And tomorrow, Reuters will unveil a new website devoted to coverage of Africa. Many people believe the news media has barely scratched the surface of life in Africa, only reporting on the most devastating news in the region. Global Voices, a blog aggregator that covers the world outside of Europe and America, will be a part of that new Reuters Africa site, which will link to Global Voices coverage from within its country pages.

For example, if you check out the Reuters Africa page on Algeria, there is a box of links to relevant Global Voices posts (see below), with the asterisked footnote: "Reuters is not responsible for any content provided by external sources."

I talked to Reuters' president, Chris Ahearn, at the We Media conference in Miami, and he later told me about the Africa site.

"Africa is a continent we have been covering extensively for decades," he said. "Now, for the first time, we are publishing this valuable service directly to consumers across Africa and the world to help them grow smarter and richer. We are especially proud to be integrating blogs and commentary, via Global Voices, into our Reuters Africa offering from the start. This further underlines Reuters' commitment to new digital platforms and user-generated/moderated content with community oriented tools, to deliver the next-generation of news and information."

Ethan Zuckerman, a co-founder of Global Voices, told me they were excited about the new African site because it will point to content on daily life and opinion -- and not just to breaking news stories about war and tragedy.

"There's a rising tone of anxiety and despair in the Zimbabwean blogosphere, for instance, but it won't 'break' as a story unless the civil service strike goes off tomorrow and sparks a violent government response," Zuckerman said via email. "In a perfect world, I think we'd find a way to help our friends at Reuters anticipate stories that might break based on our coverage -- that hasn't happened as much as I'd like."

Still, Zuckerman has been happy with the alliance so far, allowing Global Voices to expand its coverage, hire a full-time managing editor, and translate more blogs than previously.

At the We Media conference, I had a chance to sit down with Ahearn and talk more about the various citizen media moves by Reuters, and also pick his brain on what the future of wire service journalism might look like. The following is an edited version of that discussion.

Tell me more about your moves into citizen media in the past year, and what your plans are going forward.

Chris Ahearn: The key is how do we continue to expand the potential network of sources to add value to our news services. Where and how do we reach out to different forms of information gathering? How can I help our editors and journalists do their jobs better and create more value for our website or news agency clients? Global Voices was a no-brainer, a good idea, with smart passionate people, bridge-blogging in underreporated areas. It's extremely valuable. It tends to be someone like us and the bloggers on the ground in those environments. We've gone to them to augment our own coverage -- the Mumbai train bombing comes to mind.

At Davos, the [Reuters] team hosted a variety of live streamed interviews with leading figures around the world. That's not a big deal, that's called TV. What I thought was interesting about it was it was done physically and also in a Second Life environment. As Adam was doing the interviews, there was a crowd of people watching, and also making their own comments that everyone could see as Adam was doing the interviews. Through a moderator, they could suggest additional questions or follow-up points.

That sounds like a pretty interesting model for the future. If someone is so passionate that they'd like to see the whole unedited interview process, how do you bring the audience into the newsgathering process? It's not going to work every place and every time, but I see that as a potential future model.

Cut to investments in Pluck or You Witness News with Yahoo. With Pluck, how do we invest in people who have solutions for the digital newsroom? That's one half of Pluck's business. Media companies are not known as leading-edge technologists who create state-of-the-art tools, so who can help us get there and bridge between the worlds of professional journalism and amateur journalism? We liked what we saw there.

Marry that with BlogBurst which tries to make sense out of 15 gazillion blogs out there. What are the X number of bloggers that will matter to publishers? How can you bring order to it, how can you understand that, how can you augment that? We use it to augment our coverage, it's not a replacement vehicle. It's basically: 'If you're interested in that, here are some other people writing about it in blog format.'

You talk about bringing this in as a resource for reporters and editors. What's their attitude about it? Does it take a change in mindset to accept that, or do they feel like someone's on their turf?

Ahearn: I think it's both. It goes one person at a time. Our online group was involved with everything. It was more the people who were away from the experiment, there's a level of concern in the journalistic community, 'Are they out to replace me?' The answer is no, God no. It's my job in management and running the business side to ensure that there's as much choice out there for our editors as there can be to best address the audience.

The struggle here is how do you let the audience identify what they actually care about and how do you mesh that with the two pillars of control. As a brand, I do want to control what's around me; as a consumer, I want to control everything about my experience. My own supposition is the reality is somewhere in between. One of the reasons newspapers are such a valuable thing or that people lean back and watch TV is that at times people say, 'Show me, I like that serendipity.' At other times I want to be very self-directed, I don't like that on the page.

Do you think once people have control through TiVo or creating their own newspaper online, will they want to go back to leaning back again? Once they have that control, I can't see them giving it back.

