Participants discussed journalism's need to find a way to compete with other information sources, perhaps through "noise" or "valuable information." Journalism will also have to be more interactive with "back and forth" between the reader and journalist as all citizens, to a certain extent, become both consumers and producers of information. As they gather information, citizens will likely be searching above all else, for a source they can trust.

There was some difficulty in articulating the differences between content and news. Jan Schaffer of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism described the unique characteristic of journalism as "speaking truth to power." The CEO of Starwave, Mike Slade, on the other hand, said, "What matters is what people consume."

In discussing possible future scenarios, one constant held: the answer to how to be profitable online in remains a mystery.

Katherine Foulton: I want to ask the panel to begin by thinking about this notion of what it is that you think is going to be true, regardless of future. I gave out a list of my certainties, What's your list? What would you add to it? What would you take off of it?

Jan Schaffer, Executive Director of the Pew Center for Civil Journalism, felt Fulton's list was a little value sterile, and I was wondering whether we could posit a given, being that values are going to come from humans and not from machines.

The other one that occurred to me is that I agree with your given that attention is a scarce resource and there's going to be a lot of competition for attention. And I'm wondering if there is a given that says that if you're competing for attention you compete with volume, repetition and intensity. You compete with noise. If you're trying to get people's attention you talk louder, you talk more breathlessly, you write more breathlessly

Richard Meislin, Editor in Chief, New York Times Online, thought journalists might compete with "value:" You compete by trying to find the things that people really want and want to do. If you have something that people really want, they're more likely to come back to you to find you without you having to scream about it or be breathless about it or promoted it...

Pat Sullivan, Editor of the Merc Center, asked: But will they find value if it's not loud enough? It's one question I would have.

I'd like to add [that there will be] increased competition as well. Right now there's people staying up all night for days and nights on end to compete with the quality we've already talked about.

I don't think we can trust that established brands or established titles will win the day in the future. In the couple of years that I've been in the on-line media, I see things going faster and faster and competition rising and rising and rising, and I don't see a break for that in the foreseeable future.

Abe Peck, Associate Dean of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism cautioned that raw numbers of a news organization's audience share may not be what matters most in the future: I'm sure the half of you who [are] journalists like that [concentric circles] chart and want to preserve it, but perhaps the other half of you might not see it that way. We're only at the center of a process that mediates information. We're not at the center of how people wake up in the morning and gather information. I think that one thing the Internet has done, the Web has done, is brought that to our attention.

The second thing is when you talked about share, the idea that we had networks that had a huge share of media is probably an historical anomaly. The second part about it is so what? We don't want to get locked into the assumption that big is good. The medium that has the largest share in the country as a medium is probably the telephone, which is not really a journalistic medium.

So just because newspapers had a certain number of people reading them, or television had a certain number of people watching them, or Modern Maturity has the largest circulation of any magazine in the country, the magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons. Raw numbers I don't think will have a lot of meaning especially as we get down the line.

The third thing, and then I'll shut up is, probably to get us through the day your [Fulton's] assumptions are relatively benevolent. You have one statement when you talk about the additive part that may be Y2K or a recession slows this process. But just as we talked about values, we have no evidence that large amounts of technology are inherently good. It's inherently neutral. In 2010 we could all be walking around with a chip implant in our foreheads that has our e-mail address on it. And just because the Talaban doesn't like television, there may be a friendlier solution here that wields technology in ways that we might in terms of democracy see as negative.

Katherine Fulton: It was value neutral and it was neutral in other ways, but we do want to try to look at the dark side and the bad side. How would we prevent the bad things and encourage the good ones?

Eddie Reed, a teacher at Washington Middle School, worried that due to the pervasive business culture, journalists may not have full control over the news that is produced: I can tell you from my perspective, the tone of conversation from last night [at dinner] and from your position paper which I thought was pretty good, and also today, [has] two assumptions that I'm not real comfortable with and I'll be very interested to see how the group as a whole resolves these assumptions.

One, the [journalists] are in control of the process. That as these choices come up, we collectively will get to decide whether or not they're things that we want or don't want.

I think I have to remind the group that there was a time where cultures within media were all within themselves. They were very proprietary. ABC was ABC, NBC was NBC, New York Times was New York Times. But now with the financial consolidations of media, because of the pervasive business climate... It doesn't appear to me that if trends presented themselves clearly that you as a body really would have an opportunity to make the choices in the atmosphere of freedom that you think.

