RyanBlitstein.com

I went to the Chicago Journalism Town Hall yesterday very excited, and left pretty disappointed and a little angry. To be sure, it was a heroic effort by Ken Davis to get all these people together to talk about a really significant problem. It’s just that 90% of the conversation was the same-old, same-old, without anything remotely new offered. And far too much of the discussion — ostensibly focused on how we can keep great journalism alive in Chicago in the face of serious financial obstacles — took place at a very unsophisticated level.

Here’s how Ken Davis opened the conference: “People are freaked out. There are a lot of people who are looking at what is happening, they’re not necessarily unhappy, but they’re freaked out because they don’t know what to expect.”

Okay, maybe you’re freaked out. But I’m not freaked out. Obviously, the traditional journalism business model is threatened. But journalism as we know it is far from dead. I think the people who are “freaked out” just don’t get it. This is a time of change and uncertainty, but when it comes to the future of news, I’m an optimist, and I think most of those in that room who were under 30 (40?) are, too.

The last 45 minutes of the meeting yesterday definitely exposed that generational rift (great case study on this issue from AJR here is a must-read). I admit the angry, self-righteous young buck in me was super-psyched to hear Windy Citizen’s Brad Flora call “bull***” (literally) on the people on the panel. In some ways, he was right — the reason we got into this mess was not because journalists are risk-averse or bad people. It’s because newspaper publishers were like Detroit’s automakers: when times were great, they got greedy, and they didn’t plan for the future or listen to the young people in their midst who saw the revolution coming.

Sadly, the setup of the town hall only reinforced these problems. I have been writing about innovation on and off for several years, and I still feel like I have no idea how or why innovation happens. But one of the things I can tell you for certain is this: true innovation is not going to come from people who have spent decades working in a business that has not changed for a century. People like Carol Marin and Ken Davis are invaluable for a discussion like this — they can tell us what has worked and what hasn’t, and (far more important) give us ideas how or whether great journalism and reporting can be done under the constraints of the technology and models we propose.

But experienced journalists are not going to be the ones to solve these problems. Entrepreneurs (some of whom may have journalism experience) are. It’s technology and economics that got us into this problem, and technology and economics that will get us out. If you really want a panel that talks about solutions, get someone from University of Chicago b-school. Get someone from the advertising department of the Tribune. Get someone from Pitchfork or ArsTechnica or one of the successful small media companies in Chicago. Get Max Levchin.

Instead, we had people up there who couldn’t agree on whether you could fund a serious journalism venture for $2 million per year or $20 million, and didn’t know whether media companies could make money from online advertising. They couldn’t even agree on the problem they were seeking to address. Was it that we should save the $90k+ salaries of Baby Boomer journalists? Provide enough money to investigative reporters to keep public officials and corporate wrongdoers in check? Keep the public informed on basic civic issues? Entertain? Find a way to replace the crap that the Sun-Times and Tribune put out every day and call “news”? These are all very different problems with very different solutions.

It seemed like Davis was trying so hard to build consensus on the panel and among people in the room toward some new journalism venture. That just wasn’t realistic (oddly enough, a wiki would’ve been a much better way to do something like that). And as Geoff Dougherty pointed out, several ventures already exist. Besides the fact that I didn’t learn much yesterday, what frustrates me most is that I was expecting a very different event. For some reason, I thought it’d be like multiple live versions of this blog post by Kiyoshi Martinez. I was hoping for some sort of FooCamp-like unconference where people who were well-informed would give presentations on their ideas and there’d be back and forth and dozens of startups and experiments (funded or not) came out of it. Apparently something like that happened at Medill on Saturday, I wish I’d heard about it beforehand.