At Media Summit, the Real Conversation Was Conducted Online
By Julio Ojeda-Zapata
A vast chasm often separates bloggers and other "new media" types from old-guard journalists in the "mainstream media." So Minnesota Public Radio, a mainstream media bastion, recently made a valiant but ill-fated attempt to bridge that gulf.
The public radio network hosted a summit for mainstream media (or MSM) operatives to mix with media-2.0 types in a frank discussion about a morphing journalistic landscape.
The setting, a grand hall that is part of MPR's swank, recently expanded headquarters in downtown St. Paul, had a breathtaking nighttime view of a floodlit state Capitol just up the hill. Organizers invited two local bloggers to "liveblog" the proceedings. Live streaming video was available, thanks to another new-media outfit. There were cookies to munch on.
What could go wrong? As it turned out, lots. The event last month, co-sponsored by the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and featuring a star-studded roster of media panelists, faltered almost from the start.
Blame it, in part, on a clash of cultures. Of nearly a dozen participants, only two represented media 2.0 while the bulk were from mainstream media outlets or academia. The audience, though, was replete with so-called "citizen journalists" -- or CJs -- who inhabit an amorphous new-media universe of blogs, Twitter feeds and video-streaming sites.
These members of the audience thought nothing of flipping open their laptops or cell phones and carrying on a parallel dialogue online -- mostly via microblog posts or "tweets" on the popular Twitter -- about what they liked or disliked on the stage. Many judged the event to be boring, and said so.
Bob Collins, a Minnesota Public Radio staffer and the event's co-moderator, would later chide those Netizens for all their simultaneous tweeting, and would argue this was a main reason the event fell flat. All the communicating online, he reasoned, stifled discussion offline.
Given this cultural chasm, is any media summit of this kind doomed from the outset? With discussions already under way about a possible do-over, it's important to examine what happened at the MPR forum and consider what might have been done differently:
The format. Collins and his co-moderator, famed media-world author and academic Dan Gillmor, were the only ones facing the audience. Other panelists -- including an Associated Press editor and an emissary from Minnesota Monitor, a top Twin Cities blog -- were relegated to bit roles, sitting in the front row of the auditorium with their backs to the rest of audience. None of the panelists was given much of a chance to speak.
This irked the event's livebloggers, Greg Swan and Erica Mauter of Minneapolis Metblogs, who were often anything but kind in their running transcript of the event:
E: Yeah, I'm bored with the "panelists" supplying questions for Bob and Dan. Can we get to the audience, please?
G: Dear MPR, you are losing us...If this was a podcast, I would move on the next one.
Some later wondered whether a sloping, college-style auditorium was the right place to carry on what Chuck Olsen, co-founder of political-video site The UpTake and one of the panelists, said "should've been more of a roundtable."
Collins, who blogs for MPR, owned up to the event's failings when he wrote on Olsen's blog, "Clearly I didn't do my job and Gillmor didn't do his job. The format didn't do its job. The building didn't do its job."
The topics. Collins, Gillmor and others wasted no time in dissecting important media topics such as accuracy (a key attribute many bloggers lack), transparency (a frankness about potential biases, sometimes lacking in mainstream media), passion (also sometimes lacking in overly detached mainstream media) and a rich, rapidly evolving media ecosystem.
"It's not about MSM or blogs," Gillmor remarked at one point. "It's about MSM and blogs...What does 'mainstream' mean anymore?"
But some in the audience bristled at an "old media vs. new media" thread they saw running through an onstage discussion dominated by mainstream media participants.
"I definitely didn't get the feeling they were there to learn from the other side," Graeme Thickins, a media strategist and prominent blogger, later told me in e-mail.
As Mauter put it in an e-mail, "I think we spent way too much time talking about the differences between MSM and CJs/bloggers and not nearly enough time talking about where the middle ground is."
The tweeting. "If you let the chattering classes in the door," Olsen would later quip on his blog, "the bastards will chat about you!"
And so they did. Even Mauter and Swan, frantically liveblogging on their laptops, had Twitter open to drop in periodic tweets while monitoring what others tweeted. Such commentary tended toward the negative.
"Is it only 7:45? Good God, this is slow," said Jason DeRusha, a local Internet celebrity who also happens to be a TV reporter with the Twin Cities' CBS affiliate, in a Twitter "tweet" tapped out on his cell phone.
"Half the people in the audience would rather be watching American Idol," wrote Garrick van Buren, a blogger, podcaster and tech entrepreneur. "The other half are."
I was part of this audience, taking notes on a laptop while watching the Twitter chatter, and added my own voice to the online chorus: "Enjoying Twitter and MBM reax to (this) event more than actual event -- I think I will sleep well tonight."
Afterward, I would ponder that snarky tweet of mine, and those of other participants, and wonder whether Collins had a point when he railed against the simultaneous online discussions.
He later wrote, "For a segment of the audience, it was more important to get a laugh from a Twitter message than it was to actually engage in a discussion that was likely to bring disparate interests together." (The MPR blogger is no fan of Twitter, saying it "seems like digital spitballs to me.")
Phil Wilson, a broadcasting industry veteran, noted on his blog that there were "many brilliant thoughts being exchanged by people who seem to be more prone to write about them than verbally express them." He added that "sarcasm is really easy on Twitter," and, "Twittering away while a discussion is going on is like talking when someone else is…It’s kinda rude."
Expecting an audience filled with Twitter users not to tweet is unrealistic, though (and Minnesota Public Radio did provide Wi-Fi for those in the room with Net devices). So some of us are now wondering how the tweeting at the MPR forum might have been integrated better into the overall discussion.
Some have suggested that a second forum, which is now in the planning stages, include a digital backdrop to display online commentary as it's posted, so those in the room can somehow react to it. But Olsen is against this idea.
"I'm pretty serious about NOT having a screen projecting a back channel," he said as part of the forum-planning e-mail thread. "Been there, done that in the tech conference world, and it's a distraction. I think we should really focus on listening to each other in the room."
On this, at least, mainstream media and media 2.0 seem to agree: The most effective conversations are often the ones that take place face-to-face.
Julio Ojeda-Zapata covers consumer technology for the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press, a MediaNews Group newspaper. Find his coverage at yourtechweblog.com and twincities.com/techtestdrive.
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