Ahearn: I still can't make a major motion picture myself. As much as I think I'm pretty worldly, I can't specify everything I want to watch tomorrow because I would have to know everything in order to define it. There's still a place for packaging and programming. People like to paint them as mortal enemies. I'm a big believer in choice and free will. Giving people both is a good thing. If you do both well as a media company people consume more.

There is a big assumption I make in that, because I believe content creators should be paid. I'm fine if people want to do that [for free], but creators are making a choice that the reputation or social capital is worth more than making money in it. People should have the right to make that choice. But if I am monetizing somebody else's content, that person has the right to make money with me. Whether it's a contractual arrangement where I pay you for the syndication or 'I don't know yet, let's tally it up at the end of the month to see what's fair.'

Maybe it makes me more like old-line media, but gosh wouldn't it be nice if YouTube didn't allow people to steal things? I do believe information wants to be free, but free in how it's consumed. In a world that has been predicated on control of distribution points and consumption points, this is a pretty cool golden age that we're in. Is it dangerous? Yes. But I think we're entering a golden age of journalism and we'll look back five years from now and they'll be a lot happier than they are now.

What will make them happier? Will things be less chaotic?

Ahearn: In a world where there is almost infinitely expanding information, I doubt it will ever be less chaotic. But as we start to arm the quote-unquote mainstream with the same tools as journalists, editors and reporters have, there's an interesting asymmetry here. I talk to a lot of people who say, 'How come blogging software seems to be a richer news-telling experience than some of the tools we put into journalists' hands?' Interesting dynamic, that.

The cost of newsgathering has plummeted. How do we take that and deploy more resources into newsgathering and news presentation? Why is it that right now, at a time when the world is getting more difficult to understand based on everything that's happening are news organizations pulling out of so many places around the world? Why?

Maybe the bureaus closing down are a precursor to everyone having their own personal bureau. That you can somehow grasp all this information that's being sent to you. Many services like You Witness News are trying to do this, but I've always felt that someone could create a giant wire service to take in all that. But you've got a lot of minds to change on that.

Ahearn: Going from 2,400 journalists to 24 million sources -- that's a lot of scale and there's some skepticism, but how might that change the news cycle or the ability of people to make sense [out of everything]. I also wonder how much time is wasted in the rewriting of someone's else's copy that doesn't really change the story or add that much unique value. What's the obsession with that? I like a world where there's different levels of news trust and brands and people can mix and match. If you have something unique, then go for it. Everybody is guilty of it, everyone has their unique version, but if you matched them up, how much are they really unique? How much is there overlap vs. a story you really, really need to tell? Can you spend your resources on something incremental?

But can we get past the in-grown tendencies and legacy ideas? What will it take to get past that?

Ahearn: It's only this decade that online newspapers have become more than just recitations after they were printed. Our CEO [Tom Glocer] says 'we were made for the Internet age; we don't have a press, we never have.' I think we can continue to add value and I do believe that everybody is your partner and everybody becomes your competitor. My clients have other ways of syndicating and sharing, and I think, 'Wait a minute. That's no different than what we do.'

So everyone can have their own wire service?

Ahearn: Why not? Everyone already has their own way of syndicating columnists. I think the future of the news media model ends up with everyone as a syndicator and everyone is a publisher or broadcaster and where everyone has pay-per-use services and subscription services. That's fine, people will gravitate to the brands they really want. I listen to NPR to the morning, it's my habit, it's my aural wallpaper. But it doesn't make me any less loyal to Reuters. I read a lot of Reuters and lot of other things too.

Everyone has their daily content they get from whatever sources they can, it's just that now they have more access to international sources and citizen media and blogs and everything else. It's amazing what we have access to, but the missing thing is the window into it, or the context.

Ahearn: Well, I give Yahoo a lot of credit. I think they do a pretty darn good job, and they're a good model for every publisher to look at. Everyone should be doing that. The thing that drives me a little nuts is, I turn it around and say 'I really trust an audience. If I give them good value, they'll come back to me.' Even if they find me, they may not even realize they're reading me every day. Over time, they will, and to be a part of that consideration every day, you can build a good business on that....That's how I think we break the back of this all-pro, all-amateur -- never the two shall meet.

You just put it all out there together?

Ahearn: I'm not saying that. I'm saying that for the brand you have, you have to do what makes sense. It's not a free-for-all. As you move further away from the brand, there's more trust risk there. The opportunity is to make sense of that. The more context you provide, the better the discussion with your reader, and your reader is better informed. And the last I checked, the business we're in is to inform people.

*****

What do you think about Reuters' moves into citizen media? Are they steps in the right direction or are they not going far enough? What will it take for Reuters to change its old ways and include the audience in its newsgathering operation? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

How do the staid wire services play in a world where our attention is increasingly shifting toward the commentary and eyewitness reports of blogs and citizen media? Changing their very nature is difficult, so the major news wires have chosen to take small steps toward something bigger. Reuters sent a reporter into the virtual world Second Life and made alliances with blog aggregators Global Voices and BlogBurst. And now the AP has made an alliance with the Media Bloggers Assocation (MBA) for blog coverage of the Scooter Libby trial, and a wider deal with citizen media site, NowPublic.

