Blogging Roller

I spent Friday and Saturday in Greensboro, NC at the ConvergeSouth 2005 conference. I had a great time meeting fellow NC bloggers and attending talks on community building, blogging and journalism, collaboration, blog tools and podcasting. The next couple of posts will be my trip report, based on my notes and recollections. This is installment #2.

I didn't get much out of this session because it was completely focused on the business of journalism. That's not to say it wasn't interesting, it was, but there wasn't a whole lot of information that I could relate to or take away and use in my day-to-day work. The session leaders were Phil Meyers, Sybril Bennnet, Chris Nolan and Martin Heimann.

UNC journalism professor Phil Myers gave a fascinating summary of the old journalism business model, which was based around newspapers. His book, The Vanishing Newspaper, sounds interesting even for a non-journalist.

Sybril Bennett and Chris Nolan covered the new business model, which I admit, I don't totally understand. It seems to involve outsourcing the newsroom. Now that the "newsroom has left the building" due to both the advent of personal publishing tools and old media layoffs, you have to go out, track it down and pay it to write for you again. One way to do that is to use bloggers as stringers to get additional local coverage (Jeff Jarvis wrote about this). And bigger name bloggers can band together to sell ads across a network, to sell their writing to main-stream media outlets or just to get bought-out. Weblogs Inc., Gawker Media and Pajama Media were offered as an examples of this type of organization. Hmmm... $25 million dollars... on second thought, maybe I do understand.

Finally, Martin Heimann explained how his company can help you to internationalize and localize your websites. I guess I was completely lost at this point because I could not figure out how this relates to the new journalism business model. Seemed to me, this was, to use a journalistic term, "filler."

Tags: topic:{technorati}[ConvergeSouth], topic:{technorati}[Journalism], topic:{technorati}[Blogging]