shelbinator.com

As suspected, there was nothing particularly earth-shattering presented by last night’s panel on new media and ethics in journalism and business. What highlights there were — mostly coming from the Georgia State University professor of journalism (with a special focus on law and communications), Greg Lisby — seemed to be two steps forward only to take one step back a paragraph or two later when yet another unbelievably clueless assertion about the web was made by someone who’s had enough time to get to know better. Lisby came prepared with facts and figures and historical insight, and he had lots of us at the kids’ table looking at each other with raised eyebrows, nodding, and Twittering in unison that we liked what he just said.

No, there was no knife fight between a blogger and a PBA radio newser or anything remotely as exciting. I think the highlight of tension for the evening, in my mind, was around the 2:30 mark of the video below. A fellow asked a question that left the AJC Interactivity Manager nearly apoplectic, along the lines of, “Okay, so maybe most blogs are crap, but at least I know they’re crap, and as your content, which is supposed to be so refined and exclusive, starts sliding toward the crap end of the spectrum, why shouldn’t I just go read the people who specialize in crap from the get-go?” It obviously wasn’t that blunt, but it might as well have been for its effect, because as far as I could tell the AJC rep’s answer was, “But — b’gack — you — hey — we have blogs! And it’s not — we — that’s like, your opinion, man. And uh — I — somebody help me out here.”

Okay, so I don’t have the same detailed summary and analysis of the event as everyone else, but I provided the live video, damnit (though the acoustics of the large room leave plenty to be desired). Steve was much kinder to the AJC than I have been and has some other summary points from the panel, if you’re interested. GriftDrift is downright optimistic about how much better the conversation went last night compared to nine months ago. Sara is closer to my level of general “meh”-ness; same old story, still just admiring the problem.

On the inevitable “how do we standardize bloggers” issue, scroll to the 1:20 mark on this video for a Q&A about whether such a set of standards might possibly arise organically (but still very systematically and with structure) from the blogosphere itself — or rather, from some arbitrary subset of “ten or so” bloggers. Right, let’s start caucusing for the ten standard-bearers now.

Leonard Witt brought up his concern about media consolidation and offered up the blogosphere as at least a partial antidote to that winnowing of voices. But the panel came right back at us (the one moment where we disagreed with the good professor) with a study that said we’re less welcoming to opposing commentary than mainstream media sites. Given the crap that litters the comment sections of the AJC, I’m not yet worried about this point. Shortly after that is when the older gentleman got up and warned us that there were “forces afoot” at this “nascent stage of the blogosphere” who would want to take over the web and “use it for profit.” As Sara already said, Welcome to the twenty-first century!