future of journalism looks bright but different

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disclosure

i am not a journalist (which should be very evident by my writing style), but rather am an emerging media technologist who has worked with and for some of the worlds largest media entities, normally as a cto - currently at hearst interactive media...

speaking at asu

in late march, i traveled out to phoenix to speak to dan gillmor's program at asu, the knight center for digital media entrepreneurship, which is part of the walter cronkite school of journalism and mass communication - i participated in 4 different sessions, a few made up of j-school students and a few made up of students focused on digital media and entrepreneurship related to emerging media - my talk and the conversations of the day focused on the changing nature of journalism, especially from a technology perspective...

since that trip, i've been traveling a ton and very busy (work & life) thus i'm overdue publishing both my thoughts on the day at asu and my presentation for broader consumption, so i wanted to get this post done for those who've asked - sorry for the delay and sorry in advance for the length of this post since it's meant as more of a reference than one of my normal posts...

a little background, while dan runs the program, my friend cj cornell is entrepreneur in residence and a member of dan's faculty - cj and i worked together earlier in our careers - we've stayed in contact so he's the person who proposed that i be invited to speak at the program...

setup

so an overview of my talk and the various sessions in which i participated - i started with some basic assumptions and recommendations: cj was using twitter to both publish soundbites from the sessions and to gather questions from those who could not attend in person - this is a great mechanism for broadening involvement, a natural next step is to show a live stream of the interaction on a monitor during the live sessions, makes it a little more lively for the presenter but creates a nice live feedback mechanism in my opinion - i also differentiated the "i" and "we" aspects of my talk, "i" being my personal opinions and experiences not related to my current role and "we" being definitive topics that do represent my current employer that i am at liberty to publicly discuss, i think this is really important to state, though common sense its rarely in my experience clearly articulated - given my role i also stated that certain not yet public aspects of our projects could not be discussed - that was it for setup...

background

i spent some time providing background on hearst, my role there and my career - i won't go in to the same level of detail here since the sites i linked to will provide you with more detail if desired - so i explained that hearst is a private, mostly domestic focused, diversified media company, one of the nation's largest - its made up of broadcast, newspaper, magazine, entertainment, business-to-business and interactive focused operating companies - my technology leadership role is diverse as well, comprising venture, enterprise, strategic relationships, innovation and emerging media focused responsibilities - all pretty typical of other cto roles i've had during my career, such as corporate cto of time-warner; cto of dell online; cto of encoda and technology leadership roles i've held with other media, entertainment and advertising companies - i went over various board and advisory roles i've held or currently hold and relationships i hold with academic institutions such as mit media lab (sponsor), kellogg (coordinator) and columbia (mentor)...

my role

i then provided some detail on certain aspects of my current role: for enterprise technology i provided an overview of what it takes to foster technology initiatives that are meant to benefit an entire corporation, how to focus on roi when recommending technology initiatives and the challenges that exist for a diverse company who's numerous industries are in a constant state of change due to competitive landscape & customer affinities; for venture technology i reviewed some of the companies we've invested in recently and motivations behind them such as pandora, eink, brightcove, sling media and sphere which were all minority investments and ugo, kaboodle and 1up which were all acquisitions - i then reviewed the scope and methodology behind my technology due diligence process which i won't go through here since it is already well documented via blog posts and supported via my wiki; i then reviewed what strategic relationships mean for a large media entity (some folks call this vendor management) especially related to leveraging scale across numerous digital media efforts: such as embracing best practices for operations and development, commoditizing platforms, developing consistent mechanisms for technology and product feature assessment, and finally how to leverage relationships for traffic growth, syndication, sponsorships and advertising - so instead of lots of silos and one offs, how to instead create uniform approaches that from a cost and revenue perspective benefit all involved...

future of journalism

the following aspects of the presentation are contained in the pdf (at end of post) that i've provided for downloading (or for subscribers it's in the rss 2.0 enclosure) so i'll just summarize here: i discussed the changing nature of journalism and the need to embrace becoming a networked journalist - i recommended that the students follow established journalists who have embraced digital and social media (jay rosen, ryan sholin, steve outing, dwight silverman, mathew ingram and their own dan gillmor are just a few), that they subscribe to beatblogging.org for its excellent posts and podcasts all about the changing nature of covering a beat, moving from traditional print to community building via blogging, i went over my belief (and many others) that all journalists need to start considering themselves multimedia creators and i recommend ryan sholin's post on alternative business models for news from a similar session at syracuse university that he held at newhouse; that they read steve outing's excellent post on digital news production; i recommended a number of emerging tools that they should experiment with for news gathering, research, publishing, distribution and community engagement: friendfeed, social median, yauba, zemanta, filtrbox and adaptive blue were those that i suggested but i also recommended that they develop a proficiency for trying out emerging tools as a way of staying current and find what works best for them; i recommended that they look at emerging online news sites such as hearst's seattlepi, now public and outside.in...

i then went over the differences i'm seeing in communication methods leveraged by social tools which i've blogged about previously so i won't rehash here but i thought it was important for students to experiment with a variety of tools and platforms and understand that they aren't all created equal nor universally applicable to every interaction or requirement - so pick the right tool for the job...

semantic technologies

given the audience i thought it was important to provide an overview of semantic web technologies and why learning about emerging content publishing capabilities such as these are so important not only for those already in the media but especially for those seeking to enter the industry, namely what it'll mean for the changing nature of journalism and the newsroom of the future (pointed them to an excellent post by john cass, formerly of forrester research) - simply stated semantic technologies provide a way for information and services on the web to be defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines desiring to utilize web content systemically - for future journalists it can give them the ability to leverage social media mining tools to determine which stories are of most interest to a community, giving the journalist the information and metrics to incentivize investigating in greater detail as well as enter the conversation proactively - i'm a member of the semantic web community in nyc, having hosted a well received semantic web meetup at the hearst tower in april and then the following week meeting up with tim berners-lee and other research focused semantic web technologists at mit in boston, the consensus seems to be that these technologies, while nascent from a broad business perspective, are extremely active amongst computer scientists, researchers and the w3c.org - for those in the media it can and will be a valuable tool in our kit, both as aspects of the content management systems used to publish and as seperate research and collaboration tools used to gather information and interact...

entrepreneurship

i finished up with a session for the students who are part of the entrepreneurial program, allowing about a dozen teams to first pitch me their startup ideas, then i ask them a few followup questions and then i provided them feedback and gave some recommendations - i heard some great ideas and had a lot fun interacting with these very passionate students, as a parent of a college student i can safely stay that these kids are getting a solid educational foundation that they'll be able to leverage immediately upon graduating...

overall, i was really impressed with the way dan, cj (i had a nice dinner with them in downtown phoenix after the packed day) and the rest of the faculty are preparing these young journalists and entrepreneurs for their future - they're getting the traditional grounding of j-school but layered with a strong influence from digital media creativity and startup innovation skillset, hence their future's bright but different than those that preceeded them...

download pdf of presentation

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Comments

[John Cass]

Mike, Thanks for mentioning my post, much appreciated.

It was great to get even more background on you, and thanks for the tips for some of the new technologies.

[sonnerie gratuite]

Everything is very open and very clear explanation of issues. It contains truly information. Your website is very useful. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to more!