New News Ecology

We mapped how a story gets written, edited, and distributed in the 'old' model 20th-century newsroom

I haven’t blogged about it much, but for me, this is the Season of the Journalism Conference.

I just returned from my first of three: Journalism That Matters: NewsTools 2008. It was a great gathering of nearly 200 journalists, technologists, educators, activists and bloggers – held at the Yahoo! Corporate headquarters in California’s Silicon Valley. (What a time to be at Yahoo!)

We kicked it off in URL’s Café (get it? Eat at URL’s!) – with a skit about old journalism (an intrepid newspaperman) encountering new, technology laden journalism (a Twittering young idealist). In order to create a common language between the “old” newsroom, and the 21st century “news ecology,” we prepared a map that drew out the roles and the values values (both tangible and intangible) involved in the process of getting a story out to an audience in the 20th Century.

Then we began to map the roles that might exist in the future. The experiment worked. While not everybody agreed about the new map -- in fact we began to identify lots of new roles that are developing – we had a great three-day “mashup” in which lots of new ideas were hatched, and lots of important connections were made between fascinating and diverse folks.

Next week, I’m off to Media That Matters at Hollyhock Retreat Center on Cortes Island in British Columbia, Canada – one of the true beauty spots on the planet. We’ll be exploring “Art, Story and Social Change.”

Then, on June 4-6, we’ll be at the University of Minnesota for another Journalism That Matters gathering called “A Passion for Place: New Pamphleteers/New Reporters: Convening Entrepreneurs Who Combine Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs.”

Hopefully, we're creating a new news ecology where truth, fairness, verification, and watchdog journalism can survive and thrive, even as new voices emerge as important storytellers in this turbulent time.

The emerging ecology takes the old roles of editor, reporter, and audience and converts them to sense-maker, beat blogger, and community.