The recent news of AP teaming with NowPublic was announced at the We Media conference in Miami, where the focus was on how the suits in media could adjust to the new decentralized world of citizen journalism. Jim Kennedy, vice president and director of strategic planning for the AP, told me the wire service has been seriously looking at citizen media since 2004, and has distributed iconic images shot by average citizens for many years.

"From the Oklahoma City bombing, there's the famous picture of the fireman carrying the baby out of the rubble, captured by a bank clerk," Kennedy said. "The space shuttle breaking up over Texas was captured by a cardiologist shot from his back porch. And we've had people capture shots in the Twin Towers during 9/11 and in the tunnel during the London bombings, and the tsunami images and video.

"The bottom line is this: You can't continue to approach the news in the same way as you always have, in a world where everyone is equipped to capture some of that news. In the days when only the professionals were equipped to do that, then you had one approach. In a world where people have the tools at their disposal to contribute on a regular basis you'd be foolish not to tap into that. The potential here is that you have someone on the scene of almost everything, and as a news wire that's a really rich resource to tap into."

So what does NowPublic offer the AP in such an alliance? The site was launched in March 2005 but has built up a registered base of 60,000 contributors, who can upload text, photos, audio or video to the site. NowPublic co-founder Michael Tippett told me the site's active participants are "in the thousands," uploading material on a daily or weekly basis. The site has improved some past usability problems, according to Tippett, and NowPublic's board now includes longtime online journalist Merrill Brown as chairman.

"NowPublic has a presence where [the AP] doesn't have it," Tippett said. "If news happens, chances are we have someone [there], more people than [the AP] does. [Our users] aren't trained journalists, some of them are, but they can take photos and video and make phone reports and cover things that [the AP] just can't cover. The other thing we do is make sense of all that stuff. That is a big problem for a lot of mainstream media organizations. If something happens, and a news organization tells readers 'send in your coverage,' they'll get 20,000 emails, and what do you do with that? We have some filtering mechanisms to help them sort through stuff."

As for figuring out hoaxes or inaccurate material, Tippett says the community can leave comments about stories or flag something if it doesn't pass the smell test. But NowPublic is taking an open newsgathering approach where people in the community see raw material and help sort the good from bad. If something important breaks on NowPublic, and the AP is alerted to it, the wire service can then purchase the text or photos or video, and will pay the content creator -- with a cut going to NowPublic.

"The AP gets the content, the creator gets paid and we would get a percentage of that," Tippett said. "It's the first time the AP has gone about this with an organized system."

Bloggers Handcuff Themselves

Not long before the NowPublic alliance, the AP made an agreement with the Media Bloggers Association to point to their member bloggers' coverage of the trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby. The MBA made waves by getting press credentials for 18 bloggers -- conservative and liberal -- to rotate in to two slots in the court's press room to live-blog the judicial proceedings.

[Full disclosure: I am a member of the MBA. Plus, the MBA will be running blog posts on the PBS Frontline site related to the News War documentary.]

Blogger Robert Cox is the president of the MBA, and is focusing on getting press credentials for bloggers at high-profile events, while also offering legal protection for bloggers. Cox told me some people at the AP had concerns about running unedited blogs from the courtroom, so he got the bloggers to agree to some basic ground rules of conduct.

"I called around to all the bloggers, and said, 'There's a time and place to be edgy,'" Cox said. "This is not the time to write a post titled 'Dick Cheney is a [expletive deleted].' We sought to address [the AP's concerns] by saying we have a vetted membership of bloggers who've agreed to ascribe to certain ideals of what they're trying to do. [The AP] has the kind of accountability that they want. I'm not going to control what the blogger writes, but if they get way out of line and embarrass the AP, they can be pulled from the feed."

The AP is limiting the distribution of the bloggers' posts from the trial, only including a pop-up box off their main Libby wire stories that run on about 750 medium- and small-market newspaper sites. So if you go to the Des Moines Register home page, you have to click on From AP Wire and then find the wire story on the Libby trial. Then you go down that page and find a box on the sidebar titled, "Posts from the Media Bloggers Association." Clicking on that box brings up a pop-up page with headlines and the first few sentences from each blog post, which then links through to the blogs themselves.

The total distance from the Des Moines Register front page to the full blogger posts is at least four clicks. "The bloggers are literally being kept in a box," Cox noted wryly.

Steve Johnson, online editor at the AP who is overseeing the deal with the MBA, said the AP had to create this amount of distance to make sure its editors -- and AP member newspaper editors -- were comfortable with running the content.

