The Changing Media Landscape

Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but for a room full of journalists ("new media" students scribbling on pads, in many instances --- interesting image there), I don't see much coverage of the "Changing Media Landscape" that took place last night at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.

I've posted on Rebuilding Media, asking about if there are government bloggers, and on Congoo on New York Times "futurist" Michael Rogers saying there will be dozens of NY Times Web sites in the future and trying to find business models. "There's no such thing as a mass audience anymore, but there is a general consumer audience," was one of his quotes I liked. "There's a lot of people who just want information aggregated for them." Not everyone wants their own feed reader they've customized and personalized.

Iranian blogger 'Hoder' talked about needing help with a lawsuit the Iranian government is bringing against him. Josh Cohen, who does bizdev for Google News, peeled back the curtain a little, telling us that Google News is a closed index, that they have specific criteria for inclusion, and implying that those criteria would (or at least should) be more revealed soon. He later talked about Google not getting into the editorial production game because of its need to remain agnostic in information choices.

Andrew Lih, formerly of Columbia J-school's new media program and then of Hong Kong University and now author of a book about Wikipedia, talked about how the Web fills "the knowledge gap" – information that's too new to be in the history books, but too old to be in the daily newspapers. And Rogers peeled back his curtain to tell us there were a dozen engineers and techies on his futurist team, about half of whom do daily work, but half of whom are looking to build what'll be in use – and to figure what business models there'll be, up to five years in the future. He noted, too that venture capitalists are now talking about "the second billion," meaning that a billion people on earth now have computers and Internet access, and there's a new market waiting to be tapped.