As I write this, I’m having the odd experience (for me) of actually wishing I was in New York City. That’s because right now the New Business Models for News Summit is happening. It sounds really good, and you can follow it easily online…
Here’s the live video stream. You can also follow the action via the Twitter hashtag #newsbiz
The premise of today’s gathering (which is the second Networked Journalism Summit event, organized by Jeff Jarvis and David Cohn and held at the City University of New York) is that: “finding, sharing, and creating new business for news is an urgent need in journalism — perhaps our most urgent need. We have called this summit to begin doing just that, bringing a diverse group of editorial and business executives, entrepreneurs, and academics to the school.”
… Of course, the catch with these kind of events (I’ve been to several) is whether you can really get buy-in and action from the business side of news operations. Too often at these kind of events it’s mostly people from the content side, and sadly that’s just not enough.
In my experience, plenty of journalists, editors, and academics are now on board with overhauling the news biz big time — but what about the ad managers and sales staff, circulation managers, and publishers? What about the ad industry execs? (Hey, this event is in NYC, after all.) What about the search engines and ad networks? These factions still don’t seem to be mixing and working together directly enough to turn this ship around. It’s pretty hard to achieve a remix without much actual mixing. If the NBMN Summit pulls that off today, that would mark considerable progress.
That said, the NBMN Summit attendee list includes a lot of impressive names and news organizations, but doesn’t clarify which of these people represent the business side. (Nudge, maybe someone at the summit could correct that today?) I’m glad to see that Google has a few folks there, as does Velocity Interactive. Craig Newmark is there, too.
Wish I could be there…
