The Future of Journalism conference opened in Cardiff in September 2009 with a welcome from Bob Franklin: 370 abstracts submitted, more than 100 research papers across 30 panels in two days.
The keynote came from James Curran of the Goldsmiths Media Research Centre in London. Rather than forecast — the future, he said, makes a mockery of predictions, from the facsimile newspaper to CB radio and the CD-ROM — Curran laid out four positions and rejected all. News industry leaders held, in effect, that they would survive; liberal journalism academics answered that the industry was missing the opportunities of new media, pointing to citizen journalism and to sites such as Voice of San Diego and OpenDemocracy; a third group welcomed a forecast death of journalism because it disliked how the media worked; a fourth, media workers themselves, feared job losses as advertising collapsed, citing 101 UK newspaper closures since the start of the previous year.
Curran called the industry position ostrich-like and argued that charging would cost both audience and revenue in a self-reinforcing decline. Bloggers, he said, had not connected with a mass audience and low-cost news sites remained niche, with contributors drawn largely from an elite: “It is a delusion to imagine that they represent the grassroots.” Dominant news brands were still dominant. Nor did journalism reliably serve the public, as coverage of Iraq in the US and the MMR vaccine in the UK had shown. His own proposal was publicly funded journalism, room for public media to expand online, and a broadband tax to support non-profit reporting.