"There was a certain amount of distancing we had to do," Johnson told me. "The MBA is intriguing to us because they have some standards, they have a balanced group, with liberals and conservatives. They have an informal agreement about how far they would go with trashing people. It's funny that what happens when people say they want legitimacy, they will put handcuffs on themselves. When you go to a court and say 'I want to be certified to be a reporter,' then suddenly the court administrators and lawyers see what you write about them. And you've crossed a threshold and it matters, because they can kick you out of the courtroom and keep you from coming back.

"That was a key selling point. We want to keep doing this with other trials and other events. And that means there's certain language you can't use. If you're covering a beat, you can't burn your sources."

So far, no bloggers have had their credentials pulled, though Cox did have to remove a comment on the very first blog post about the trial. That comment was aimed at the AP for using Iraqi policeman Jamil Hussein as a source, a long-running feud the wire service had with the conservative blogosphere. Cox told the blogger to remove the comment, and she did.

But just as some bloggers are trying to become legitimate members of the press, other bloggers are wondering if that's the point of what they do, and are opposed to creating a new elite for bloggers. Law blogger Tim Gebhart lauded the MBA's efforts, but noted that many bloggers can already cover live events and that credentials work against the bloggers' ethos. Here is part of Gebhart's argument:

Any effort to proclaim one segment of a group of similarly situated individuals as an "elite," entitled to advantages over the others, should raise red flags for all bloggers. Designating an "elite tier" of bloggers seems particularly contrary to one of the best concepts underlying blogs -- they allow almost anyone a low-cost means of participating in the marketplace of ideas by distributing ideas, analysis, and criticism worldwide...

Don't get me wrong. Adhering to certain ethical standards behooves bloggers and their readers, but it isn't just what the [Washington] Post calls "this experiment of free expression" that is guilty of ethical lapses....An "elite" stamp from any particular organization does not guarantee anything. It certainly should never become the determinant of the legitimacy or value of any individual or collective blog.

Social Networks for News Junkies

So now that the AP has taken their baby steps into citizen media and blogs, what comes next? Cox hopes the MBA bloggers will move up the food chain at the AP and eventually have their content run directly on newspaper sites and perhaps in print. NowPublic hopes to gain more exposure for its site and its army of citizen journalists, who could get paid for their work.

Jim Kennedy at the AP says that wire services will become part of an online social network of news hounds, and says that professionals will still be needed.

"The Internet audience will evolve into a big social network of news junkies," he said. "Instead of sitting in front of a television at 6:30 pm or reading a newspaper religiously every morning, the next generation of news junkies will be connected to the Internet through multiple devices and multiple networks, and news will surface through those networks. Working with people and letting them participate will become a built-in part of the consumption patterns. Connecting with users in a personal way will be part of what we'll do. If you want to be the most comprehensive source in news you'll have to connect to that resource or you won't access the kind of news that you need to have.

"The professionals will still be on the big stories, and there will be a value to that and to editors and to setting the agenda of what the top stories are. But there will be this whole new visibility of other things, a Long Tail of news that's impossible to capture now with what we've developed as mainstream tools, so we need to develop new tools and new networks to expand our reach. Everyone will do that. The kind of things we're talking about now will be absolutely routine and expected in a couple years. It sounds really new and risky today, but if you're not game to get in and work through the risks then you're going to lose the opportunity, and that's finally what we came to."

What do you think about wire services stepping their toes into the citizen media waters? Are these the right steps, or should they be looking at more radical reinventions? What do you think the future holds for wire service stories, photos and video? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

UPDATE: David Bauder, the TV writer at the AP, didn't appreciate my stereotype of all AP writing as being bland. Here's what he wrote to me in an email:

As the television writer at the AP, I appreciated reading your smart, perceptive piece on the AP's alliance with bloggers. All except the lede. There are a lot of people at the AP who take great pride in their writing, and a lot of examples of good, and different, writing on the wire. Sure, there are plenty of stories like you suggest, either due to time pressures, necessity (a story that doesn't need much more) or lack of creativity. But it's a sterotype I think we're moving beyond, and it makes me wince to see it reinforced.

Fair enough. I think there's a bit of tension on where the AP would go if it went beyond the bland and simple inverted pyramid. With so much opinion and snark in the online world and blogosphere, it might take a cultural leap for wire writers to go that far. And perhaps the fact that the AP is so focused on being bland and geting it right sets it apart from the ocean of online rants.

I've already mentioned how much I liked the mix of people at the conference, and enjoyed meeting people face-to-face that I had only known by email or telephone. One other aspect of the conference that I liked was the way the organizers used technology to help bring more people into the conversation, and let participants catch up on panels or breakout workgroups they missed.

The conference organizers, Dale Peskin and Andrew Nachison (a.k.a. the Blues Brothers), have put a big emphasis on continuing their mission between conferences, to mixed success. This year, I liked the pre-conference online application by IntroNetworks, which helped me connect to some conference participants and set up interviews ahead of time.

