most of us in mainstream news organizations are using contributed content on the side. As we start to get our core news operations more engaged in this, you'll see reporters thinking more about contributed content for sourcing and generating story leads. That leads to cascading effects that would raise the bar."
[At this point, I mentioned the collaborative aspects of tools like Gigapan, and also keeping an eye on changing global demographics for media -- which means it's a good idea for ambitious, career-conscious online media pros to start learning Mandarin now, and I'm not kidding.]
Budde (Yahoo News): "...More and more of this will happen at local level and niche subject areas that lend themselves well to participation and contribution."
Gelman (CNN.com): "...After this panel I will learn Mandarin and I will give Mike Davidson my resume."...Also, what these people said about database journalism, where it's going, extracting info from public records and figuring out ways to apply and deliver it, that's very important. ...Earlier today I just got a position approved for a database reporter. If you're interested in this, please send me an e-mail."