Now from the user's end, that's a real concern out there because we only know, really, when you think of mass culture, what we are presented. And when the purveyors of the material are faced with challenges, financial challenges, editorial pressures that they've never experienced before, those choices of what is news, what should the public really know, get challenged.

Leigh Bardugo, a twenty-something freelance writer, argued that by 2010, many of us will be both consumers and producers: It's interesting that I have been described as a young consumer, and that we have this idea of the division between consumers and producers still existing in the same way. Because the idea of noise is also the idea of creating producers among consumers. People aren't just reading content, they're providing content, no matter what the value is. I actually think one of the great dangers is to create a situation where those people are no longer providing content. That becomes a situation where you're not getting the same number of voices and you're also not getting that same access to information.

I think that's unique. I think that's one of the new things about this medium.

Katherine Fulton: There are more people who can be producers.

Leigh Bardugo: Absolutely.

Eddie Reed: Well the latest issue of Fast Company this month, if you read it, makes that point very clear that advertisers will soon begin the process of purchasing content themselves. Now that has real major implications when you stop to think about it. ESPN Network recently dropped the ad dollars from a very wealthy pharmaceutical company because they didn't like the tone of the ads. So what's to stop that company then from going out and creating its own media outlet given the technology that we log today? Not a thing, really

Mike Slade, CEO of Starwave, added the idea that it takes some effort to go on line, and when they do, consumers provide a lot more information to providers than ever before: A couple of things that are important to remember about people who consume their media, and basically, more importantly, sort of put their life on line.

One of the things is that they decided to do it. I think that's different than lot of other popular forms of media in that the barrier to entry, that is the steps you have to go through to become an on-line consumer are very different than any other medium by a factor of 10 or 100 or 1000. I'm not just talking about money, I'm talking about time and effort. The stuff doesn't work very well... You have mostly an operating system monopoly and it's not very good, like most monopolies. So it's an awful experience for most people and it's really complicated. So you're Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea just to get online.

So you get to the Pacific Ocean and you've gotten online, and you've demonstrated intent with all those psychological things. You're going to expect to like it because you've made all the extra emotional investment and all that stuff. That's one thing to remember, which is very different than sitting in a supine decision deciding between ABC and CNN and Jerry Springer.

Another really important difference which those of us who have been creating content have learned, is that most content that is consumed on a PC is not content that was created by big media outlets or by lone voices in the world. It was created by friends and peers. Most people interact not in some weirdo chat room they interact with people they already know. Instead of talking on the phone or writing letters or hanging out at a cafe because they're all over the country, they just interact e-mail is the currency of most of what goes on on the Internet

But I think the most important thing to keep track of is that unlike any other medium the people who make business decisions have a lot more information at their fingertips. I call it the tyranny of measurement.

Imagine if the guy who published Newsweek knew which columns got read and didn't. I mean really got read. No one knows, right? Well you know that online

Now there's never been anything like that before in journalism, and that's I'm not even saying it's good or bad, but you know. So you have the cost/benefit relationship you don't examine like every 12 months at some planning meeting, you can examine it the next morning. That's all scary

James Fallows, who was for 17 years the Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly and for two years, editor of US News & World Report, found "two identifying traits that separate journalism from other activities": One is it's about things that in some way have to matter. It's not just that they're interesting, but they have some purported public impact.

And second, it involves aggregating an audience of some generality. If you're just talking to people in your own business, that's a grad publication; but journalism assumes some kind of public. I think that there are two givens that affect both of those assumptions.

One is a very important given that we often don't mention, but it really conditions everything we do, is that people are basically less interested in things that matter than other things. They are more interested in mystery, sports, celebrities, sex, drama, cars, thus ... [if you try to] compete with sports and sex and entertainment you're going to drive yourselves crazy.

So what we have to contend with is working against the natural human lack of interest in things that matter more than celebrities, sports, sex, and the removal of the artificial crutches that gave us a bigger audience. This is the task we face

Pat Sullivan is Online Editor at the Mercury Center and writes the daily "Good Morning Silicon Valley" online technology column. She argued that content no longer means news: We're using a lot of different words and I don't know if they mean the same thing. We talk about content, and in a journalist's vision of the world content is news. But [not] anymore, content is not news. I think that what we are increasingly finding, especially in the speed and pace with which information is hitting all of us is that some people may actually be less interested in every nano development, micro development that's happening out there that we're constantly bombarded with, and more interested in something else which is knowledge, which is not the same as news.

