On Tuesday, November 11, Columbia’s Journalism School convened its annual “Changing Media Landscape” panel to discuss the current state of the news media and the direction it will take in the future. Participants–Sewell Chan, editor of The New York Times‘s City Room blog; Jacob Weisberg, chairman of Slate; Erica Smith, news designer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Paper Cuts blog; Adriano Farano, executive editor of CafeBabel.com; and David Cohn, founder of the crowd-funding investigative platform Spot.us–found both reasons to be hopeful and reasons to be vigilant.
One reason to be vigilant, according to Weisberg: “New media and the traditional media are diverging rapidly after a period of peaceful coexistence,” he said. “We are moving into a conflict model.”
One reason to be hopeful, though, is that conflict often leads to innovation. “Finally, experimentation is being embraced,” Cohn said. “We should think of it as research and development; journalism will survive on the shoulders of its failures.”
Listen to the discussion here.
The Editors are the staffers of the Columbia Journalism Review.