So, I’ll try to express here some of my thoughts on all of this, which are meant as discussion points and not conclusions. I also don’t pretend that these thoughts are in any sense original—I’m sure there are many others out there who have already made these connections and are busy responding in their own ways. As we in the Department of Journalism at Bowling Green State University launch into an examination of our curriculum, then, perhaps the thoughts here are just some more things to put on the table.

Overall, I think that we are currently far too exclusively “connected” to the mainstream media, and that is to our own detriment. For years, it has been a good thing that we have close connections to the local newspapers, and the local television stations and the national networks because it shows we’re not ivory tower isolationists and that we understand “the real world” as well. But, at what point does the mainstream media become so disconnected from the concepts of good journalism that our concentration on their needs is no longer an advantage but a hindrance to our goals? Is it possible, in fact, that that point has already been reached?

I think it’s also worth noting that most of the public displeasure with journalism in general and journalists in particular stems from what the mainstream media structure has forced journalists to become. There are certainly partisans such as Bill O’Reilly and his ilk at FOX News who do disdain journalists for doing real journalism, but most “real people” despise journalism because so much of what they see, hear and read has become so vacuous. This is usually not the fault of individual journalists, but of the system they are fed into.

I am most familiar with this in the area of broadcast, where for years I have struggled with whether to teach students what is good or what news directors and consultants want. Unfortunately, I have increasingly had to make a choice between turning out good journalists and turning out people who can get jobs. Thus, time that should probably be spent talking about actual journalistic processes is spent instead discussing things like how to have an “active” stand-up and mastering the fine art of the meaningless hand gesture. News directors really want someone who does compelling stand-ups, after all.

I’m not in any way saying that we should abandon the mainstream media, but I think we need to be looking beyond them. There is a lot of really great journalism happening out there that IS NOT connected to the traditional media. And how much good—much less great—journalism is there actually to be found on local television, the 24-hour news channels or the daily newspaper? Clearly, I think that we as journalism educators need to make a stronger connection to the journalism, wherever it comes from. To that end, it seems pretty clear that we have to start training journalists who can be more adaptable and less focused on “getting a job at a newspaper” or “working at the television station.”

Although the thought made be cringe as recently as a week ago, we probably should require courses in entrepreneurship, or at the very least place greater concentration on preparing students for more of a “free lance” life.

If I ran the world, traditional media outlets would be hiring more journalists at the same time as they adapted to the Web, and journalists could look forward to getting a nice, steady and secure job with regular pay and real security. But it’s abundantly clear that the industry—at least the one we’ve hitched ourselves to—is moving in the opposite direction.

Now, on to my not-quite random, but quite scattered, coverage of the NCMR. Of course, I could not attend all of the sessions, and some of the sessions that I did attend I don’t have much to say about. I can summarize what I saw overall as:

· The mainstream media sucks and it’s getting much worse;

· There is a nascent movement for media reform among the public;

· Independent media are in many cases serving the voids left behind by the mainstream media;

· The Internet is a critically important factor in the future of media and journalism.

I’m including some links throughout the narrative, but note particularly Web site of Freepress, which puts on the NCMR. The main conference site is here, and you can download various video clips here and audio from all of the sessions here. Also, you should check out the shiny new Second Edition of my Online Journalism textbook, because it ties into all of this.

At the opening session, Freepress co-founder Josh Silver noted that media reform is finally becoming a mainstream political topic. “For the first time,” he said, “both presidential candidates are openly discussing media conglomerates and the open Internet.” He particularly acknowledged the Internet’s role in the media reform movement, noting that it could “not only speak truth to power, but organize truth against power.” He noted that grass roots organizers like the ones attending NCMR were changing the media landscape, and taking control of the future of the media. He ended by saying that “The future of the media does not belong to Rupert Murdoch. The future of the media does not belong to Comcast. The future of the media does not belong to clear channel. The future of the media does not belong to Verizon.”

Adrienne Marie Brown of the Ruckus Society, a community activism organization, noted that new tools were allowing individuals to create their own media. She chided the inaction of “mainstream journalists” saying that their “ambivalence and complacency only serve injustice.”

