We’ve got full coverage of Panel 1 and Panel 2 of the Chicago Media Future Conference posted on the site. A big thanks to our volunteer audio/video crew: Fuzzy Gerdes and Erica Reid, our videographers; Shannon Heffernan, our audio engineer and Sam Prus, our video editor. I recommend all of them highly for all your audio/video needs.

We’ve split each panel discussion and Q&A into multiple parts for ease of viewing.

Panel 1 videos
Panel 2 videos

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A last minute conflict kept me from my panel seat at CMFC, but just a note on one of the proposed questions from the moderator who was going to ask me about the “digital edition” of Ebony and whether it was effective as an alternative to print.

The sort answer is yes - and no. But it brings up a broader point.

Digital editions are really for a specific audience. Generally a subscriber who is tired of paper but still wants the magazine. Is web-friendly but not web-centric, and has never gotten quite used to the jumble of content in a web format and still wants a page by page experience. In short, most likely a future Kindle candidate.

Digital editions don’t net you much, their biggest attraction is that they count as circulation and probably retain some subscribers who might otherwise get lost. But again, it’s a different audience from Google Books, who we have a deal with for our archives. And different still from the crowd that looks for us using Ebsco. Different people, different points of access.

And that’s the broad point of doing things in new formats.The ultimate goal of any content producer these days should be to make their content available on every format that is feasible. Publishers should start belly-aching about paid walls and instead start looking to broader points of distribution - most specifically devices that work on a paid app and subscription model.

We should also all be looking for non-ad based revenue. That means less of a focus on content than trading on the goodwill of the brand to create direct transactional opportunities - shopping channels as one example.
Companies should also look to be media companies, not publishers. How much of your content stands alone as intellectual property. And then how much of that can take other forms via TV, radio, digital film, other formats with more established pay models.

That gets to another question proposed about aggregation - something I just don’t support as a long term strategy. It may net you eyeballs now, but in ten years, what do you own? If you don’t own the content, you can’t feed it through new platforms to come. It’s a losing proposition ultimately. –Eric Easter, VP Digital and Entertainment, Johnson Publishing

So the first Chicago Media Future event is over, but we’re already looking forward to the next event. We’ve got some ideas about this - smaller, more focused, more one-on-one conversation - but we want to hear from you first.

After you’ve checked in with the live-blog and the #cmfc conversation, tell us: What did you like about today’s event? What didn’t you like? What kinds of topics should we explore in the future? How would you change the format? How much did you like the candy? Let us know. And if you’d like to help us with future events e-mail us at info {at} chicagomediafuture(.)org.

(We’ll post our list of thank yous to everyone who helped us tomorrow.)

Reactions to the Chicago Media Future Conference (updated as needed):
ChicagoItaliano (1,2)
“Lou Grant” at Chi-Town Daily News
Athenae at First Draft
Mike Doyle at Chicago Carless
Matt Wood at The Negotiation Limerick File
Whet Moser at Chicagoland
RyanBlitstein.com
Windy Citizen comment thread
CivicMediaUSA (Updated from pre-conference post)
Driftglass
Mike Doyle at Chicagosphere
Chicago Tech News
Michael Miner in the Chicago Reader
Romenseko
Rhetorica
Kris Vire at Storefront Rebellion
Vouchification

As I said on Saturday, a big thanks to all our panelists, and everyone who turned out for the conference itself.

But we couldn’t have done it without the help of these fine people, who - it’s worth noting again - all worked for free:

Our Web designer/tech god: Stephen Schmidt at robotstephe.com, without whom we would have been unable to prove we were a force to be reckoned with;
Our site runners: Kate Gardiner, Joe Germuska, Sophia Madana, Jenni Prokopy, Justin Sondak, Anna Tarkov, and Erin J. Shea;
Our audio/video crew: Fuzzy Gerdes and Erica Reid (videographers), Shannon Heffernan (audio), Sam Prus (video editor)
Our guest bloggers: Josh Andrews, Shawn Campbell, Keidra Chaney, Charlie Meyerson, Whet Moser and Tracy S. Schmidt;
Our live-bloggers: Marcus Gilmer of Chicagoist and Matt Wood of Wood-Tang.com;

And finally, a big thank-you to our food sponsor, Ramon De Leon, operating partner at Domino’s Pizza, who stepped in at the last-minute to feed everyone during the break. Check out his Twitter stream at twitter.com/dpzramon.

If you weren’t able to attend the conference yesterday, we’ve got it here for you to listen to.

First Panel: How do people consume the news, and what do they do with it?
 

Rich Gordon; Medill Readership Institute; Director of Digital Technology in Education, Medill School at Northwestern
Andrew Huff; Editor and Publisher of Gapers Block
Amanda Maurer; Social Media Producer, Chicago Tribune
Daniel X. O’Neil; People Person, Everyblock
Hilary Sizemore, Interactive Content Manager at Barrington Broadcasting Group
Moderator - Dan Sinker, Columbia College professor, founder of Punk Planet

Second Panel: How do you make money selling the news and who is willing to pay for it?
 

Brad Flora; Publisher and Founder, The Windy Citizen
Tom Lynch; Director of Client Satisfaction at IMP!
Steve Rhodes; Founder, The Beachwood Reporter
Patrick Spain; CEO, Newser

Follow - and participate in! - the Chicago Media Future Conference proceedings below with our moderators Marcus Gilmer of Chicagoist and Matt Wood of Wood-Tang.com.

You can also add your thoughts to the discussion via Twitter by using the #cmfc hashtag. Your Tweets will appear in the rail at right and we’ll include some of them in both the discussion below and in the conference. If you have a question for the panelists, enter it below and we’ll try to include it during the Q&A segments of the afternoon.