I guess a question I would posit for journalists is can we change our definition of news?

James Fallows: One of the challenges of this medium is if you're a traditional news organization, which I [reputedly] represent, what you don't want to be doing is simply putting traditional news in another environment.

The thing that you're creating, and I've slipped into the horrible habit of referring to it as "the product", something that I would never have done when I worked at the newspaper, the thing that you're creating needs to take advantage of both the opportunities presented by the medium and the interests of the people that are on the other end.

You can't go into this and say well, I'm the New York Times and I'll be the New York Times on the Web, and because people love me when I spread ink on crushed trees, they're going to love me just as well when I'm electrodes on a screen. You have to take into account the attention issue, the fact that people can move from you to the Washington Post in a nanosecond rather than having to go back to the newsstand and dropping another 60 cents. And that there are a lot of other things that people want to do online, and somehow we have to figure out which part of them belong with our mission as journalists or to be more crass about it, which part of them allow us to survive long enough to continue to provide our role as journalists.

Abe Peck: For example, Jim, I was curious about a division you just made about ruling out trade publications as journalism. Aviation Week in space technology went to war with the government over satellites, and on a much lower level, just the ordinary business of running a restaurant or running a gas station. There's certainly, if you pardon the expression, news you can use in that.

James Fallows: I'm not meaning to disparage trade publications at all, which play an important role. I'm simply saying that even in their own realm there's a kind of public they try to aggregate trade publications play an important role, but we're mainly talking I think here about the general media which try in some way to create a public. And I'm suggesting that is becoming harder and harder and requires more ingenuity on our part.

Katherine Fulton: What is the definition we're using of journalism? We've been talking a little bit about news here. Say what it is that you think it is

Eddie Reed: It's really hard to tell these days, isn't it? (Laughter) I think I can comment better on what I think journalism has aspired to be over the years, and that is to provide a voice, a rallying pole, if you will, for the general public regarding matters of real concern and to help the public best understand what all of us are really like. To open up a window on all aspects of our society. Because unfortunately, way too often we are, various aspects of our society are portrayed one way or another

When was the last time we saw a feature article on South America outside of the travel section or outside of some dictator running off with the national treasury? Not too often.

I see journalism as being at a point to where they can go one way or the other. They can be very knee jerk based on their sense of anxiety about surviving in their world where the rules have clearly changed; or they can reacquaint themselves with the values that they began this enterprise with in the first place, and be a lot more aggressive about putting those values, those opportunities out there for the public to be able to see, in a real quality kind of way.

You're standing right on the line. It can go one way or the other.

Katherine Fulton: Mike, what on the various sites that you operate, how do you think about what is journalism and what is something else?

Mike Slade: Well, certainly in the case of news more than sports we set it up to be a little more church and state-ish just because of geography and other things. We had a big functioning newsroom in New York that was relatively insulated from the vagaries of commerce, whereas in sports, it's sports. (Laughter) It's pretty complicated I guess we're covering football now. But it's big strategic decisions.

You do the best you can, but people vote with their feet. That's why I was saying the thing about tyranny of measurement.

There's a really interesting implication in this, and I don't know quite how to draw a conclusion from it which is the most popular, there's this dichotomy there being zillions of Web sites, as you pointed out, and the way human nature operates, which is that people have a choice base of ten or less of anything. Period. I defy you to find a normal human being who goes to more than ten Web sites on a regular basis

The only point I was going to make was that most of those Web sites that get really trafficked are the portals like Yahoo and places like that, and most of what you get there is wire.

So I would argue that relative to 10 or 20 years ago, or even less, more people get their news from Reuters not even AP, because AP's kind of constricted and needs a laxative about their content policy. (Laughter) More people get their media from Reuters New Media than ever before on the planet earth, and I don't even know what that means because I don't even know where the hell they put the stuff together at Reuters, but it's amazing to think about, that most people get their news fix from that little corner of the front page on Yahoo or the pabulum that is AOL than anywhere else, including all the news sites combined.

Jan Schaffer: I still have to, and maybe it's because of my background in old media, but I have to say there's still a difference between journalism and content providing.
My favorite definition of journalism is speaking truth to power. Whatever power you want to say. Whether it's political power, whether it's consumer power, whether it's Bill Gates. Journalists speak truth to power. We comfort the afflicted, we afflict the comfortable. All those wonderful old definitions. We provide information that people need and information that people want which are sometimes the same and sometimes not the same.

