Not planning on going to the conference. I wouldn’t mind talking with you anytime, but not sure if it would yield much more than you get out of my comments here. I’m not involved in journalism in any way other than reading newspapers and watching new media developments unfold.

Will you be at this conference on Oct 10? I’d love to talk to you more about this. I am probably one of the younger folks in this audience(ok maybe not anymore, I turned 27 last month), but I find too often we are grabbing at the desires often reserved for the dreams of youth “scrapping the old” etc. Would love to chat more about other perhaps more reserved options.

I tend to think the best way to find innovation is to understand the steps that led us to here, and to look for ways to change and influence contemporary networks, while also utilizing technology to grasp oppotunities not attainable to our forebears…

I’m not sure if I would consider “blowing things up” as a best practice. I think you must realize that you and many other bloggers exacerbate an adversarial relationship between msm and the blogosphere. I think the first objective should be to eliminate that. However, the problem as I see it is that you and others feed off of that adversarial relationship.

Sorry, I am a bit of a hothead, and I think I came off way wrong. As you may or may not be aware, I just came back from an “unconference” where I struggled to create a dialogue, not a lecture with questions, and it was essentially impossible. Sometimes the unconferences need unconferencing. People were more interested in hearing about Alive in Baghdad than opening their minds to how they could do exactly what we do, whether in their backyards and communities, or in Bogota, Rome, TImbuktu, or Saigon. And this has happened repeatedly, we each have roles and sometimes we too quickly fall into them.

I completely agree that there needs to be a best practices section, and I sincerely hope this will be a dialogue, but my major point is simply that I hope we can all step outside ourselves. Just like I need to step outside my own combative “kick the tables over” mentality.

I am not meaning to be insultive, I’m just realizing that the unconference needs active unconferencing and a prepared and active attitude of open-ness.

I will bring my list and a sense of faith and trust in our capabilities to put great minds toward great things.

In this case, though, I want us to share best practices with some order. So we are having people with representative experience share their practices and lessons before the conference so this can turn into a discussion at the first minute. And then everyone will work together to come up with next steps; that’s close to an unconference. There’s no preaching. Who said there was going to be preaching? Why are you assuming that? There’s going to be sharing. And I hope there’s going to be action. That’s what matters most: moving forward.

And, please, let’s not make assumptions about anyone because they are white or not, young or not, blogger or not. Enough with those us v them labels. That is the whole point of this silly discussion around Skube’s screed. Enough already. Let’s work together and figure out what’s next and then do it.

I suggest you come with a list of things that you want from others to help you move to the next level. And think about how you can help others get to that level thanks to your experience.

If we’re really going to wack the curmudgeons, then at this conference on the 10th, let’s get rid of the stage altogether. Can’t we all discuss at an even horizontal level? We don’t need any more experts, particularly older white men (yes such as yourself and Jay Rosen) preaching to us about what we need to know. Nor do we need young rabble rousers, rebels and disruptors like myself on stage inspiring us with feeling good and remembering how we used to do it. We need equality, acceptance, mutual support and respect. Its going to be hard for all of us to put aside our baggage and ask how we can cooperate and collaborate, and most important of all, leverage our privilege to support the least heard voices. But we have to do it, journalism depends on it. I also believe humanity depends upon it. We could be using web 2.0 for greater human understanding and tolerance, but its not going to happen if even the privileged few can’t communicate in a horizontal manner.

For a world without podiums…

Brian
http://www.smallworldnews.tv
http://www.aliveinbaghdad.org
http://www.aliveinmexico.org

Nor is it trying to “convince” anybody of anything — it’s trying to do something, albeit something incremental and wholly insignificant when weighed against what should be done.

According to your logic, we shouldn’t have run Jay’s piece, because the whole concept is insufficiently revolutionary. Yet Jay’s piece was interesting enough for you to link to and comment on, and to have sparked hundreds of mini-conversations on our site and (especially) elsewhere. My job is to add value to readers, not withhold it in protest of not being able to hand them the keys to my office.

As for “why not kill” the op-ed pages — I presume you are aware that billion-dollar media companies are not institutionally predisposed toward radicalism. That doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to do radical things, but it does mean that the results will often fall considerably short of the Jarvisian Ideal.

The conversation is happening out here without that process and those limitations — and good on the Times for linking to it in this case. But I don’t know how much value the paper adds by allowing our 700 words to be put online there. Because there’s such great editorial judgment there? That’s the same judgment that selected this tired and sloppy Skube piece and didn’t put the response in the print paper, ill-serving the readers there. Finger in the dike, I think.

The flood is coming — it’s here — and I don’t buy the arguments that an inch is better than nothing when the 5,000-mile journey is what’s needed to reach dry land. A journey of an inch is actually worse, I’d say, because it convinces people that they’re doing *something*. Something can be worse than nothing.

I think what’s needed is an utter rethink of edit and op-ed pages. Why not kill them — and hand over that valuable print real estate to reporting — and move the conversation entirely online? Drive your readers and conversationalists there? Won’t get there an inch at a time.

The idea of Blowback, the way I understood it, is different than what you said.

Blowback’s editorial logic is independent of comments on articles and other devices that let users speak. It’s to offer equal length, placement and promotion on the site for the blowback version (the voice in reply) which therefore addresses the inequality left over from the old platform, in which 100-word letters are a reply to 1,200 word articles.

In fact, I asked Matt to make the Blowback version more two-way, by adding forum function to my column and he did.

To me it’s an interesting feature promoting equality in debate via equal promotion of the reply at the same site that published the original.

jd

but the best part is that journalist B ends up making a more thoughtful reply through the same mechanism as journalist A

Jeff, this isn’t working anything like you were describing….

–journalist A writes opinion piece
–respected journalist B responds with insults and fact correction (again with more hatred and anger, painting A as a total failure in life)
–bloggers agree with each other at length in their attack with more anger and insult

(a very controlling effort to add just a little bit of interactivity to its content, instead of just opening up to the discussion that is already happening all around them — see the post below).

That just ain’t so. I’ll go ahead and bore everybody with the institutional history:

1) We’d like to open everything Opinion publishes to comments, and in fact we’re heading that way soon. But for tech/bureaucratic reasons, we could not wave that magic wand.
2) We frequently get responses to our content that doesn’t fit into our severely restricted newspaper-letters format (i.e., 250 words, can’t have published a letter in X amount of time unless you’re directly aggrieved by the piece, etc.).
And so, 3) We created this new feature to deal with that, *not* as an effort of “control,” but basically the opposite — as a way to expand reader reaction.

Now, that’s about 5,000 miles short of what the ideal situation would be, but Jeff of all people should know that large media institutions tend to move slowly, so you do what you can.