Often the debate at conferences about the internet’s impact on the media end up sounding pretty similar. It is all about how the internet is destroying/saving (choose your side) journalism.
From Jemima Kiss’s coverage of the Online Publishers’ Association Forum in London, it seems that the song remains the same.
Writing about a spat over blogs and mainstream media between Jeff Jarvis and the New York Times’ Martin Nisenholtz, Kiss said:
I’m getting a feeling of deja-vu in all this. Has the discussion really moved anywhere in the past three years? Have mainstream news sites progressed beyond a reluctant acceptance of all these changes? I’m not convinced.
And this is the kicker. You can hold as many conferences as you want and regurgitate tired arguments about how bloggers aren’t journalists etc, but this ends up being a pointless exercise.
News organisations need to wake up and realise the word has changed. The internet has changed the playing field and control is now on the edges of the network, not at the centre. In the words of Cory Doctorow, the internet makes it possible to control your destiny like never before.
It looks like the best comments at the OPA in London came at the end, from futurist Wolfgang Grulke, chief executive of FutureWorld. His argument was that change is good, incremental change isn’t.
This is what the media industry needs to realise about the internet. It is not enough to tinker with how you currently work. What we need to do, and I’ve said it before, is rethink how journalism can flourish in this new world.
In the words of Grulke: “You can only understand the future by letting go of the present.”
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