[T]he auto buy/sell sites, the database where you find the perfect computer, the perfect laptop that you want to buy, that doesn't fit into my definition of journalism. Now you can use those tools to do journalism online, in print, in broadcast, but it, by itself, is not journalism.

Mike Slade: The only thing I would say is that what matters is what people consume. In other words, if the paragon of journalism you had private showings for, what difference would it make?

Jan Schaffer: Mass media.

Mike Slade: Not even mass media, it's how opinions get formed. How culture evolves. It evolves through.The fact that there's choice relative to 10 or 20 years ago is a good thing. But what's interesting, and I think it's easy to lose sight of, is where people go is where they go. So if they all think something's true, that could change the whole culture. So you have to draw that line between doing it perfectly and doing it so that people will consume it. Otherwise, it's irrelevant.

Eddie Reed: That's the point, I think, and that's the problem. What matters is what people consume. Think about that statement.

If in writing headlines they reflect the National Enquirer kind of style, and people scoop those up off the newsstands, are you then implying that it's okay then for journalism to fall merrily along that way because it sells papers or it sells magazines or it sells...

Mike Slade: But you're making a value judgment. I'm not making a value judgment. I'm just being a statistics professor. ... I'm just saying that if people don't consume it, forget about why or how. What differences does it make? I'm not saying it's good or bad.

By the way, this is nothing new. Just go rent Citizen Kane. This is nothing new here, right? But all I'm saying is we should talk about what to aspire to, but we should keep in mind that if you aspire to something that nobody cares about, then it will be a waste of effort. That's my only point. I'm not saying one's good or bad.

Eddie Reed: Consider my position as being an American citizen, being a minority in America. We want a new perspective. It's the Citizen Kane perspective that has made it very difficult for groups in this country along an economic, gender, and ethnic line to be able to be seen in a positive and contributing light.

I have a real hard time with that position. If that's a value judgment, okay, I'll take it.

Mike Slade: Let's just take what you say as a fundamental truth. How do you get there?

Leigh Bardugo: I agree with you in the hard, cold truth of where do they go? Where am I going to go? Since you're all ruling the hearts and minds of my generation, where are we going to go? I think that that's important in the sense that we're taking a really traditional view of mass media and monopoly.

Yahoo is one of the most visited sites. Fine.

Mike Slade: No, number one.

Leigh Bardugo: Right. The most visited site. [I]n the paper there's this really strong idea of filters and of personalization and of this evolution of the search engine. Somebody's running those, and at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist or an X-Files fan, I think there's really a danger in that. Because you're talking about where people are going to go.

If they're only going to go to ten Web sites and they're looking for the truth or something which they're interested in, and you have a search engine which has partners, or you have a filter which has partners with all these people, they're going to turn up ten sites. They're going to list them in a particular way. That's a really dangerous way of manipulating the way people consume.

Mike Slade: It's funny because you're right, and yet on the other hand that would give you more choices than old media. I mean how many newspapers how many of you live in a city with more than one major newspaper? Sorry, owned by more than one company. (Laughter)

Leigh Bardugo: Do you think it's as visible?

Mike Slade: How about television? Everybody watches... There are how many media companies? Single digits.

Leigh Bardugo: Absolutely, but that's why I'm trying to address this idea that mass media is not dead; or this idea that monopoly is dead; or that the big networks are dead. They're not dead. Somebody else is going to step into that vacuum ...

Katherine Fulton: We're talking about a couple of different things here. We're talking about what journalism is and how it gets distributed. I wanted to ask Jan, who I know has spent a number of years thinking about sort of new ways of framing what news and journalism is. Do you have anything you want to get in here?

Jan Schaffer: Yeah. I think that the old definition was we speak truth to power, and I'm increasingly coming of the opinion that there isn't one truth anymore, that there are many truths out there. And that sometimes journalists don't do a very good job of capturing all of them. We're still looking for the one, the one that we think is it.

I think that a new model of journalism needs to relinquish some of that control, this kind of arrogant journalist at the center of the universe who's the primary gatekeeper and creates a kind of one-way pipeline of information that says open up your brains, reader, we'll tell you what we think you need to know, whether you want to know it or not, is being challenged, and I think probably deserves to be challenged right now. Because I don't think we're doing a very good job of being a filter.

Something that Leigh said is very interesting, that we're dealing now with a news consumer population that is wanting some of that control that we are still very reluctant to relinquish. News now is much more about not only reading what's being consumed, but helping to produce what's being consumed.