One of the more interesting parts of the application is a questionnaire you answer to find out more about your personality. It then takes your answers and matches them up with everyone else's answers and charts you on a "Pin View" as seen below. Each pin represents a person from the conference, with yourself in the center. The other pins are closer to you if their personality is near yours.

I decided to test out the concept by contacting the person nearest to me in the Pin View, who turned out to be Stephanie Kanowitz, the web editor at Federal Computer Week. Right off the bat, there were similarities in our lives, as she lives in suburban Virginia, not far from the PBS headquarters. Her last name, Kanowitz, is very similar to my mother's maiden name, Kaskowitz. She works at a computer trade publication, and I got my start at the computer trade mag InfoWorld.

So I contacted her through the IntroNetworks application and we traded emails. She even made sure to find me at the conference so we could meet in person, and we had a nice conversation. Kanowitz even has a media criticism blog she writes in her spare time, and we talked about ways she could build on that experience.

Mash-ups and the Conference Blog

Another positive about We Media was the breakout sessions which had smaller, more intimate settings for real conversations. There were sessions on 3-D worlds, innovative journalism and Second Life. While I missed a breakout session on mash-ups, the group created their own mash-up blog in 30 minutes. The idea for media mash-ups is to take two functions (or more) and mash them into one site. For this blog, they combined Flickr photos tagged with "wemedia," and plugged the RSS feed for We Media into a map. They also created a pet rescue blog during their session to show how quickly you can deploy mash-ups in a quick and dirty way.

The We Media site also includes audio from some of the panel sessions, as well as a comprehensive group blog that has detailed notes from every session. Not only are the notes useful now, after the fact, but the live notes by Brian Reich during sessions helped punch up the major points and "a-ha moments" as they happened. I was impressed with Reich's fast work during sessions, as he brought up relevant sites that were discussed during panels, and built full PowerPoint presentations based on statistics he found on the web.

I talked to Reich after the first day of the conference, and told him how impressed I was with his rapid-fire work. He told me that was the environment in which he was most comfortable -- juggling multiple screens and inputs -- and that he could most relate with stock traders, who have a similarly chaotic work environment.

In his blog post about the "Soft Power" panel at We Media, Reich made this poignant observation:

I'm not sure that the third major discussion of the We Media conference was appropriately titled, but it sure was interesting. Yes, the concept of 'soft power' implies that there are sources of influence that are not tied explicitly to military or financial might...and that influence is quite regularly demonstrated by the media, and increasingly now the citizen media. But soft power is a political science concept, a theory about how influence carries.

Yes, if you were to rank the most influential people in the country, perhaps the world, based on their ability to drive changes in the world, many of the panelists for this session, and the people participating from the audience, would be near the top of the list. Still, the concept of soft power seems to require that the people who have influence are actively seeking to gain authority, drive their own agenda, or similar. I think the collective brain trust in the room feels like it is part of a greater movement, and while they all have their own individual financial, academic, creative, or other goals that they are seeking to meet, few would ever say they are out for a power grab.

He made a nice open-ended conclusion about media power as well:

There was also quite a bit of discomfort with the concept of power. Power is shifting and distributing in new ways (which of course is going to make people uncomfortable) and the media is going to have to figure out what that means, and what role they want to play.

Again, there was a focus on keeping the conversation going beyond the conference, and we'll see how well the organizers (and attendees) will do with that follow-through. If you attended the conference, what were some of the positives you saw? Did you use the IntroNetworks application, or follow the conference through audio or the group blog? How helpful (or not) were they for you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

To get in on those conversations (and this is about conversation, right? We Media?) required waiting until all panelists spoke, questioned each other, and then getting called on by the moderator. Often there was little back-and-forth you'd expect in a conversation, and more of a question and answer session typical of most conferences. This year's enhancement was the addition of "go-to participants" planted in the audience. But that just made it seem like there were ubiquitous panelists popping up like whack-a-moles out among the common folk.

Some of the more interesting, frank discussions -- and, of course, the snarky complaints -- took place out in the hallways. As is becoming a custom at conferences, the hallways and outdoor areas are the hotbed of intellectual discourse, socialization and true connection. I've often wondered why someone didn't just create a conference that was just one big hallway, and NowPublic's Michael Tippett seconded my emotion when I chatted with him outside.

"I think this conference would have been better served with the unconference format [without formal panels]," Tippett said. "I think the audience here has some really interesting things to say, and the unconference format would give them many more opportunities to speak up. Someone should do a conference that's just eight hours of people networking and just dispense with the nonsense and the podiums. You have 20 minutes to meet the 10 people you came here to meet, and you're doing it while shoving a piece of salami in your mouth."

Tippett had one of the more important announcements to come out of We Media, with his citizen journalism hub NowPublic making a deal with the Associated Press to supply photos, text and video shot by average folks to the august news service. Tippett told me the AP would be paying citizen journalists if they used their material, with part of the fee going to NowPublic. (You can read more about this deal in this later MediaShift post.)

