Reinventing Journalism: The Media Giraffe Conference

I sort of like the fact that this - my first blog in over four months - will be posted the same day that "Superman Returns" opens. I grew up watching George Reeves play Superman on TV and have always believed that in each of us there is someone much more powerful than might be obvious to those who see us going about our every day lives.

But my real purpose in writing is not to talk about Superman...or to comment on one of the stories of the day as I have done in the past. I am writing to bring to your attention the extraordinary conference on the future of journalism I am attending starting tonight. I am writing this post from the Campus Center Hotel at UMass - Amherst, where the Media Giraffe Conference is being held. The roughly 200 people who will be attending (and you can see who they are here ) all recognize that the existing system of journalism in America is in trouble. Some, like me, actually believe it is broken...or perhaps a better word is "obsolete"...a belief I will go into in more detail in a moment.

But - whether or not you agree with my opinion - I urge you to pay attention to this conference and to its eventual outcomes. (If I understand the conference organizers at the UMass School of Journalism and the web site they've set up correctly, a lot of information will be available on-line.) Global Warming may be the greatest threat facing humanity, but I believe that the flip side to that - in other words, the greatest HOPE in humanity's forseeable future - is Journalism That Matters (the topic of one of the seminars at the conference). Right now, journalism as we know it has largely been swallowed up by the political and cultural war that is swirling around us. Despite the fact that the Bush administration's interest in tracking the financial aspect of the world's terrorists has been widely discussed since shortly after the 9/11 attack, today we see The New York Times and other papers accussed of treasonous behavior for publishing stories that describe that effort.

If only that sort of journalism really mattered. If it only helped us build a world beyond this culture war. After all, isn't that the kind of world we're all supposed to want? Aren't we supposed to want to end this war - all wars for that matter - some day? Well, as important as it may be to publish stories about tracking terrorist financial dealings, there is just so much more of a constructive nature that the media could be publishing stories about. And this is why I used the word "obsolete". That's because building a better world means not just talking about stuff that we might want to stop doing. It also means talking about new stuff that we might want to start doing. Maybe "obsolete" is too strong a world. "Incomplete" is probably a much better one. Stopping bad stuff is like putting out fires. It's important, but it only prevents what you have from evaporating in a puff of smoke (if you get there on time). It doesn't help you make what you have work better. Destructive vs. Constructive news. This is what I will be talking with people about at the Media Giraffe conference.

To test this subject out a bit, I posed a question to Tom Friedman in early Apriil regarding what I consider to be a constructive news story. Ted Koppel and Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz were there to hear my question as well. And the three of them spent about seven minutes talking about the subject (which happened to be the scientific and engineering underpinnings of creating true world peace) at an event hosted by The New York Times. Fortunately, this event was broadcast on C-Span, so I can share this seven minute portion of the program with you here...through the magic of YouTube.com.

I look forward to hearing what you think...about the future of journalism...the Media Giraffe conference...and about covering subjects that have the potential to help us all to get beyond these political and cultural wars to a place where we can finally work together to build a better world.

And now, as they say, "Let's go to the video tape."...