On the first day of the ONA conference, after my previous post, the battery of my laptop ran out and I didn't bring the charger. On the second day of the conference, showing up a bit late and therefore in a bit of a hurry, I managed to spill coke on the entire contents of my conference bag, including my passport, my purse, my favourite cardigan and my mobile phone, so I spent the better part of the afternoon trying to save my belongings (my mobile phone is still hovering between life and death, a very uneasy feeling). Oh, and the wireless connection only worked in some conference rooms. Hence, no more liveblogging from ONA, but if you want to know more about some of the content mentioned and discussed at the conference, read the conference blog or look at the links to the ONA 2005 Awards of Excellence in online journalism, and the list of all the finalist. Lot's of great source material for teaching online communication and possible best practices. The awards, by the way, were presented at the conference banquet which gave it a very nice air of exitement and "content" - we should do more awards in the humanities-flavoured conferences, I usually attend...

Thinking back, to be honest, one of the best sessions, I went to at the conference, was the international panel, with participants from Deutsche Welle, Brazilan UOL, Spanish El Mundo and English BBC. Now, here are some online news sites that are trying to push the borders in terms of producing directed content for the web. One thing that really intrigued me - and also scared me a bit - was that Guido Baumhauer of Deutsche Welle was the ONLY person at the entire conference who (from what I heard) mentioned mobile media as part of the site's "news outreach". Listening to Alberto Cairo from El Mundo talking about infographics, I was pretty proud that there is actually an entire chapter of our Danish anthology, Digital Worlds, which deals with Elmundo's use of infographics (an analysis of their coverage about 9/11, written by Anders Fagerjord), and this was written back in 2003. I still think what they do are bloody brilliant.

What surprised me the most about the conference was all the buzz about blogs. I did not talk to a lot of participants, but several of journalists I talked to were considering how to use and include blogs on their websites of their papers. And it came up again and again in the panel discussions - clearly also because of some more or less implicit concern that the bloggers are "stealing" the scene from the "real" journalists and blogs are hence also needed on the news websites to "spice them up" and signal a certain degree of hipness. Then, surprisingly, at the final discussion at the conference, the blogger behind www.paidcontent.org was called upon to comment on a post he had written about the lack of passion of the conference, and there was no doubt that this blogger has earned a lot of respect in the present community of journalists. So while fearing the change of times, it appeared that all seem to recognise that the line between being a journalist and a professional blogger is becoming somewhat blurred. I might have gotten it wrong, not quite catching on to all the nuances in the war of opinions which was obviously being fought out between panelists and the question-asking members of the audience, but in the end most seemed to agree that we are all "citizen journalist", whatever that means. .

Well, I'm all for involving "citizens" in as many ways as possible online, but at the end of the day, dear journalists, I want to read what the trained reporters, the researchers and well-informed local activists have to say about events like Katrina, the Tsunami and the war in Iraq and I do not want to read about how scared my neighbour on holiday was, when he woke up. I'm already becoming somewhat tired of all the touchy-feely "reality" reports from eye-witnesses that seem about to become as standard a feature of "big disaster" coverage as the live tv-broadcasts. Citizen journalists, be it bloggers, activists, independent reporters or Mr. Smith with a mobcam in his hand, are not the major threat to the world of news, though the content they contribute can certainly be a very interesting supplement to the news produced by the media themselves. The major threat (in my humble opinion as an academic, who is a sucker for quality content on the web) is the conservatism and lack of boldness of traditional media when moving into the new media scene. What I don't get is that if all the big players on, for instance the US newsscene, are so afraid of the bloggers and corporations like Yahoo and Google stealing away the text-based (cum video)online newsscene, why don't they use some more of their money to hire dedicated webjournalists and programmers who can produce unique, interactive news and commentary for the web combined with the solidity of documenting and reporting, that I still believe trained journalists' are the best at doing? Perhaps, I just went to the wrong sessions and it was actually discussed in some dark corner of the conference, but I'm thinking newsgames, infographics and flash-timelines produced by professionals. I'm thinking well-developed news content for my mobile, podcasts on the fly. I'm thinking tagging and sharing. Now there lies the future for me, not in the massive presence of weblogs, which - in the end - are bound to cancel each other out, simply because of the sheer amount of them.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 22:05