Of Teens and Town Halls

So while I thoroughly enjoyed the people I saw and met out in the hallways and outdoor schmooze zones at the conference, the panel forums in the auditorium were a mixed bag. Sometimes the pace felt rushed, and the pressure to sum up everything with sound bites was strong. The online backchannel wasn't as much a part of the festivities as last year, but Brian Reich ably kept PowerPoint style notes on the "a-ha" moments as they came up.

First up this morning was the requisite look at what the kooky kids are doing these days. The panel included a smattering of Miami high schoolers along with a marketing trendspotting expert, John Fischer, the oldie at 24 years of age. The group generally dispelled the notion that email is only for older folks, though many of them did say how much their lives revolved around social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, where even their teachers were communicating with them.

There was consensus that many teens aren't following the news that much, though many of the panelists do follow the news. And while some of them were into social networking, others pooh-poohed them as being full of junk and irrelevant invitations. The problem with this teen panel idea is that you can't get a sense of what all teens are doing with a handful of random ones on a panel. Instead, perhaps the group could at least pierce through some of the stereotypes about teens, including an Internet question about them being the slacker generation.

"It's ironic you have us all up on stage," Fischer said. "There's an idea that our generation will break all the old models. But we have the same old problems, the same human needs and issues as you all do. It's unfair to characterize us as bored or boring. We're not saying pay attention to us, we're different. You're the ones who put us up on stage."

In the men's room after the panel, I overheard this conversation between two attendees:

Guy 1: "What did you think of the panel?"

Guy 2: "I tuned out half way through and was checking my email."

Guy 1: "Have you checked out MySpace? It would probably be a good idea to spend some time there...."

Guy 2: "No not really. I haven't spent much time there. But my students use it."

Later, there was a powerhouse "Town Hall" panel with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, University of Miami president and former Clinton cabinet member Donna Shalala, Time Inc. executive editor Sheryl Tucker and Knight Foundation CEO Alberto Ibarguen. New York Times futurist-in-residence Michael Rogers was the moderator, and kicked off things with his own predictions of what's to come in media technology.

Rogers predicted that there would be an "extreme explosion and evolution" of mobile devices, with a new device that would combine the power of laptops and tablet PCs with smart phones to create a laptop replacement. He also predicted a new decade about identity, where everyone would have real legal identities online that would be more meaningful than passports. Not surprisingly, Rogers was bullish on Big Media catching on to the we media craze.

"Big Media is catching on fast," he said. "It's easy to say Big Media are dumb and blind but it's not the case. TV networks and newspapers all will adopt social media. Reporters did not become top reporters by ignoring reality. We're at these conferences and we're all listening."

Big Media Will Absorb You

Time and again, the theme of the panel came back to Big Media really, really getting this we media thing-a-ma-bob. Time's Tucker said that "We are not the enemy as mainstream media." Even Newmark took potshots at the blogosphere for a "print first, then maybe do fact-checking" attitude and lauded Big Media for having pro fact-checkers. These are the old rationales and defensive postures that MSM folks like to make to separate themselves from the masses of untrustworthy citizen journos.

I couldn't take it much longer, and finally got up to basically restate what I had blogged about yesterday, complaining that the unspoken context of this conference was Big Media trying to regain the control they had lost.

"What no one wants to admit is that the mainstream media has lost power and lost control to the people," I said. "And Big Media is here to try to figure out how to exploit or make money off of citizen media. I'm not saying that they can't be part of this new world, but they need to engage it in an authentic way."

Their defensive posture was to say basically that "hey we're all media, we can all get along" and it's not an us vs. them thing anymore, which was not my point at all. Time's Tucker was the most defensive, saying that she too was a citizen, and just wanted to provide a framework for people. JD Lasica tried to more eloquently make my point in a question to the panel later.

"The Time magazine Person of the Year was 'you,'" he said. "How come they chose you and not us or we? My question is do you see MSM representing our interests, do you have our best interests at heart? People see MSM as representing hard power and not being on our side. The figures from Zogby show that the public perception of MSM is [as low] as the way people view Congress.
How can people in charge of media companies embrace the new ethos of new media?"

But that question proved to remain rhetorical, because it just wasn't getting through to Tucker, who was stuck on MSM providing the trusted voice. "We need to give our readers a frame of reference," she said. "Are we communicating with hardcore research or off the top of our heads? Whether it's from a computer at home, the standard doesn't change. They can judge whether it's accurate or not."

Outside in the hall after the panel, NYU professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen told me that Lasica and I had not gotten through to them. Rosen had raised his hand but wasn't called upon, but had a great analogy of what was wrong with MSM's approach to citizen media.

"They are trying to change the vocabulary without changing the grammar," he said. "They use the new vocabulary [of new media] but they are not changing their mindset, and accepting a loss of control."

