We Make The Media: Initial thoughts

Today — assuming I get this post up before midnight — was the We Make The Media event in Portland. For those who were not following this topic, this was a conference at which the future of Portland’s media scene was the center of discussion. I’ve dabbled as a journalist and a freelance writer off and on over the years (and depending on one’s point-of-view this blog could be considered journalism as well), but my interest in attending had less to do with my own writing than the greater issues of journalism and citizen engagement. I had attended hoping to learn more about the direction that media may be headed in the 21st Century, with an eye towards how this might affect the evolution of how citizens relate to their governments. I’m still processing many of my thoughts about this, and I hope to have some more extended comments about this subject next week. First, though, I want to provide some initial reactions while they are still fresh.

The strongest takeaway I have of the conference is that if the proceedings are reflective of the state of media, we are in deep trouble. Throughout much of the conference I felt as if I were stuck in 2002. People — usually older, white, male employees (or former employees) of dead tree media — were talking about how they wanted to revolutionize media by including things like websites, YouTube videos, and the like. When I hear the term “digital divide” I usually think of low income people who cannot afford a computer, not of upper crust Portland establishment types who apparently are too busy picking lint from their golfing sweaters to understand what all those crazy kids are doing on the spooky Intrawebs.

Okay, that was snarky, but if you want to really understand the vibe at the event, snarky is just it. There was a massive divide — aided partly by the location of outlets for plugging in laptops — that resulted in one corner of the room becoming the Twitter Corner. Although the distribution of ages and backgrounds were not even, there were far more younger crowd people in the Twitter Corner. Sadly, I had decided to be lazy and had failed to bring my near-death iBook, so instead I kept up with the Twitter feed by looking over the shoulders of other laptop users. The conversation going on in the feed was far different than that in the room. It was more net savvy, it was more innovative, it was more frustrated, and it was more snarky. It represented a demographic who felt that the point of the conference was to advance journalism, not to advance the journalistic establishment that presenter Joe Smith nobly enshrined in the clothing of patriotism.

It wasn’t just the damn kids and their Twitterisms that felt this way. I was sitting at the edge of the Twitter Corner, near a lot older freelance writers. One, an environmental writer who was stringing for some big eastern papers recently, kept shaking her head. During a break, we talked, and she pointed out that everyone was so focused on the structures of the journalism establishment that they’d forgotten it’s about the writers. “It takes longer [these days] to pitch a story than to write it,” she related. “I end up putting it on Huffington Post because it’s better to get it out there than wait until it is stale.” This is a key point that has to be understood: this person was willing to put her work up on the web and bypass traditional media (as well as meaningful income) because the story came first. Nobody seemed to understand this. Writers were wanting help to make their magic happen, and instead the center of discussion was some kind of WPA/CCC jobs project to support editors and staff reporters.

Perhaps it is time that the media considered the idea that the era of the staff reporter is over.

Much hand wringing also centered around how little investigative reporting would happen as newspapers continue to decline. The local beat reporter concentrating on attending local government meetings was raised to the level of some kind of hero, bleeding for the people. Local government reporting? I’m sorry, but as someone with a lot of local government experience, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ever been impressed by local government reporters. They tend to write happy-happy kumbaya stories, or they write stories that seek controversy at the expense of deeper digging that would reveal a more balanced perspective. I don’t think it’s entirely those reporter’s fault — short deadlines, lack of staff, and low pay all contribute to the quality of work here — but really, if what we’re trying to do is preserve the kind of local government / small town reporting that we’ve had for the last thirty years, let’s just take this horse out to the pasture and shoot it already. I’d rather read Twitter. (And not that long ago I had no use for Twitter.)

Is there any hope, or was the conference a total waste of time? Certainly some of the Twitter Corner denizens were toying with ditching the place with two hours left to go and hitting up a bar for some real conversation. I don’t think it was a total waste, though. For one, it was a suitable — if not particularly hopeful — fodder for thought about where media might be going, but that’s a story for next week. For another, it allowed the Twitter Crowd to emerge. Sometimes, the best motivator is something to react against, and I think there were enough interesting moments of failure of imagination by the conference presenters and some of the older ink-and-paper crowd that there’s fodder to react against for a couple of years. I also think that the idea of a journalism incubator might be the kind of decentralized, cooperative tool that could unite many of the lone wolves in the Portland media world.

Most of all, it taught me that I should never, ever, ever go to a conference and leave my laptop at home. Better that it die in the noble service of Twittercasting than leave me out of the loop of the real conversation — the interesting conversation — from the back corner of the room.