“Best technology moment: When panelist Eric Zorn outed a skeptical twitterer in the audience.
“I’m not one of the young people in the crowd, but I cringed every time when an older person said, ‘Newspapers are giving it away for free.’ They aren’t giving it away for free. Their Internet sites promote the newspaper with very little overhead. Newspapers’ problem isn’t the Web sites; they aren’t utilizing the ad space well on those Web sites.
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“It was suggested in the forum that both Chicago newspapers could die. They might. But a new and different newspaper would rise from the ashes, giving Chicagoans what the Tribune and Sun-Times refused to do. Newspapers have to start doing what every other media form does: hustle and work hard. If they do so smartly, they will stick around. If not, something else will take its place.”
“It seemed like journalists were trying to figure out how to be businesspeople and save a dying industry, which they are ill-equipped to do (this includes the young ones with the online-only publications).
Leah Pietrusiak, freelance writer and former newspaper editor:
“There are a ton of possibilities; publishers will just have to make it fun; and that doesn’t mean that the journalism part goes away; that’s of course which will bring the widest demographic in, and keep them coming back. Have you seen what Popular Mechanics is doing with their website in terms of advertising? The blue links move you to something actually newsworthy, and the green links–usually some related random word–are a link to an advertisement. The Pop Mechanics site is like a multimedia circus, in a good way, lots of points of entry, video, pictures, flashing ads–but the pages also take longer to load because of that. Which makes one point made during the forum even more poignant: that with the advent of this medium transition, we need to make sure that Internet connections are as robust and widespread as the newspaper boxes of old.
