Speakers:
Rafat Ali, Publisher and Editor, paidContent.org
Dean Rotbart, Host, Newsroom Confidential
David Sifry, Founder and CEO, Technorati
Jonathan Weber, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, New West

Moderator:
Tina Sharkey, Senior Vice President Network and Community Programming, AOL

Blogging has gone from 0 to 36 million blogs worldwide in less than a decade. 75,000 new blogs will be created today. 27% of internet users engage in blogs, whether, creating, writing, or reading, every month. At this rate, the blogosphere is doubling every 5 months. Consumers spend 4 hours a week writing their blogs.

Professional blogs are a slightly different animal. Engadget has 17 million page views a month. Citizen journalism isn’t just about blogs. Look at YouTube and wikipedia. This is the generation that creates their own content, starting with an away message when they’re 14 years-old, to doing blogs.

As news production and consumption undergoes a radical transformation. What is relationship between blogs and media? What will happen to the traditional newsroom?

Dean Robart is the host of Newsroom Confidential, a national radio program focused on journalism and public relations. Dean starts by posing a question to the audience: When was the idea for weblogs first seen in American media? In 1690, the first American newspaper was called Public Occurrences. The fourth page was blank so the reader could add his or her own news items before passing it on. This was the earliest we see the idea of citizens participating in journalism. Thomas Payne passed out brochures when the printing press came around. It empowers citizens. We have always been citizen journalists. The idea that the rise of the Internet and the explosions of the blogosphere is causing decline in newspapers, magazines, and old media circulation is a myth.

Dean did a Factiva search in order to find the first story that mentioned the internet. A September 25, 1989 issue of PC Week says that a Compuserve gateway provides access to internet. In October 1989, the question was, “Will the internet be commercialized?” The first mention of blogs was in May 1999. Dan Gilmore said that slashdot may be a prototype of web communication. However, going further back, the NY Times published a story in 1976 about the American Society of Newspaper Editors, who saw a declining newspaper readership. At that time, the villain was TV.

Based on the history, Dean is skeptical that the two worlds are in competition. Is Craig’s List suddenly eating into newspapers classified advertising? No. These declines have been going on for 30 years, long before blogs.

The Moderator redirects: If the industry itself has already been on the decline, what will be the role of the traditional reporter?

According to Dean, the traditional reporter is not going anywhere! 75,000 new blogs a day don’t have an established readership nor credibility. If anything, the role/value of traditional reporter will go up. Blogs, like Engadget, are narrow, do well, terrific. However, general news blog will never replace The Wall Street Journal or Financial Times.

Jonathan Weber is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of New West and was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Industry Standard. Jonathan says that people confuse the decline of newspapers and the decline of journalism. Whether or not newspapers are declining, this is the golden age of journalism! Barriers of entry are lowered, which is a good thing. That doesn’t have to be associated with a decline in standards. New media and new publishing are a good thing in the world of journalism.

The moderator: We’ve historically relied on the big guys for impartiality, accuracy, and quality standards. What is the blogosphere equivalent of that?

Rafat Ali is the Founder, Editor and Publisher of paidContent.org. He says that the newspaper business is in trouble. Both the big guys like the New York Times and the citizen journalists need to unlearn what has been institutionalized. We have to learn to do journalism at 1/10 the cost what we were doing before. A good reporter is a good reporter at the end of the day. We haven’t been edited. Is that good or bad? We thrive on speed, low cost, continuous evaluation. Journalism has become more of an evolution of a story. There’s no such thing as “once it’s done, it’s done.” Journalists need to be able to follow stories as they unfold.

Weber agrees with respect to speed. At the LA Times a story went through five editors before it hit the  printed page. That is a pre-computer work flow. The process of reporting with the internet is much more efficient than it used to be. There’s no need for a copy editor when there’s spell checking; fact checking is much faster. Large media organizations haven’t grappled with productivity yet but they will.

David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a blog search engine, says that we use the internet in a fundamentally different way than in the 1990s. When we think about the internet itself starting to change, there are several mega trends: Broadband and mobile adoption has seen a proliferation of tools. The way that we use the internet has changed. We used to think of the internet as the world’s biggest library. Now the net is a real time, an “always on” media. The internet is a communication forum as well as a reference forum. Search engines are still based on the internet as a library. They do not incorporate the understanding of time.

Journalism has to have the ability to be timely. Economics of traditional media model dictate this. Now, people who clearly do not work under standards of objectivity, but as a group, can help to inform all of our opinions. It’s their pictures, their writing – it acts as a supplement to traditional media.

The moderator summarizes that the blogosphere is less about information, and much more about conversation.

David says that the question now is “how do we know who to trust?”

