I’m sorry I missed this afternoon’s panel discussion on new media. It featured laid-off talk-show host Colin McEnroe, laid-off Courant.com general manager Chris Morrill, New Haven Independent Editor Paul Bass and Rich Hanley, Quinnipiac University journalism prof.
Can someone who did attend report in?
Here’s McEnroe’s thoughts on where the business should and can go.
Morrill, incidentally, has lately been working with Global Post, which has some ambitious and worthy goals.
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I went down to the session on Newspapers and the New Media at the New Haven Museum last night – aside from the two ex-Courant panelists (Colin and Chris Morrill) I ran into two others: Len Felson and Fran Silverman. It was great to see them all.
It was a high-energy event in the style anyone would expect who knows Bill Hosley, the former head of the Hartford-based Antiquarian & Landmarks Society and now director of the New Haven Museum , http://www.newhavenmuseum.org/. He had gotten it together quickly, and said attendance would have been better if he had had time to put an item in the Register. (I I didn’t count heads, but by the end there were maybe 40, including what Colin called some of the meanest, ugliest bloggers in the state.) The museum’s librarian, James Campbell, gave a brief Power Point on the joys of studying old Connecticut newspapers. Then Hosley gave a rapid-fire introduction in which he managed to introduce everyone, describe the newspapers’ plight, and criticize how newspapers, even when they were healthy, neglected their readers by doing six-part series in Peru updating the Incas.
Paul Bass wasn’t physically there, but in tune with the era of the new media Hosley projected him from his laptop to the screen in the chandeliered museum meeting room. Bass gave his weekly New Haven Independent commentary next to his compost pile, as he does every Friday. You can see and hear what he said at http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/compost/ After searching for The Courant’s news hole in the pile, he said that what is dying is monopoly control of newspapers, and yes, if you work in a funeral parlor (which he compared to a newsroom) you might think everybody’s dying, but in fact new lives are being born every day.
Marcia Chambers of the Independent was there in person, and she quickly recapped how she started a publication in Branford, the Branford Eagle, which came under the wing of Bass’s nonprofit publication (part of the Online Journalism Project, and funded in part by the Knight Foundation, see http://www.newhavenindependent.org/about_us.php). She described how the six staff members get together in a coffee shop, as opposed to a newsroom, to discuss stories.
Ed Stannard of the Register was on the defensive, describing his and Ed-in-Chief’s Jack Kramers’ great love for and attachment to New Haven, and touting some of their online work. Rich Hanley, Professor of Journalism at Quinnipiac, talked about newspapers’ losing their community role during the 90s fad for “literary” journalism.
With Colin, of course, we were back in high-energy land, as he outlined the ideas Paul linked to yesterday: a membership model for newspapers, the insanity of hiding your archive, welcoming people to sites. It’s all here: http://blogs.courant.com/colin_mcenroe_to_wit/ He also mentioned that the Courant’s bloggers had been asked not to blog about the Mardi Gras Massacre – which explains his surprising silence on the subject in To Wit. As a result, he said, Web traffic surged on all the non-Courant sites with an interest in Connecticut , particularly Duby McDowell’s The Laurel, http://thelaurel.wordpress.com/ reaffirming the Courant’s cluelessness in this area.
Chris talked a little about the Courant’s early days of pioneering the Web and the opportunities he found there, and described his current role as syndication manager of Global Post http://www.globalpost.com/ The for-profit company has hired 60-odd foreign correspondents to supply the site with high-quality news from the countries in which they live: The NY Daily News has just agreed to use the group’s staff as its foreign bureau. Chris says the staffers range from seasoned veterans of overseas coverage to young people with lots of tech savvy.
I hadn’t expected to report on this, so pardon any goofs, misrepresentations or important points I missed as I occasionally gazed upward at the chandelier and let my mind wander.
Thanks, Steve!
It’s interesting what McEnroe said about Courant bloggers being flagged off the Mardi Gras Massacre. I’m a little disappointed, but not surprised, that managers would instruct the bloggers not to write about it — not even one; but I’m also fascinated that the online audience went whereever it needed to find out what it wanted to know.
As I pointed out earlier, this site’s readership on the massacre days jumped five-fold, and has never returned to previous lows.