Note: While this post explains the background of the conference and includes the original video, a better video of the panel was later posted here.
The week before last Imagethief was in Hawaii to participate in the NewsMorphosis panel organized by ThinkTech Hawaii and several other organizations. The last week or so since I got back have been a bit hectic, so I haven’t had a chance to write anything about the conference, or the activities around it.
The whole conference was streamed live, and the video is still available. I’ve posted the two videos below the jump, below . There is about four hours worth, so, while it was a great conference, unless you’re truly dedicated you may want to pick and choose a bit. I’ve included a bit of a rundown, below, but the easiest thing to do is to look at the program, here (pdf) and bear in mind that the opening remarks by Avi Soifer, dean of the University of Hawaii’s law school, is about half an hour, each of the three panels is an hour, and the closing speech on the Peer News program, by John Temple, is a half hour or so. (John Temple’s remarks also on Vimeo here, and Avi Soifer’s remarks here.)
I appear in the first panel along with Honolulu Advertiser editor Mark Platte and Hawaii News Now news director Chris Archer. The three of us about how new technology is affecting the business of news. It’s definitely an interesting discussion, and very relevant. Hawaii News Now, which is the television news gathering service shared by two of Hawaii’s major TV stations, just finished a massive consolidation and technology revamp to enable them to serve multiple stations. The Honolulu Advertiser, long Hawaii’s newspaper or record, was recently sold by Gannett to its smaller, local rival, and will be closed soon unless something dramatic happens. So my fellow panelists are both dealing first-hand with the remaking of the American news industry. As the sole participant from overseas, my job was to bring a little foreign perspective. I also appear in the brief wrap up with TechCrunch journalist Sarah Lacey (our star power for the day) and Michael Freedman.
While I was there I had a chance to visit both the Hawaii News Now and Honolulu Advertiser offices, along with Michael Freedman, a fellow speaker, longtime CBS newsman, and now executive director of George Washington University’s Global Media Center. It was a visceral lesson in the state of news in America. The television operation has gone through a lot of consolidation, but it at least had a sense of vitality about it. They’ve recently revamped all of their technology and workflow to server several broadcasters. Having spent a couple of years in the newsroom of San Francisco’s CBS affiliate, KPIX, I got a little tingle of nostalgia. The Advertiser, however, is at death’s door. Their newsroom has been shrinking for some time, the building looks like it hasn’t had a dime of maintenance in living memory, and they were recently sold by the Gannett group to their smaller local rival, the Star-Bulletin. They’re all on death-watch now, and the newsroom is a mix of gallows humor and grim resignation to fate. The spot in the newsroom where the sale was announced by the publisher has been roped off with crime-scene tape, and there is a little masking tape body-outline in the shape of a newspaper on the floor. It was an interesting experience.
More below.
Unfortunately, the Ustream video player is a bit primitive, so finding the right spots can mean a bit of fishing, but it can be done. My panel starts at 31 minutes into the first video, with my opening remarks at 45 minutes and closing remarks at 1:28.
I also appear in the closing panel, at 1:03 in the second video, with my remarks at 1:04:30.
Enjoy. If you have the persistence to dig it out. If they post the individual panels, I’ll update.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Glad to hear you went to Hawaii! I’m from there originally and interviewed you a few months back for my US-China Today article on product safety. It’s very sad for me to hear that the state of print journalism has deteriorated so much back home – in fact, so much has changed just in the past two years since I started as an undergraduate at USC. Were you able to pick up any insights on what direction Hawaii is going in in terms of journalism? Any idea what the media landscape will look like in the future? I’m really curious.
Hi, Jasmine. I remember that. I think it’s very hard to predict where it’s all going to go. I do think there are some interesting models being explored, such as the Peer News stuff that John Temple talked about, and which will launch in Hawaii since that’s where Pierre Omidyar is based. However, no one really knows how well it will fly. The Star-Bulletin will continue to be around, at least for the foreseeable future, but the main takeaway seems to be that no one really knows what the state of journalism will be in four or five years, or which of the emerging models might fly. It’s possible –as I suggested in the conference– that we had a golden age where an advertising model could subsidize public service journalism. If that’s dying, it’s possible there won’t be anything to replace it, which will make all of us very much poorer.