So I think a new model of journalism needs to be much more interactive. There need to be two-way pipelines of information going on here, some give and take, and the journalist needs to reposition him or herself to be not such a control freak, not such a gatekeeper, but looking for the reporting opportunities and using these two-way pipelines as listening posts to figure out where are the information gaps.

Abe Peck: Interestingly enough, you can make an argument that the newspaper of 20 or 30 years from now, especially if it's going to be cities that have more than one newspaper, may be more opinionated and actually take a stand rather than just gathering.

But going back to what journalism is I think journalism is independent. It may or may not speak truth to power, but it's not tied into a commercial concern. In some ways there's some value added to it. It's not just data. It's public, otherwise we call it a diary. So it has to be shared in some way...

What's interesting to me is that if we pick up our local newspaper in whatever town we're in, we assume that's a journalistic product. A lot of what's in that paper is not journalism. I don't want to offend anyone's religious beliefs, but the horoscope may not be journalistic. The stock tables are raw data. The articles around them may be journalistic.

If the Chicago Tribune circulation and advertising department came to my house on Sunday they'd have a collective coronary because I gut that thing like it's a fish. My recycling box has a lot more in it than what I save

Richard Meislin: One of the things that we're talking about actively is how does the New York Times remain the New York Times from 8:00 in the morning when people arrive in their offices and start making news, or 2:00 in the morning if you're talking about European time, until the next cut of the printed newspaper comes out?

If you think there are special values to the analysis and journalism and wit and wisdom of the New York Times, how do you exercise that during the day in a way that's useful to people? The AP is very popular on our site, constipated though it may be (Laughter)...

Katherine Fulton: The thing is whether the readers know it's any difference between the New York Times and...

Richard Meislin: As a whole I would say the general people don't. We get e-mails from people about headlines that are generated by the AP saying I expect more than this from the New York Times.

Pat Sullivan: Can I drill down a minute from the big picture to the grass roots level?

You talked about how journalism is going to have to have more interaction with the readers. I found personally that there's a lot more back and forth between me and my readers than there ever was, even when I worked at a small newspaper only eight hours east of here.

A question that occurs to me time and time again that I'm pushing for at my shop is why aren't all by-lines hyperlinked so readers can click on a name and say Dan Gilmore, you're full of beans, and have Gilmore respond? Even at the Mercury News, which is probably the most wired newspaper in the country at this point, and people are most aware of the Web being in the middle of Silicon Valley, some reporters still resist answering their e-mail to readers. Some don't even look at it. They don't see it as the phone call interaction.

Male Voice: No, but reporters regard printed mail the same way, too.

Pat Sullivan: Yes, they do, but it's a new media.

Katherine Fulton: I want to ask each panelist to answer one question, then we're going to open it up to the room.

If I really could tell the future, really could tell you something about what the world would be like in 2010 that would help you understand what the opportunities and threats for journalism are; what journalism is; what's happened in terms of coming together with media, anything like that, what is the thing you would like to know?...

Gary Gibson: I work for public television, and [we're] struggling right now with this whole idea of how soon is all this convergence of the Web and television and print I believe all that will happen. When does that happen, and when is it important for me to be in it? [I]t really isn't being used by very many consumers at this point. How soon does that kind of interaction really become a factor and useful in both directions

Eddie Reed: What's going to be the role of an editor or a producer or a gatekeeper in the largest sense.

Jan Schaffer: I guess I would say I would like to know whether we'll be able to create a culture of journalists and of journalism that is adaptable to risk, and whether it can create a new generation of journalists that are almost entrepreneurs, adhering to core values of journalism -- accuracy, independents, and objectivity but adaptable enough to change that they can see the information and grab it instead of resist change. I think journalists, by and large, are resistant to change.

Leigh Bardugo: I'd like to know if it is really successful to create an online community, which is a phrase people throw around and talk about in terms of things like Salon and Echo and that kind of thing. But I don't think that's a real community. I think there's a real question about the lines along which these communities will be drawn, whether they are national or religion based or gender based or ethnic group based. I want to know where those interests are going to lie that create those communities.

Richard Meislin: Consolidations. I want to know whether or not the trend that we're currently seeing of larger media entities buying up other media entities and consolidating them down into single media entities is going to continue, if it's just a reactionary kind of thing, or if this is going to continue where we continue to have one newspaper to service ten million people, or one electronic massive media warehouse that controls the dissemination of product.

If that is true then I have great concerns over our understanding of each other and our own humanity and how that's placed.