Stanford Law School professor Larry Lessig followed with a presentation that was both inspiring and cautionary. His overall message was that before media reform could really happen, reform of the election laws—through publicly funded elections—would have to happen. He began by discussing the arcane flaw in Intel’s Pentium chip in the early 1990s and how the public rose up and demanded that the company fix the bug that was likely to affect an average user only once in 17,000 years. In contrast, he said there was no such uprising against what he said were more fundamental flaws in the U.S. Constitution. He then cited several examples of the government being captured by business interests, and legislating to protect and enhance wealth. The only way to fundamentally change all this, he said, was by changing the way we elect our representatives in the first place. He used as a metaphor an alcoholic man who had lost his job and his family and was in the process of losing his liver. The first problem the man needed to solve was the alcoholism, because addressing the other problems without addressing that one would ultimately be pointless.

Rep. Keith Ellison, the first and only Muslim Member of Congress said the Bush administration had demonstrated “the politics of greed elevated to a political ideology.” The truly remarkable part of Ellison’s presentation, however, came in the introduction when the clip of him appearing on the Glenn Beck show was shown. “Sir . . . prove to me that you are not working with our enemies,” Beck demanded. I think the clip pretty much summed up the audience’s feelings about the vapidity of the mainstream media.

I then attended the session, “Media and Elections: Uncovering 2008.” The Nation’s John Nichols spoke about the mainstream media’s fixation on minutia to the detriment of real issues. He especially cited coverage of the Reverend Wright “controversy” and the sexist coverage of Hillary Clinton. “The media should lift us above the fault lines of race and gender, not trip us over them,” he said. “But the mainstream media’s message is, ‘Don’t rise above it, let us pull you back down to your basest fears.’” He also noted the past day’s over-coverage of whether Obama would choose Clinton as his running mate. “It’s like the high school prom. . . ‘Do you think he’ll ask her?’” “We’re not just seeing bad journalism,” he said, “we’re seeing a daily assault and battery upon democracy.” [I note that three weeks later as I edit this, the discussion of whether Obama will pick Clinton continues. . . ]

David Sirota urged attendees to abandon what he called “the psychology of paternalism” toward the mainstream media. Instead of waiting for the mainstream media to serve us, he said, we should instead use the resources available to us to create our own media. He urged people to talk to people at work, to use the Internet, to send e-mails, etc. He said that a significant communication infrastructure is currently building “way below the mainstream media” and that determining how that infrastructure is to be used will determine whether we are “on the precipice of something really, really good or really, really bad.” He particularly noted the mainstream media’s message that politics is only important at the presidential level—this discourages change because the presidential level is where politics is most resistant to new and different ideas. Echoing Lessig, he said, “no one who believes in media reform cannot also believe in election reform.”

Bill Moyers gave the morning keynote address for the second day. His talk was mostly about how the mainstream media was responsible not to citizens or democracy, but to corporate boards. He cited the continuing layoffs and buyouts in journalism, noting that it had lead to a media consisting only of “ads, celebrities, nonsense and propaganda.” He also chided the Bush administration, particularly its march to war in Iraq and ongoing march toward war with Iran. “A neoconservative is an arsonist who sets a fire and then six years later boasts that no one can put it out,” he said.

At a later session called “New Media, New Models, New Journalism,” Citizen Journalism guru Dan Gillmor urged both independent journalists and media organizations to experiment with emerging technologies. “The cost of trying things is so low that even if many of them aren’t successful it’s still worth it,” he said. He said that this experimentation needed to extend past the content to the business model as well, where organizations needed to think up new ways to fund journalism. He said that it was unlikely that the journalists of the future would follow the type on newspaper-based career trajectory he had, but said “there has never been a better time for journalists to create their own jobs.”

Mike Skoler of Minnesota Public Radio has been a pioneer of creative online storytelling that uses new forms and involves the audience. He began by noting that newspaper publishers and editors regularly lament that Craigslist and other online entities are destroying what they do. However, Skoler says the real problem is “a crisis of relevancy”—people feel that they need and want news, but they’re not getting it from mainstream journalism. He showed some examples from the MPR site that used games and interactivity to engage readers in the journalism, such as “Budget Hero,” which lets you decide where your tax dollars go, “Minnesota 150” which lets users contribute to telling the story of the state’s sesquicentennial, and “Consumer Consequences,” which—among other things—allows you to see how many earths it would take to provide the resources if everyone on earth consumed like you. Ultimately, he said, the goal was to involve readers in the journalistic process, moving journalism from an “editor-driven” pursuit to a “public-driven” pursuit. He said MPR has a “network” of more than 57,000 people who are authorities on various topics, and that MPR tries to let them decide what the important stories are rather than leaving such decisions solely to internal editors. He calls this “Public Insight Journalism,” and says “if there is a future for mainstream media, this is it.” [I note that the stories on the site include links to allow readers to “Help Us Tell This Story,” submit comments, and discuss with others.]

