Denim, Hard Cheeses and The International Symposium on Online Journalism

Denim, hard cheeses, wine, my wife JoAnna.  All things that improve with age.  Add the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin to the list.  This has always been one of my favorite events of the year because it combines professional and academic panels exploring the evolution of online journalism.  The conference entered its second decade this past weekend with the strongest lineup I can remember, featuring panels on how journalism is adapting to mobile news, strategies for surviving the digital era (thankfully pay walls were rarely mentioned), participatory and nonprofit journalism. As organizer Rosental Alves noted, if number of tweets is a metric of the success of a conference then 2010 exceeded 2009 almost three fold (4,500 tweets to 1,600).  I tweeted more in two days than I have over the past two years.

If you want to read a good summary of the conference either visit the site’s blog or go to the insightful blog posts made by Alfred Hermida. Rather than trying to match Hermida for insight, I am taking the coward’s way out by gleaning important points from the conference through my Tweets, the Tweets of my Tweeps,  and Hermida’s blog. Here goes:

*Digital first, print last. Someday everyone will understand this.

*Don’t fight aggregators; don’t put up pay walls.  The newspaper is no longer the water cooler. The audience now assembles itself.

*“Walling off the different departments in the news room is going to be the death of the media”

*The question isn’t who is a journalist, but what is journalism?

*The profit model “will not pay for public interest journalism.”

*We were moving from a era of mass media, where we talked to a forest, to an era of niche, where we talked to a tree, to a era of micro-niches, where we talk to the leaves, “and the leaves are talking to each other.”

*Put faith in the public and allow the community to curate the best of what’s out there.”

* Internet asked you to go to their sources. Personalized news allows news to come back to you.

* Transparency is the most important thing about journalism in this century.

*Evan Smith of #texastribune recommends “content partner sluttiness” and argues the destination site is going the way of the dodo.

*Users demanded ability to filter the fire hose of news and get personal news stream. That’s the value of aggregators.

*Wikipedia is the best place to start, the worse place to stop.

Congratulations Rostental, Amy and all the UT graduate students for putting on a wonderful conference. I am curious from those of you who were there, what was your favorite pearl of wisdom? And for those of you not there are these ideas heretical, common sense or a combination of both?