What David Carr said

New York Times media columnist David Carr delivered the keynote yesterday at the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, a half-day program presented at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. (agenda)

It was a bit of a rambling talk (beginning at about 57:00 above), but here are some sound bytes:

* On the technology available to backpack journalists: "I think there's more power in here," gesturing to his own backpack, "than there was in the whole newsrooms [of yore] ... Reporters get more and more powerful every single day."

* On discussions on the failed business model for news and its effect on the quality of journalism: "What people are missing is how much deeper and richer journalism on the fly has become." In future content analyses, "They're going to see the quality of journalism not going down but going up because it's got all this information [databases and other research] built into it."

* On the power of branding, illustrated by his turning to the new hyperlocal D.C. news site tbd.com to find out about the standoff at Discovery Channel, rather than the Washington Post: "It's a freaky age that we live in, in that way, where brands can pop up and become really, really meaningful."

* On the tech-savvy of younger journalists: "Multi-tasking [is] baked into them"; for them, consuming and producing news "are not separate acts."

* On new media vs. mainstream media: "What's happened is the insurgency and the mainstream media are creeping toward each other, where some of the voicings of mainstream media are changing and some of the best practices of mainstream media are beginning to affect [new media], and ... you're going to end up with another hybrid form that will not necessarily be distinguishable in terms of what you're looking at."

* On the realization by content-hungry operations like Demand Media that quality, human-produced copy matters: "Algorithms won't get you everything. Algorithms will not make phone calls."

* On an uptick in ad revenue this year: "This toboggan ride to hell that we've been on [is] finally slowing down."

* On misinformation on the Web: "I look at the Web as a big self-cleaning oven where stuff will live for a day or two and then the high mind will take over."

Should we really schedule another meeting?

I wish I had been the first to connect the dots, but I wasn't. So I'll just pass along this observation: that journalism's deep thinkers seem to be spending a lot of time in meetings these days, just as the mainstream media do.

Meetings are as much a part of life at a metro daily newspaper as breathing. What with the morning planning meeting, afternoon planning meeting, Sunday planning meeting, special-section planning meeting, etc., etc., etc., it's a wonder the managers responsible for making sure the paper is published get it out every 24 hours.

(As an aside: Early in my time at a metro, I'd have nightmares about missing these many meetings. So I used to devise elaborate Post-It Note and Microsoft Outlook reminders -- which occasionally flummoxed people trying to use the latter to set up a meeting with me. Oops!)

Is it any wonder, then, with so many meetings, that getting an idea from conception to execution at a legacy paper is more like a marathon than a sprint? Or that the mainstream media seem more like slow, plodding elephants than online's nimble, speedy gazelles?

Surely there's a lesson here as the future of journalism is debated.

Yesterday, the topic at a one-day conference hosted by Minnesota Public Radio was "The Future of News: Creating a New Model for Regional Journalism in America"; last weekend saw a two-day conference at Yale University on "Journalism & the New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay the Messengers?" On the West Coast, there was an overlap with Gonzo Camp, which billed itself as a different kind of conference where "ideas get done." And that followed by a day or so the "hypercamp" sponsored by the folks at the School of Journalism at the City University of New York who are involved in the New Business Models for News Project.

And let's not forget two other conferences this month: at Harvard on "The Future of News" and in Australia, hosted by Media140, "a newly formed global collaboration of journalists, academics and social media practitioners" that says it's staging conferences around the world on the future of journalism.

Whew!

While we learned as children that sharing is good, we know as adults that talk is cheap. (And as journalists, we know that a heavy schedule of meetings can be paralyzing.)

Let's be sure these discussions, near and dear to many of us affected by the implosion at newspapers, lead to someplace other than the next conference.