News: The Source That Blogs Are Made Of

During the first hour of the RTNDA convention’s opening panel discussion Sunday night, the only mention of news came during an online video chat moderator Miles O’Brien had with his 14-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter back in their rooms at home in New York.  They are cute, personable kids, and, as the children of a network news reporter, they watch more TV and care more about current events than we can safely assume their classmates do.
 
But it did seem odd that two teenagers not even physically present in the room would be the only ones to address journalism until the session was about two-thirds over.  (That doesn’t count Eric Newton of the Knight Foundation, who made a few opening remarks before the panel discussion started.  Newton announced a $1.2-million grant to RTNDF’s high school journalism program.)
 
Representing the new media generation on stage were videobloggers Zadi Diaz, of http://jetsetshow.com/, and Amanda Congdon, formerly of Rocketboom.  She now works ABC News , but insisted –- when the J-word actually entered the conversation after more than an hour –- that she has “never claimed to be a journalist.”
 
O’Brien took the crowd to visit both sites, first watching Diaz do a clever shtick about her pesky, persnickety, inexpensive equipment.  She’s charming and comfortable enough on camera to captivate 40- to 50,000 viewers a day, by her count, most of them teens.  Then came Congdon’s work, which focused mostly on some unusual video of a backhoe – “or is that a front-hoe?” she asked, adding, “I know ‘ho’ is a bad word.”  The footage may have come from an actual newscast somewhere, but that’s about as close as Congdon came to connecting with any actual journalism.
 
Otherwise, the session was a recitation of buzzwords and catchphrases that have become achingly familiar over the past few years: paradigm shifts, tipping points, 24/7 news, mainstream media, dinosaurs, echo chamber, info-snacking, etc.
 
The most refreshing moments came toward the end, when the conversation finally left social networking and micro-blogging and turned to reporting.  Michael Rosenblum, founder of what he calls the VJ movement, offered an impassioned soliloquy on traditional journalism, exhorting visionary leaders to “burn it down.”  Videoblogger Diaz responded by saying she couldn’t quite side with Rosenblum, that she sees a continuing if changing role for actual journalism, both online and off.
 
Then, in a question-and-answer session that should have begun much, much earlier, a college student from Colorado asked what may have been the question of the night:  “If traditional news organizations go out of business,” as Rosenblum predicts, “where will the bloggers get the material they talk about?”
 
I couldn’t get across the crowded room in time to get the questioner’s name, but to my knowledge, he never did get an answer.