Pat Sullivan: What will readers, users value?

Abe Peck: She took the words right out of my mouth. What do users, readers, viewers, want us to be? How active or passive? What will this experience become ten years from how? What's the mindset of people who are coming to this technology and what do they use it for? What value does it have?

Mike Slade: I would echo those questions and just be more analytical even. I would question in a world where people consume information on a screen, how important text will be to them five or ten years from now versus other forms of media.

James Fallows: I guess at this stage in the panel it's incumbent on me to say something like what the winning Powerball number will be in 2010. (Laughter) But I guess my question is related to Mike's, of whether people will actually shift their reading to on-screen away from paper. I doubt they will, but if they will, that's significant.

Abe Peck: Jan, I would submit to you, you mentioned the O word, which I deliberately left off my list, which is objectivity. I would submit that objectivity is a core value of only one kind of journalism. I guess I'm wearing my alternative discussion hat right now. And there are other journalistic traditions where in an attempt to get more of the truths that you were talking about before, that objectivity unlike accuracy and balance and fairness, may not be honored

Question, Nick Devine: I'm a writer and editor of a small news magazine in town. I was kind of struck by something you said, [Jim]. I'm really wrestling with this because I've seen elements of truth in what you said, is that people are going to go for the sex, the cars, all of this. But part of me asks a question whether or not that is truly what people are after, or whether or not that's 90 percent of what we are given by all of the media. And if there really were some voices and some opinions, some alternative things that people that were saying things that meant something to people.

What's important to me is the fact that I live from paycheck to paycheck. You've got to make sure the car runs. You don't know where the next meal is coming from. I'm almost a little offended when you say that people don't really care about the things that matter. Because by and large, what you're given by the media and the state of the environment and the level of cynicism in the nation today, it could very well be that things that matter are just cars and sex and sports teams and all that. I'm curious.

James Fallows: I appreciate that. Let me refine a little bit what I was trying to say. I think it's a matter of the scale of the audience you are looking for. This is, in a way, addressing what Eddie Reed was saying awhile before, too.

Through human history I contend people have been interested in drama, mystery, contests, sex, glamour. Those are sort of the primal human passions. And if like a network TV executive or if like the publisher of People magazine or something, you want to get a very large-scale audience, the National Enquirer, that's how you do it. People are going to... I am more interested in the typical movie star than I am in social security reform, even though social security reform matters to me in various ways, etc.

The challenge for journalism is to find the largest possible audience for making... My old war horse, for the purpose of journalism, is making things that matter interesting. Not treating them as medicine, but finding ways to get the largest conceivable audience recognizing it will always be smaller than the Super Bowl, always smaller than Miss America, for things that are of importance to them

Mike Fancher: [O]ne of the failings of journalism in general, and I think it's the thing that on-line might be able to help because it lends itself to it, is taking things and turning them into things that are relevant to you at the same thing.

Seattle, most of you who don't know Seattle, Seattle has extremely bad traffic for its size, and yet, although probably one of the biggest moneymakers in local journalism is traffic reports radio, TV, whatever very little is written about urban planning in Seattle. Very little. Or talked about. Certainly not in anything other than the Seattle Times. What did they do, what are the implications of this, blah, blah, blah. It's just about how bad the traffic is. There are no alternatives. You know, sit back and relax. (Laughter)

So that's an example where you might think of traffic reporting as right down there with the Powerball numbers, and yet all people do in the city is sit in traffic and very little is written about how it's relevant to them or what could change or what they could do about it

Question: Abe, can you maybe say a little bit more [about your distinction among fairness, balance and accuracy]?

Abe Peck: Yeah, I think there's a couple of different journalism traditions in the United States, and certainly a couple of different traditions elsewhere in the world. There are very good papers in France and Europe that take political positions and still provide their citizenry with information that's very valuable, including news information.

The idea that journalism can be neutral, first of all: ...Physicists don't say they're objective anymore [O]bjectivity doesn't exist. You can strive for fairness and you can strive for dispassion, but I think we've made a cult out of our ability to do that, and I don't think it's true.

Jan Schaffer: I think that we need to talk about journalistic objectivity too, which isn't always the same as objectivity. I think that in the very fact of writing a narrative story, you put a frame around that story. The very fact you're taking a picture, you put a frame around that picture. Whatever you leave out isn't in there. Maybe what you leave out is important to some people.

