Not miked and not missed—the old guard of Chicago journalism. Apoplectic and apocalyptic, they had their say about the sea change in media at February’s Chicago Journalism Town Hall. Last Saturday’s Chicago Media Future Conference at Columbia College was for the young Turks.
EveryBlock cofounder Daniel X. O’Neil, speaking on the panel “Why the News Still Matters,” went this tweet one better. “I think there’s just a lot of real unnecessary negativism about journalism,” he told the 170 or so people in attendance. “Frankly, I think it’s going to be great. I swear to God we’ll look back ten years from now and we’ll all be making an insane amount of money and we’re going to look at each other and we’re going to say, ‘Hey, you were there that day! Remember, we all thought we were screwed?’ No, we’re not. Everything’s great. It’s literally impossible for the answer to the question ‘What happened?’ not to be valuable.”
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When the future is fraught with uncertainty it helps to be young and brave and not afraid to starve. And something else might be essential. This sine qua non is naivete, a key ingredient of The New News: Journalism We Want and Need, a report commissioned by the Chicago Community Trust, just published by the Chicago Media Workshop, and distributed at the conference. It’s an earnest, ungainly attempt at a “snapshot” of online journalism in Chicago, and although the snapshot is fairly depressing the report doesn’t seem to notice this.
Greg Sanders, an IT specialist for the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, says in the report that “the Web we know and love is no more than the tip of a very large iceberg.” He looks forward to “super-broadband,” which “would allow viewers to tune into events and content from an almost infinite number of sources, in real time or plucked from archives, possibly marginalizing traditional news media even further.” I found myself wondering if he expects us all to live like the precogs in Minority Report, floating in brine, our brains hooked to computers, absorbing content every second of the day yet falling ever further behind.
This prompted Gapers Block’s Andrew Huff to add, “Yeah, something that I’ve talked a lot about online and in person with people is that the newspaper may be dying, if you want to call it that, the mode in which we receive our news may be being lost, but the news itself is still out there in different forms and we need to try a little harder to find some of it, but a lot of it is there in plain sight and we just have to collect it all.”
And then O’Neil asserted, “We could talk all day about the deprofessionalization of journalism. It’s just nothing to be afraid of. Those people need to be encouraged. I would love to encourage more flat coverage, because there’s so much hot heat neighborhood anger get-rid-of-the-alderman type of coverage of news out there, but what’s underneath it is insanely valuable answers of what’s going on and it’s hidden frankly in a lot of heat!”
Someone twittered, “Well, if there is no way to make $ then lets all go home.”
