CUNY Digital First forum

Tonight I went to a forum on Digital First at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. @jxpaton and Justin Smith were interviewed by @jeffjarvis. (Jeff Jarvis wrote an essay in the Guardian earlier this year called Digital First.)

There was a diversity in that Justin Smith represented magazines and a smaller organizational structure & market cap, while John Paton represented newspapers and larger numbers. However, both represented industrial journalism. For example, a frequently tweeted event quote is John Paton, "Patch can't scale," because of the difficulty of getting enough warm bodies in enough zip codes. A true point, but why is scaling to a huge organization important? Sure large piles of cash are fun, but this was a forum that couldn't resist the lure of romanticizing "Journalism"-- must Journalism as force for good be industrial scale?

In fact, the conversation provided a counter to the necessity of organized scale. In response to an audience question on quality in the face of increased output, Smith provided a content taxonomy: tweets, short aggregations, short posts, and longform. Smith was focusing on the variety of popularity (longform NCAA story and shortform Putin photo set). However, that taxonomy against some smart comments by Paton point the way: curate crowdsourcing. Paton mentioned that no paper has ever really "covered" high school sports, at best they only identified notable programs to cover. But curation of tweets and posts from anyone at any game could also work.

This opportunity is further supported by what appears to be a blending of two spheres, the internal or private part of a company with the external or public spheres. This didn't seem to be intentional, it wasn't really stated as such except offhand, but it jibes nicely with moderator Jarvis' new book Public Parts. For example a lot of talk focused on getting people ("resources") with appropriate skills and encouraging their collaboration, including with customers. For example, both participants discussed developing analytics from display ad CPMs into a service for customers. Paton noted, particularly in small town markets.

In all it was a great listen.