If you’re a busy person and need a reminder, add your info to this box and you can choose to get one three hours, one hour or 15 minutes before we start. We’ll begin when doors open at 1pm and start in earnest with coverage at 1:30.

Or follow it via RSS at this link.

The newspaper hasn’t been so much destroyed as it’s been exploded. The roll of grey woodpulp we used to find on our doorstep every morning is being replaced not by one online news source, not by Google, but by a million websites of different shapes and sizes. Some of them happen to be newspapers, some TV stations, some blogs, but there are also lots of bits that make up the new “newspaper” that don’t look like news at all. Twitter and Facebook are the examples du jour, but it’s not just social media that traditional news organizations are competing against online. It’s also YouTube (mostly not for AP newsclips), Ebay, Weather.com, CraigsList (and not just for the classifieds), podcasts and more.

People put together their own “newspaper” out of these sites in a variety of ways, via their bookmark list or their RSS reader or from one or two of the sites they start from every day. And sure, plenty of them create it ad hoc using Google, as well.

But the thing to remember about Google is it’s dumb. It’s a machine. There is no brain, no editorial voice deciding what gets onto Google or Google News — just a bunch of algorithms tweaked by engineers to deliver the most precise results possible based on users’ search terms. Google isn’t the enemy; anyone who says it is apparently doesn’t understand how search works. It’s just a tool.

But anyway. The question facing us all is: How do you get people to add you to their custom digital paper, and do so regularly if not always?

I don’t have all the answers to that. But I know a few things that’ll help.

1. Produce compelling content.
Sure, we’re all trying to do that. But we’re all trying in different ways, to varying degrees of success. To do it well, we’re writing with personality, and we’re specializing, either by covering a niche or finding some other unique selling proposition (to borrow a phrase from the marketers).

2. Respect Your Audience.

• Don’t build a walled garden — let your readers leave. If you’re worth reading, they’ll be back.
• Don’t annoy them with bad or intrusive ads. No punch the monkey, no pop-unders, no flash interstitials wandering across the page. It cheapens your site and and annoys your audience. Do it often enough and they may not be back.
• Don’t resort to pagination and other reader-hostile tricks to increase pageviews. What, do you think we’re stupid?

3. Promote!
Get involved with your audience, live and in person if possible, but most certainly online with social networking options. There’s no glass wall or moat separating media and the audience anymore, and readers will be more loyal if they feel like they have a connection with a publication. And don’t forget to interconnect with other media. One of the biggest differences between online media and the old print and broadcast media is they link to each other — that means giving credit (simple as a “via” at the end of a story) where credit is due, and acknowledging that we’re all part of the ecosystem of news.

We’re in the midst of some last-minute organizational details, so I’ll make this short and sweet.

The details:
What: The Chicago Media Future Conference
When: Saturday June 13 (tomorrow!) at 1:30pm
Where: Film Row Cinema at Columbia College (1104 S. Wabash, 8th Floor)
Who: Smart folks discussing news publishing and innovation

Doors open at 1pm. Show up early to get a good seat. If you registered on the site, you’re guaranteed a seat. We still have some spots open so if you haven’t RSVP’d, do so now. We’ll do our very best to accommodate walk-ins, but we can’t guarantee a seat if you’re not signed up.

If you’re unable to attend, visit chicagomediafuture.org for a live-blog of the event run by Marcus Gilmer, editor of Chicagoist and Matt Wood, proprietor of Wood-Tang.com.

And please: tell your friends. Especially if they work at WBEZ; some of the kids over there really need some help:

I don’t think you have to be a “new media expert” or a journalism scholar to realize that:

1.) The news business is in the toilet.

2.) The journalism profession as we know it is going the way of the dodo.

3.) It’s kind of the fault of the Internet.

Anyone reading this blog certainly doesn’t need a primer on the state of the news industry. It’s probably been a big chunk of your daily discourse for the past 2 -3 years. But the past year or so has been particularly brutal for the news business, and as I see many laid-off journalists look to online news outlets like Huffington Post as a possible model for the profession, I cringe.

Because all I see is a big black hole.

There’s no money in online writing. You don’t have to be a new media expert to figure that out either, but at the same time, there are too many underemployed journalists and media professionals write for online news startups for paltry micropayments, or even worse, just for potential web traffic. It’s depressing.

Now I don’t mean to single out HuffPo, that website is certainly not the sole offender when it comes to paying with pageviews. I don’t even think it’s the fault of the internet. I think it’s us, the scores of writers (myself included) who have devalued our own work over the years by doing professional-level work for free — or for far too little.

We write for exposure. We write for practice. We write for press passes. We write for beer/diaper/vacation money. We write for lulz. But we don’t write to support ourselves. And we end up screwing ourselves everytime.

I know this for a fact because it was a good chunk of my 20’s. And also because I still do it. I have a day gig that I love and that supports me, so I can afford to freelance/blog for beer money, but that’s not enough for the unemployed journalists who are now attempting to make a living as freelancers or find full-time staff work. So what can we do? I don’t have any easy answers, but I am a big fan of starting one’s own damn blog. Stop trying to get HuffPo’s attention and set up a Google Adwords account for your own blog instead. Start a coop with other like minded bloggers that focus on similar topics. If “we are all freelancers now”, as Gawker likes to point out, then maybe we should take advantage of that and exploit it, by spearheading a new age of entrepreneurial spirit in media.

Now this is a good idea in theory, borne of naivety, zeal and a couple of glasses of Dornfelder. I understand that it’s hard to make money from blogging on one’s own, and that people need to eat. But honestly, while we are all still waiting for old media to come up with the wonderful new media model that will save journalism, maybe in the meantime we could work on being that model, on our own.

originally posted on The Learned Fangirl