Journalism is calling for progress, and the digital world never fails to bring opportunities for it, experts said.
Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, moderated a panel between three leaders in the digital field of journalism on Thursday at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication as part of Cronkite Week, a celebration of the school’s 25th anniversary.
Creator and CEO of WordPress.org Matt Mullenweg; Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director for the Knight Foundation; and Lisa Stone, co-founder of BlogHer.com, engaged in discussion ranging from how to monitor content to the future of advertising online.
“If you’re not in the digital conversation, you’re no longer in the conversation that matters,” Kebbel said.
Members of the panel agreed learning new tools is key to reach more people and be successful in the media. Journalists now need to know tools like coding and Flash, Mullenweg said.
“I think scripting is going to be the new literacy,” he said.
Though not all aspiring journalists are excited by this fact, Nathan O’Neal, a journalism freshman who attended the discussion, said he now knows what to expect.
“I am not particularly excited about the topic,” he said. “But I know that in the future we will all have to deal with this.”
Blogs have become a big part of online media, many of which have newsworthy content that news sources may not have. Mullenweg said his Web site, WordPress.com, has bloggers as young as 7-years-old who are learning CSS, an Internet style-sheet language.
And blogs contain more than just words now. Mullenweg said one in eight blogs on WordPress have videos embedded into them.
A problem with citizen journalism, however, can be the comments left on blogs or articles.
Stone and Mullenweg spoke on several ways they keep their Web sites credible and free of hateful comments.
BlogHer.com has a strict policy that allows Stone to ban users acting inappropriately on the site. Stone said only editors were allowed to post for the first few months so that a professional tone could be set for the Web site.
“If you violate the rules of the sandbox, you’re gone,” Stone said. “Ugly things don’t happen on our site.”
There is a positive side to comments as well. Along with increasing page views on any Web site, comments allow citizens to become editors, Kebbel said. People can check facts and let journalists know when they are wrong, he said.
Mullenweg said when he makes a mistake in a post, he gets several comments within minutes.
“The collective intelligence of my audience is so much greater than mine will ever be,” he said.
Though page views are increasing with comments and increased technology, the three still showed concern for what will happen with advertising.
Right now, advertising still produces most revenue for news organizations, Kebbel said, but worries have spread on whether this will be enough.
Stone and Mullenweg said they are looking for new ways to produce revenue or obtain money from their users, but nothing has been decided. Though it is an unsolved issue, it is one that lies in their minds constantly while working in the online field, they said.
“Things are going to shake up,” Mullenweg said.
Reach the reporter at jolie.mccullough@asu.edu.