Marcy Wheeler is a blogger for Firedoglake.com, and received lots of positive attention for her work blogging the Scooter Libby trial. She noted that covering the Plame leak case was something of an obsession for the journalists at firedoglake, and that “they couldn’t have done what they did at the trial if they hadn’t been covering the story for two years.” She noted, of course, several “deeper” stories the mainstream media missed during the trial—either because they involved too much grunt work or because editors thought the stories were too esoteric for readers to understand. She noted particularly her post about Scooter Libby’s conflicting statements about leaking the National Intelligence Estimate. The post, which is around 3000 words long presents lots of facts but does not lead to a definitive conclusion—instead, Wheeler says, the overall gist of the article is “I don’t know what all this means.” She says it’s the kind of story that she never would have been able to get past a traditional newspaper or television editor, but is nonetheless important and relevant. Wheeler says we need “both institutional journalists and ‘dirty hippies’” to properly cover stories of public importance.

Linda Jue talked about the Chauncey Bailey Project, an investigation into the murder of an Oakland journalist who had been writing about Your Black Muslim Bakery. This site is a modern-day version of the Arizona Project, in which journalists during the 1970s investigated the death of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles. The Oakland project involves journalists from radio, television, newspapers and ethnic weekly publications, many working on their own time to investigate Bailey’s death and continue his work. Executive Editor Robert Rosenthal was laid off from the San Francisco Chronicle and now oversees the project full time.

All of the sites discussed in this session rely on a combination of professional full-time journalists and public contributions. The participants noted that many non-journalists do not necessarily want to (or know how to) put together the structural pieces of journalism, but nonetheless have valuable contributions to make.

The final session I’ll talk about was called, “Newspapers: Not Dead Yet?” The overall tone of the session is aptly captured by the fact that newspapers’ status in the session title is posed as a question, not an assertion. The main topics were buyouts, layoffs, and the continuing decline of newspaper revenues and how all of these things were hurting journalism—“whenever you hear there’s a buyout in journalism, someone is doing a sellout in journalism.” One of the few “positive” statements came from Ryan Blethen of the Seatttle Times who noted, “It could be worse—we could be in the SUV business.”

Linda Foley of The Newspaper Guild summed it up by saying “it’s pretty bad.” Employment in newspapers had been increasing until about 2001, but has since been rapidly declining. She noted a 4 percent (2400 journalists) decrease in newspaper jobs last year, and said that projections for the upcoming year are as many as 5,000 more. “Real journalists,” Foley said, “are getting very demoralized.” She noted that historically there had been a cooperative understanding between journalists and owners that—occasional employment disputes notwithstanding—“we were on a mission together.” At some point, however, that all changed and now too many owners are “at war” with their employees. Moderator John Nichols added that there was also “a war on the community” as newspapers cut back coverage of important local events.

“Dumb it down and cut it back is one of the dopiest ideas [in the newspaper business],” noted Joel Kramer, founder of MinnPost.com and former editor, publisher and president of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Kramer founded MinnPost.com to try to fill in for the shortcomings of the current Star-Tribune business model, which he says is decimating real journalism in Minneapolis. As an example, he noted the implementation of “stupid deadlines” designed to allow coverage of topics such as high school plays in the affluent suburbs. Consequently important stories—and hockey coverage—get lost in the mix. He noted that the Cowles family, which owned the Star and Tribune from the 1930s to the 1980s, helped transform Minneapolis from an isolated and “backward” city to a much more progressive and desirable place to live [I note that Minneapolis is one of the only large “cold weather” TV markets I know of that has actually gained in market size rating in the past decades]. It was an example, he said, of what real journalism and caring, local-minded owners can accomplish.