In other words, they might start blogs or podcasts or accept comments on stories, but they still believe their work is coming down from on high atop the mountain of Eternal Truth. The new truth of we media -- lowercased -- is that the media elite have lost the lock on media control, the old style of getting into a room and deciding what is news for the rest of us.

*****

One footnote to the Town Hall discussion was that I missed Tucker after the panel, and she left a business card on my laptop with a hand-written note:

Not really clear about the us and we. Would love to continue the conversation, so that I can better understand how to respond. Good journalism shouldn't have boundaries or be held hostage by mass media.

I will follow up with her and hopefully we can make our points more clearly in a real conversation, which I will update here.

For more comprehensive coverage of the We Media confab, check out Jemima Kiss at the Guardian's Organ Grinder blog.

UPDATE: ABC News anchor Charles Gibson provides a great Exhibit A of the MSM taking a defensive stand against the web and people's control of media. He told the Chicago Tribune the following:

I'm getting on a high horse here, and I haven't really worked this through, but in many respects the oft-now-derided MSM becomes more important rather than less important in the web age. You are choosing the particular kind of news that's interesting to you. We become more important because our mission is to expose you to things you wouldn't have clicked on.

The fact that people are going to the web and gravitating toward news that they want makes it more important for somebody putting together the front page of the Tribune to say, 'Well, it's still important for you.'...It's a defense of journalism. It's not that we know better. ... It's not an elitist function. It's an editorial function. It is a function of taking a look at what's important in a diet of daily news and saying, 'Here's what I feel is important.'"

And what makes your editorial function more important than anyone else's?

UPDATE 2: In comments, Michael Rogers of the New York Times, says that the social media community is wasting energy in attacking the MSM. He hopes that everyone can all just get along and look toward the future together:

When a Reuters supports Global Voices, or the AP supports NowPublic, it's not a secret conspiracy to figure out how to subvert these tools to sell more SUVs. When newspapers start blogs or put editors online to answer reader questions, it's not a desperate ploy to "regain power." It's because we think these elements add value to what we do. It seems to me that the MSM vs. blogosphere argument has outlived its usefulness. It's time to concentrate on building the best future we can with whatever tools look right for the job.

Richard Sambrook, director of BBC Global News, said it sounded like Groundhog Day at We Media, noting that the same old arguments were still coming up about old media not getting it, and bloggers complaining. Here's the meat of his post:

Enough of conferences going over the same ground, enough of bloggers (several of whom make their living from consulting with big organisations) saying big media doesn't "get it" and only they have insight, enough of big media publicly agonising over how to respond to the huge disruption the internet has brought. Enough of the fallacy of thinking there is some kind of power struggle going on. It's about integration, not subsititution... For me this year has to be less about talking and more about doing.

Point taken -- and I'll agree whole-heartedly that it's time for action. Obviously I am being paid by an old media, Big Media company, PBS, to write this blog. My intention was not a slam against all traditional media, or a holding up of small-m media. My hope is that there is a pro-am way to make new media work, a way for the public to be served, whether it's by a credible amateur blogger, a traditional media podcast, or a citizen journalist video feed from the scene of breaking news.

UPDATE 3: Author and blogger Shel Israel has a fantastic post describing his experience on the first panel at We Media. He wondered whether Big Media really had its heart in social media or was just in it for the buzz words:

But in the discussion between our five-member panel and about 150-200 attendees from big media, academia and assorted other places, I kept hearing from people who claimed to understand the current transformational period which will probably culminate on the inevitable day that newspapers die. They used words like "allow," "brand extension," "control," "company initiative." These to me are words that have lost their fuzz, like some kids toy whose battery has run down.

It seemed to me that some members of this audience should worry much less about elephants and a lot more about being dinosaurs. After my talk, a representative of one of the most powerful media companies in the world told me, "every year, for three years, we gather together and talk such a good game about the changes we have to make. Then we go home and do almost nothing until the next We Media, when we gather together to talk a good game."

Auditorium photo and photo of Shalala by JD Lasica.

Hallway photo and photo of Tucker by Georgia Popplewell.

That's the rub in Miami today and tomorrow at the We Media conference, a high-end schmooze-fest sponsored in part by Reuters, WashingtonPost.Newsweek.Interactive and the Knight Foundation. My personal definition of "we media" is the movement toward an empowered audience, who can customize their media experience and create their own media, leaving behind the old model of the mainstream media control. In that case, a "we media" conference would be about those average folks who are innovating in citizen journalism and breaking the mold.

But this conference uses the "we media" moniker loosely, making the gathering a hotbed of broadcasters, newspaper folk, venture capitalists, and advocacy groups who all want to understand how they can dance the "we media" dance. Usually I insert a metaphor about square people in suits trying to look cool doing hip-hop breakdancing, but in this case the conference was kicked off today with a couple hip-hop videos, so my usual fiction was strangely coming true.

