We Media ’09 has just wrapped up and as I collect my thoughts (and notes) from the past two days, several questions are left floating around. How do we satisfy news audiences with both the rich content and advanced technological capabilities that they desire, while sustaining a cash-positive business model to stay afloat? It’s a question that affects most, if not all, news organizations.
The reality is that the news media landscape has changed, is still changing, and the landscape of tomorrow’s news is largely unknown to us. Unknown in the sense of who will drive tomorrow’s news sites and channels? Will it remain in the hands of today’s news organizations? Will it change into the hands of users themselves? Will a new hybrid organization emerge that is run by both users and journalism organizations? Time will tell.
An equally important recurring discussion at the conference revolved around the business model behind tomorrow’s news sites and channels. Ad-based revenue models by and large do not scale, at least in our current economy, to cover the overhead to operate a news organization. Flipping to a subscription-based or micro-payment type of model may not scale either – but for different reasons. So how will this too play out? Again, time will tell.
What I did walk away with, was a sense that we, the attendees, were one cohesive news community determined to continue reporting and/or distributing news. From the panelists to the moderators to the individual break-out session groups, there were many discussions around innovation; new ways of reporting the news, new ways to engage audiences, new ways to distribute the news and so on.
A personal conference highlight for me was simply getting to know the people that I happened to sit next to - and of course, the other attendees who participated in posting our #wemedia experiences from the conference onto Twitter .
My final thought post- We Media … is that being a part of shaping and building the future of news makes returning to my day to day work even more interesting.
http://DailyMe.com
Friday, February 27, 2009
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