Here’s a link to a WTTW clip from March 2009. Yeah – it’s almost five years old. In it, I, Owen Youngman, the Knight chair at Medill, and Geoff Dougherty, then the founder of Chi-Town Daily News, discuss the future of news. Owen is still teaching at Medill and is busy doing what tenured professors do – teaching, researching and advancing knowledge in his area of expertise. It looks like Geoff is successfully pivoting into the world of science. His linked in says, “I’m a social epidemiologist and PhD student in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins, with research interests in neighborhood-level determinants of cardiovascular disease, systems- and agent-based modeling and application of GIS to public health questions.”
I have continued to advance the cause of good journalism in all my work behind the scenes and upfront. I currently write for the Knight Digital Media Center. Much of my reporting on the Open Government movement is sharpened by my direct experience in government. All of my reporting is deeply informed by my eclectic career as a journalist, entrepreneur, fundraiser and government activist – you can read my articles at KDMC, the BlockbyBlock Community News Network and 435Digital. Although I am specifically discussing the L3C Newsroom in this clip, I think its important to note that the basic principle behind the L3C was crowdfunding by a community that cares. We are considerably closer to that today — check out the Beacon platform I wrote about a few weeks ago. I am looking for my next pivot but in the meantime I might check out this session at the Newberry Library tomorrow.
Prof. Youngman and Pulitzer Prize winner Jack Fuller will present their view of the future of news. It is sure to be interesting and informative.
Please know, though, that these two will not be representative of the explosion in media that is happening. That is because today — WE— each of us has all the tools we need to create The Media We Want. We have an emerging diversity of news rooms taking shape. To learn more about that follow I and my colleagues on Twitter.