The conference was marketed as being a conversation among various players in the media industry. As the conference site put it: "The program includes a series of roundtable discussions and a variety of participatory activities involving communities, individuals and organizations to help participants understand and address the challenges of a changing multi-media world."

But some individuals, who wrote complaints on the We Media website, were put off by the $1,000+ walk-up registration fee. One commenter named Joshua put it like this:

A thousand dollars? WHAAAAAT???? How do you expect this event to benefit everyone, when only those wealthy enough to set aside a THOUSAND BUCKS for travel and registration can attend? I’m a professional journalist -- a news anchor -- and I can't afford that. And I live in Miami! I'd love to take part in this, but the price is just insane. Isn't there another way?

It's true that there are other low-cost unconferences such as BloggerCon, where there are no fees and no sponsors, and the space is donated. But this is not what We Media is aiming for. I chatted with the conference organizers, Dale Peskin and Andrew Nachison (a.k.a. the new media Blues Brothers), this morning before the confab started, and they explained the high cost of We Media.

"Two-thirds of the [250 people] who attend don't pay the full price to come," said Peskin. "We also pay for 25 fellows to attend, and we try to limit who comes."

Nachison said that registration fees only pay for 20% of the costs to put on the conference, with sponsor money making up the rest of the income. Their group, iFocos, is non-profit, but they obviously aren't looking for charity here. This is about business, and how the media business is changing, and it's not just the army of citizen media people.

"We want bottom-up media, top-down media, sideways, whatever," Nachison said. "We want to cover the whole ecosystem of media. We want to do more than just help media companies figure this change out. We want society to figure it out. Some companies will figure it out and some won't."

Community Self-Congratulation

First up was the "Community Forum," which included representatives from MTV, Topix.net and BlogHer leading a discussion about the new ways people are using news and information in their communities. Ian Rowe from MTV noted how his younger audience is changing the dynamic in how MTV covers issues.

"They want to get their content when they want it and how they want it, and that also goes for issues in their life," he said. "It used to be top down where we chose one or two issues for them. Now our audience is telling us it's great you are focusing on issues, but I want to deal with issues that are important to me, and I want to connect with people around the world to talk about issues I care about...We see great opportunities in the media revolution that's now in the hands of young people."

What's left largely unsaid (at least until the afternoon "Investment Forum") is what MTV and other media companies think these "opportunities" are. Is it an opportunity to cash in on the idea of citizen media? Is it an opportunity to change their own top-down culture?

Jan Schaffer, who runs the J-Lab at the University of Maryland, pointed out that grassroots media sites don't necessarily play by the corporate media rules of money first, community service second. A recent survey by the lab of 191 citizen media sites found that they were largely shoestring operations with content coming from volunteers. Here are some eye-opening stats from that study:

> 51% said they didn't need to make money to continue.

> 82% said they planned to continue "indefinitely."

> 73% of respondents said their sites were a "success," based on the impact in their communities.

A lot of the comments from the room revolved around people mentioning their own citizen media efforts and initiatives. Someone from Gannett mentioned Gannett's mobile journalists. Someone from Topix.net talked about the forums at Topix.net. Someone at BlogHer talked about the female blogger network at BlogHer. These were all great examples of what's happening in citizen media, but there was a self-congratulatory and self-promotional tone that didn't feel very "we media."

But it did fit in well with the conference's tagline: "Behold the power of us."

Look out for more reports from the We Media conference in the next day or so, and you can read my reports from last year's London conference here. If you'd like me to bring up your own feelings about "we media" to attendees, leave comments below and I'll make your most eloquent points in future sessions.

UPDATE: If you'd like the real-deal live-blogging from the conference, check out what Jemima Kiss is doing for the Guardian's Organ Grinder blog. A real blow-by-blow of the whole first day here in Miami.

UPDATE 2: Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix.net, takes a hard look at the failings of the conference, and how that parallels the failings of many startups in what he calls the "News 2.0" space. Here are some key passages of his excellent blog post:

There is actually a media revolution in the works. So what's going on here? By implicit definition, participatory media is non-commercial. If it's commercial, someone owns it, and it's not "we" anymore.

Furthermore, as soon as a new media venture crosses the line and tries to become a business, it either becomes a successful business or a failed one. Businesses aren't about ideology, they're about getting a job done and earning revenue to keep the thing going. Even wild success tends to leave ideology behind. Ideology is the realm of nonprofits and failures...

Yes, there is a media revolution in the works. But it's messy, it's nasty videos on YouTube, not the neat & tidy civic Welcome Wagon of citizen journalism. You can't quit your job as a journalist and replace your salary with AdSense on your blog. You'll be lucky to make beer money, let alone pay COBRA and fund your SEP-IRA.

And big media has been watching, and buying the winning ventures, and building their own platforms to -- yes you're right! -- exploit the new models.

Photos by David Parmet, except Blues Brothers photo by JD Lasica