Jonathan turns to the business of blogging. New West was built for $15,000, as opposed to the site for the Industry Standard, which cost more than $1 million. That difference is the important change. The economics of online publishing has changed a lot. The cost base is rapidly descending. The online advertising market has re-emerged. Advertising and marketing dollars follow people, and since more people are in new media, marketing dollars will follow them there.

How do you know what to believe? New West is being built as a branded media property. This is important. They paid attention to branding and design. It feels like professional media vs. a blog. They explicitly set out to combine traditional journalism with next generation journalism. It combines the voice and direct conversation aspect of blogs with real reporting and attention to facts. It is a hybrid model, and Jonathan thinks it will work with traditional advertising dollars.

Rafat sees three trends: 1) pure aggregation like Technorati, 2) entrepreneurs trying to create citizen journalism sites, and 3) big media companies that are trying to incorporate citizen journalism into their sites like BBC and the New York Times.

There is no business model yet. For entrepreneurs, a lot of it is not driven by 100% commercial gain. Over the last five years, it’s not necessarily 100% philanthropic either, but it sits somewhere between commercial gain and charity. Leave some money on the table because much of it truly is driven simply by passion.

David adds that you have to inject some capitalization into it. People are getting book deals, consulting deals, freelancing gigs, and promoting their own businesses. The marketing effect goes above and beyond just google ads.

Jonathan says that New West does a mix of advertising. They have a sales force. There are lots of options, and there will be more. For example, the “blogvertorial” is an advertorial format. The success of adsense and advertising networks depends on the nature of the content. It works better for highly specialized, niche blogs with high value keywords. For most bloggers and  sites, the money on adsense will only come from huge traffic. Otherwise, advertising income is mostly pocket change.

Google ad sense produces much higher relevance than the alternatives, though. Google doesn’t reveal how much they pay to the publisher. Some advertising networks pay a much bigger cut than ad sense does. Google takes most of the money. That’s great for publishers, but not the answer.

The moderator asks: how do you balance talent?

Jonathan says that at New West, some writers are paid, some are not. They are all on monthly contracts. There is also an “unfiltered” section on the site where anyone can write. The site has a hierarchy of writers. You get what you pay for. Journalism in writing end of it, will be done by people who are paid and have skills. from a content standpoint, paid a lot of attention to recruiting. Young talent that can be effective with some training.

The moderator says that AOL thinks of itself as facilitators. News is top down. but they also program their citizen journalists into the mix. They provide a dashboard of traditional and curated content. That way, you get and give a full wash.

The moderator asks the panel: How do you measure influence in the world of blogs? What will be the metric? Is it CPM (cost per page view), CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per action), or CPI (cost per influencer)?

David believes that there is interest in the social network effect. It is an epidemiological approach of a contagion. Technorati takes the fundamental brilliance of google and its PageRank, but uses the hyperlink as an implicit vote of attention. Net attention is derived by how many other people are linking to a site. This concept can even apply topically.

Rafat says that over the last year, bloggers are happy that PR people are reaching out to them. Bloggers are usually nice to you if you, PR, reach out to them. Take, for example, Netflix, which has a few fan blogs. The fan blogs tried to reach out to corporate PR guys at Netflix. Blogs are free PR for the company! However, the mistake is that PR folks think they can influence beyond what it is.

Davis is starting to see reactions today. Companies’ marketers now recognize the customer’s voice.

The moderator calls it the “wisdom of crowds.”

Dean, however, doesn’t see influence of bloggers as very significant. He doesn’t think blogging is journalism.

David responds that not every blog is the New York Times, but some of them are really passionate about topics.

Rafat says that media looks at blogs and mostly sees political blogs.

David says that the blogosphere is yin-yang, with the yang/male part being more topic-oriented. The blogs are covering things that aren’t being put out by Scientific American. He’s not discounting the need for training or quality. It just means that great editors are now much more important. Editors have to be able to filter out the good stuff.
The Moderator asks the panel what they see in 10 years.

Rafat sees the rise of the journalist as an entrepreneur. Mainstream media journalists will branch out and start their own companies.

Jonathan says that there is no way to see as far as 10 years. However, over the next several years, the problems that the newspaper business is facing will become bigger. Newspapers will decline faster than people think. There will be a shift of the center of gravity, away from traditional newspapers.

David sees the idea of consumer culture becoming an anachronism. The old idea is that producers produce, advertisers advertise, and consumers consume. David finds the idea that consumers are passive as offensive. “Consumers consumer content and crap cash.” If we look at the impact of MySpace and MMPORGs, culture will become a participant culture. Top-down mechanisms will start to crumble and things will be networked.

Jonathan doesn’t agree with David’s prediction that we will become a participant culture. If we take the movie business as an example, people are after quality, and will always want to watch a movie by a quality producer like Steven Spielberg.