Welcome, friends! We’re excited to explore ways to sustain local journalism. This panel, moderated by Adam Yoffie of the ISP, will be presented in two components: dimensions of the challenge and solutions to it.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Conference resumes at 1 p.m. EST with a panel on Preserving Local Journalism. The panel will comprise two discussions: Paul Starr (Princeton), Steven Wildman (Michigan State), and Lisa George (Hunter College) will frame the Dimensions of the Challenge, and Peter Shane (Knight Commission) and Paul Bass (New Haven Independent) will offer Possible Solutions.  Join us, watch on ustream, comment on Twitter.

The Conference’s first panel aims to discuss the demand for news, who its audience is, what they’re looking for, and how the new and vast range of choices is affecting the consumption of traditional news.  On the panel are Tom Rosenstiel (Director, Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism), Jay Rosen (New York University), Lee Rainie (Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project), and Steve Dennen (Vice President, comScore).

Read the rest of this entry »

One of our panelists, Steve Dennen, has just noted that Twitter’s year-on-year growth in unique visitors is an incredible 1,703%  Certainly, conference participants are hitting the #kmedia tag.  See the #kmedia search results, and add your own.

Also, the conference is streaming live through ustream.  Watch and participate—from anywhere!

A sample from our Twitter feed after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to this year’s Journalism and the New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messengers? conference.

Dean Robert Post—who represented the Washington Post during his time at Williams & Connolly—welcomed participants.  For Post, the question facing us is: when we think about the new media ecology, and how we want to reconstruct it, what are the values that should be most prominent?  According to what values should we perceive the new media ecology?  For Post, the central value is democratic self-governance: we allow all citizens access to the formation of public opinion, a process that relies on the circulation of texts, media, ideas.  How, then, does the media survive in order to serve this function, to form the structural underpinnings of the public opinion?  In a democracy, it’s not just information that has to circulate; information about government also needs to be created.  Professional journalists serve to sieve through information, work out which facts are important.  Do we want to sustain the profession, and if so, how?

Dean Post thanked Perry Fetterman, Patrick Kabat, Steve Nevas, Jack Balkin, Steve Brill, and the Knight Foundation for putting the Conference together.

Jack Balkin added a word about the Projects behind the conference: the Knight Law and Media Program and the Yale Information Society Project.  Jack recounted previous conferences, discussed ISP Fellows (who have organized the conference, will be moderating the panels, and run this website), and explained the Knight Foundation’s involvement.  For Jack, this conference will focus on the biggest question: how information flows and how it can serve the interests of democracy.  Participants are students, journalists, business people—but Jack encouraged everyone to think about themselves as servers of democracy.  The question, then, is not about pleasing shareholders or saving an industry, but “serving the very soul of America.”

Laura DeNardis (Executive Director, Information Society Project) added her welcome, and explained that this conference will occur online as much as at Yale.  The conference will be webcast, and live-blogged on yaleisp.org or here.

Our first panel, Who Uses The News, and How?, will begin shortly.  You can follow the conference right here, and contribute by posting comments or using the #kmedia hashtag on your Twitter feed.

Enjoy!