So it's going to put a limit on your objectivity. It doesn't mean you don't attempt to provide it. But the process is limiting

Abe Peck: I think the word is a trap. I think it tells journalists that they can do something that they can't do. I also think there's more than one journalistic tradition in the United States. There's the tradition of the New York Times, and there's the tradition of Ida B. Wells and Tom Paine, and they run in parallel tracks. I think sometimes we pretend that other tradition isn't journalistic

Question, Gale Lewis: I'm a freelance writer. Mr. Slade, is there a business reason to publish the column that's not read very much?

Mike Slade: Yeah, I think in general Whatever it is that's the journalistic or marketing or consumer mission of the publication, it has a wide variety of things. I'll give you a completely mundane example.

We do a lot of coverage of minor league baseball on ESPN.Com. Almost no one cares about it, but the fact that we do it and that some people appreciate it because they're really hard core baseball fans makes it worth it because it's part of the parcel of the mission.

We do a really cool thing on the ABC News Web site called Dispatches, where we let our correspondents put on-line all the things that didn't make it off the cutting room floor, and give more of an insight into what they're doing. Whether they're in Cameroon or wherever the heck they are. Sometimes that's really interesting to people. Sometimes it's not because it's not like a headline about Monica Lewinsky. But it's important because it conveys a sense of breadth. You have a broad audience, you have to have something for everyone [But] most of these things are run by businesses in the United States, which is a very capitalist economy. So at some point, somebody looks at the budgets and makes some decisions

One of the things that I think might happen over time is that as the consumer gets his sort of fix of commodity news from the wires, everything else will strive probably in a more creative way to do something other than that and to make things matter, because right now the old world, the headlines and stuff, kind of uses up a lot of the consumer's band width to find anything interesting. Even though it's the same all over the place on TV, on radio, in print, on-line, it's all the same headlines and the same sources

Question: [E]verybody thinks they've invented something new with the Web. You really need to go back 200 years ago to the roots of the American Revolution with the pamphleteer movement and all of that, when every voice was being heard because people were trying to decide were they going to take up arms. The Tory voice, the Opposition voice. There was a vigorous, vigorous dissent with anybody who could pick up a piece of paper and a pencil getting it out.

The point was the Founding Fathers recognized this They said we have First Amendment speech so that we can get all these views out, and if people are intelligent -- which may be a failure of the education system now-- they will sort through, find who's views are consistent, who makes sense, and we will come to a conclusion

Leigh Bardugo: I think to look back at the American Revolution and say that every voice was being heard is a lie. I think there were a lot of voices that weren't being heard. And I think back then I probably wouldn't have been heard either.

... I agree that there's a potential on the Web where at present you have people who can create content, but there's no doubt that there's a gender gap, there's a class gap, and that's one of the problems. While you have people saying well let's throw money at the schools and give them all computers, but they don't know these programs aren't working, and people are trying to find a way to make those programs work. But if you say that technology and the Web are going to drive finance and they're going to drive journalism and they're going to be the new mode of communication and that everything's going to consolidate, where does that leave people who are victims of the science and math and now technology gap? I think that's a real issue. The Web gives you the potential to make that voice heard in a much broader fashion if you don't create a situation where you have the same kind of media monopolies that you're talking about.

Mike Slade: The advertising model is a little bit specious because more and more it's not about the equivalent of putting up pretty pictures of, you know, cars whizzing by. It's about facilitating commerce and sort of using the Web as a way to not have to ship catalogs or 800 numbers all over the world. And more and more you're seeing those lines blur as people use the Web as a service, a tool to buy stuff. Whether it's books or a better price on a car or a house or whatever

But the answer is that no one really knows what the model will be because it's changing. Every year it changes rapidly from the previous year. I've never seen any other business like this where it mutates that quickly from year to year about what's going to be popular and what's the latest rage and how the models are changing.

I would say it's less clear than any other form of journalism about what's going to work and for whom.

Richard Meislin: If the position is okay, we're marketing a product to a certain group of people, [then] yeah, he's right. It's hard to tell what the model is. But I think if you're looking at the population as a whole, I don't think it's really difficult to understand what your economic model is.

We have great fun, poking fun about the fact of proprietary sites and how that came and went because the actuality is if you're striving for critical mass, you're asking [the public] to make choices as to how they're going to spend their very limited dollar. Let's face it, you were standing in a long line here. You had the video store, you had the local newspaper, you had the cable television subscription, various magazine subscriptions, and now boom, we're going to add just one more thing.

