Many of the key moments of understanding at the conference came when participants and presenters were brutally honest about the industry and its newsrooms.
“To a teenager today it’s not 15 minutes of fame they care about anymore, it’s 15 megabytes of fame. Because 15 minutes is gone in 15 minutes, but 15 megabytes can stand the test of time.”
— Jeffrey Cole, Research Professor Director, Center for Digital Future, USC Annenberg School for Communication
“The editorial side of newsrooms have been tremendous innovators. They’ve expanded the beats they offer, expanded the way information looks. The failure in news
organizations is the business side.”
— Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project
“If you don’t have good communication, you’re going to fall down and skin your knees. And we do that all the time, and we just get back up and keep moving.”
— David Ledford, Executive Editor, The News Journal (Wilmington, DE)
“I don’t get it. I’m not sure there’s an “it” to get.”
— Joe Howry, Editor, Ventura County Star
“We are at a point in time with declining circulation and declining revenues. It’s time to recognize how liberating for all of us that is. Because we can’t be constrained by the way we thought about things. We can’t be sustained by what our fears are. We can’t be sustained by our past successes. We’ve got to think about what we’re going to do in the future and about what we’re willing to do and about what we’re willing to change not only in our organizations but in ourselves.”
— Joe Howry, Editor, Ventura County Star
“The biggest “aha!” for me was the need to be more of a guerilla. I think there are so many things we know are problems that we just sort of try to work around. In our group, we had folks from outside the newspaper industry, and you sort of listen to how they do things, and it’s brutal. It’s, ‘Okay, here’s what you’ve got to do; let’s go do it.’”
— Julia Wallace, Editor, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Newspapers are built on competition and the Web is built on connectivity and collaboration. It’s okay to push our viewers to other links, that they appreciate that and will come back to us. And I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
— Gregory Moore, Editor, The Denver Post
“I would suggest to you that the journalism that we do is fundamentally a closed system. We want to control the gathering, interpretation, production, the editing, and then the distribution of information because we have a desire to create a high-value closed-system product. And what we’re seeing happening right now is this explosion of creativity of not very good citizen journalism… pushing closed-system journalism off the stage.”
— Steve Yelvington, Morris Communications
“I would encourage you to go deeper with those questions because the first element of this change is you, and becoming conscious of your own belief systems is quite powerful in trying to make this happen. Because it’s not all about them. The most powerful tool you have when you go back tomorrow is you.”
— Nedra Weinstein, Arden Consulting
“The only thing I do know is, if you’re urgent but you go about it in the wrong way, you’re going to go really slow. Do you know what I mean by that? So what looks like urgency to you is actually clogging up your system.”
— Nedra Weinstein, Arden Consulting
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