"Trust is the new black," declared Craig Newmark at a new media summit on Wednesday, predicting that more reliable, fact-checked journalism will excel in the new media environment.
As the founder of Craigslist, of course, Newmark is often blamed for sinking American newspapers by decimating their classified ads – a charge he dismissed as an "urban legend" – but he says he is very concerned about the state of journalism. "We need tough-minded journalism to survive and do well as a democracy," he said, speaking on a panel of Internet entrepreneurs and journalists at NYU's Journalism School, one of the more high profile events at "Internet Week" in Manhattan.
Nick Denton, the Internet mogul behind Gawker and a raft of profitable blog sites, was more bearish on the prospects for traditional newspaper journalism. While it would be "tempting" to hire laid off journalists to blog, he said, "a lot of those people don't adjust well to working online." Instead, Denton expects that Internet niche media will continue to flourish, as the value of targeted, original reporting rises.
Ari Melber
"Trust is the new black," declared Craig Newmark at a new media summit on Wednesday, predicting that more reliable, fact-checked journalism will excel in the new media environment.
As the founder of Craigslist, of course, Newmark is often blamed for sinking American newspapers by decimating their classified ads – a charge he dismissed as an "urban legend" – but he says he is very concerned about the state of journalism. "We need tough-minded journalism to survive and do well as a democracy," he said, speaking on a panel of Internet entrepreneurs and journalists at NYU’s Journalism School, one of the more high profile events at "Internet Week" in Manhattan.
Nick Denton, the Internet mogul behind Gawker and a raft of profitable blog sites, was more bearish on the prospects for traditional newspaper journalism. While it would be "tempting" to hire laid off journalists to blog, he said, "a lot of those people don’t adjust well to working online." Instead, Denton expects that Internet niche media will continue to flourish, as the value of targeted, original reporting rises.
Turning to the ultimate niche "media," the Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray credited Twitter as his key news source. "As a news consumer," he said, Twitter is a "much more satisfying way of filtering news" than aggregation sites like Huffington Post or the Drudge Report. (Murray also relayed his employer’s frustration with the ultimate aggregator, Google, for shortchanging media content providers, even saying that "maybe" the Journal would sue Google, in response to a question.)
One of the brains behind Twitter was on hand to hear about the site’s media footprint, which turned out to be a surprise. Co-Founder Jack Dorsey volunteered that he had not expected the site would play a big role in journalism. Twitter has swiftly emerged as a reporting and promotion tool, from providing crowdsourced reporting to virally spreading articles. (For a fascinating account of how citizens shared real-time information on last year’s Mumbai terror attacks, check out this Times article by Noam Cohen and Brian Stelter.) Dorsey said those trends, just like "reply" and "search" features on the site, simply bubbled up from the user community. And Denton made Twitter sound like a competitive edge, noting that smart young journalists on his staff, like Gabriel Snyder, have swapped RSS feeds for Twitter to see stories and trends moving in real time.
Finally, Murray argued that social sites like Twitter have not only shifted reporting and promotion, but upended how journalists understand their relationship with their readers. "Reporters who are good at this understand that they have to cultivate" their own audience, he said, which is actually the "biggest change in journalism."
Ari MelberTwitterAri Melber is The Nation's Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine's blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at amelber@hotmail.com. Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Joy Behar Show," “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). His reporting has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review. He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.