Centerpieces

CORRECTION APPENDED BELOW

As newspapers' financial problems increase, reporters and editors must figure out how to profit from the new media environment, said Future of Journalism conference participants at Harvard, June 20-21.

But others at the sessions, sponsored by the Carnegie-Knight Task Force, said journalists should focus on infusing emerging communications products with traditional newsroom values.

About 100 journalism researchers and professors heard repeated messages that the mainstream media must embrace -- not fight -- the blogosphere and that serious reporting can survive by catering to niche audiences.

Carl Sessions Stepp, a University of Maryland journalism professor and writing coach, said journalists should consider themselves entrepreneurs and find ways to make more money from existing news services like archives. From Gutenberg to Google, he added, "Young marginal upstarts with great ideas is a journalistic tradition."

Robert G. Picard, who teaches media economics at Sweden's Jonkoping University, said that although journalists hate the words "business" and "money," they must develop new revenue streams. He said news organizations should abandon their "all you can eat buffet" offerings of mediocre coverage of all subjects. Instead, Picard said, they should provide higher quality news for smaller audiences, present information in various media, and reuse and reconfigure existing content.

Philip Balboni was one of several who recommended that journalism schools should teach entrepreneurial skills. Balboni's work with Columbia journalism students on his forthcoming Global News Enterprises Web site was one of many academic-professional partnership ideas mentioned throughout the conference.

Tim J. McGuire, retired editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and an Arizona State University professor specializing in the business of journalism, said veterans like him "don't know the way" to the future but should give students "the tools and competence they need to find business models."

Some disagreed. Tom Fiedler, a long-time Miami Herald reporter and editor, newly named dean of Boston University's College of Communication, called good journalists' temperament very different from great entrepreneurs'. He said reporters and editors "don't see today's problems as journalism problems but as business problems they can't solve."

Fiedler sees revenue potential for quality journalism, saying online revenue equals newsroom costs at the Miami Herald. He predicts that newspapers will stop home delivery and deliver to elite audiences two to three days a week.

Philip Meyer, who teaches journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and whose pioneering application of research methods to reporting helped the Detroit Free Press win a 1968 Pulitzer Prize, said, "No industry ever disrupted itself; we instead have to bring traditional journalistic values to 'disrupters.' "

Jan Schaffer: "Ordinary people are committing random acts of journalism." Meyer hopes such nonprofit investigative reporting enterprises as ProPublica will inspire "new, egotistical billionaires who want influence" to fund similar programs. He said smaller papers will find their natural, elite audiences for public affairs and investigative reporting, and that this serious journalism will filter down to the masses.

Markus Prior, a Princeton politics professor who studies how broadcast and cable television have changed politics, disputed the popular notion of a decline in print, television and radio news consumption since the advent of cable news and the Internet. While today's consumers have more substitutes for news and more entertainment options, he said, fewer Americans consume more news. So he sees a healthy market for specialized news catering to the 20 percent who are "dedicated news junkies."

Citizen journalism received both praise and criticism.

Lowell Bergman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and University of California, Berkeley journalism professor, said, "we have to get over complaining" about it. He noted that the concept isn't new, and that many big stories have emerged from grassroots concerns. His main problem with citizen journalism: It "denies the reality that we need verifiable, solid, accountable journalism. We need a sense of standards."

Roderick P. Hart, dean of the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin, saw problems with both the Web and the fragmentation of news audiences. "Nobody knows what decision-makers read and how much they'll pay for quality news," he said. "There'll always be a market for authoritative information" and "people will pay for news they can trust." But he called the Web "the Wild West," full of postings from people "who have never been anywhere but their bedrooms in their pajamas."

In the age of information stratification, Hart said, "We're on the verge of news for somebodies and news for nobodies. What about news you don't want to know but need to know?" he asked, using the example of Iraq War casualty figures. That data is less likely to reach blue-collar audiences –- to whom it is more necessary since they're more likely to join the military -- than elites.

Clyde Bentley, a Missouri School of Journalism professor who researches user-generated news, said, "we've had our head in the sand" about the blogosphere's impact.

The debate over bloggers' influence "is over," he said. "Blogging is a numbers game. It's there and we'll just have to deal with it." Noting that 120,000 new blogs a day dwarf the country's 1,427 dailies, he said editors should treat the blogosphere like a giant wire service. Bentley said that while consumer demand for content decreases, their demand for content navigation increases. "There will always be a place for the journalist who can craft a story better than anyone else, but there will be a bigger place for the journalist who can help media consumers find the information they want."

Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland, called the journalism of the future "the architecture of participation ... Ordinary people are committing random acts of journalism."

She said the mainstream media should work with citizen media and check out what topics and trends need to have "big J Journalism done to it." Schaffer said we should offer more "non-narrative" news -- as maps, text, photos and graphics -- since audiences graze in bits and bytes.

While traditional journalism covers stories "from the outside in," she said, citizen reporters work "from the inside out," providing less conflict, fewer stereotypes, no parroting of experts' quotes, no false "balance," and no "scorecard."

CORRECTION: Tom Fiedler's name was spelled incorrectly in an earlier version of this article.