I may be relatively naive about this, but I don't think it was real hard to predict that proprietary information sites as a mass media product was going to fail and fail miserably

Katherine Fulton: I think the question really has to do with how journalism will be paid for, to go back to the resolution of that dilemma.

If we accept some of these definitions, just offering an opinion is not enough. There's actually real work and verifying information and testing against many points of view. That actually takes resources of some kind, it takes time. And the question is, is that time compensated in some way.

Richard Meislin: You said it. Journalism is paid through advertising dollars.

Katherine Fulton: Currently journalism has been supported by the business of advertising.

Richard Meislin: And we definitely have seen the problem with that. For our part, the answer is we certainly don't have the secret yet. A lot of news Web sites are heading towards break even except they don't have to pay for much of the price of their news.

If I had to add the New York Times' $100 million plus newsroom budget to my budget, I wouldn't be getting close to break even and neither would the Wall Street Journal. None of us have answers to that question. It's a very expensive endeavor to field 1,040 reporter and editors, which is what the New York Times does.... If in fact the conversion from paper to on-line takes place in anything resembling a complete manner, we don't know what the secret is.

Pat Sullivan: I'll just briefly echo what both of them said. We have more income than outgo at Mercury Center, but we're not paying the salaries of the reporters and editors on the print side, and we don't know what's going to make money whether it's going to be ads. It's certainly not going to be subscriptions or registration. Whether it's going to be selling the information of the number of visitors we have to an advertiser. We don't know. If you have a good idea, come talk to me and let's start a business. (Laughter)

Next, Andrew Gordon, a professor at the University of Washington's Graduate School of Public Affairs, presented several web sitessome journalism sites and some not-- that he felt did a good job of using the technology to offers users something they could not get from traditional media, including context, detail, timeliness and a recognizable voice.

Andrew Gordon: What I did is try to talk to a lot of people getting examples of the ways in which this new technology is different and important to them. That's what I'm going to try to illustrate. Ways in which the technology is used relatively effectively, places where it has much more work to do, and things I think that are relevant to what we're talking about as news. [I]t's going to be highly idiosyncratic and biased. There's no example that anybody won't have a better example of exactly what I'm trying to talk about. So bear with me in that sense.

The Internet is already thousands of experiments, all of which are designed to solve the news problem as people see it now. Various sites on the Web that say they're new sites, or that present information look different from what you see in the sort of core press outlets, it tells you something about what people are seeking and don't think they're able to get in contemporary places

I think one of the most important is context. I heard various journalists say that one of the things they were able to provide with the Lewinsky report was context. Context you can't find elsewhere. And yet the comment I heard most often from people who were critical of current media and were turning to the Web is precisely that context is missing

Detail. When there is a journalist or editor in charge, somebody has to decide what details matter and what details don't. Inevitably, as several of the panelists said, that means things are being left out. I don't think we should ever minimize the importance of the sheer relaxation of space limitations on the Web

Bias. There's obviously a problem in many people's minds of the bias built into the way in which news is selected and to separate media. This problem of overload is a fascinating one, because we talk about overload as if the Net were overload. Many people see what they find in newspapers as overload in the sense that so little of it is relevant to what they want to find. What they want is more detail than they can typically find in a newspaper. So ultimately the newspaper doesn't give them what they want.

Timeliness we'll talk about in various ways.

I'm going to start with a few examples of media on the Web that people turn to and the reason that was expressed.

The New York Times I would say was most frequently mentioned in the people I've surveyed because it's the newspaper of record. It still is, no matter what you say about it. That doesn't mean people pay for it, but it means it's one they want to go to. But it's interesting how often what was [named as] one of the major features of the New York Times was its search engine. The capacity one got with the New York Times to get what you wanted and to get it frequently.

CNN Interactive. There are several things about CNN that were frequently mentioned One of them is you always know where you are. They have set up a very good way of setting up trails and highlights so you have some idea what you're looking at. Audio, video, and customization, are other features we could talk about. But the fact that one could find one's way around was important

If you want to go to a place where you expect to get the latest version of a story you're after, likely to track, then this is one that people valued.

Finally, more than one person mentioned the fact that they monitor their traffic so carefully that when there's an overload they switch into a less graphics intensive strategy. So you don't have to worry about getting on so much as you do with others. They're very sensitive to who their audience is and who they're having to deal with simultaneously.

Seattle Times and Moscow Pullman News I brought as examples for us because the importance of the hometown newspaper is something that is self evident, took many users, and that the Web frequently lets them have access to

Now I'm going to walk through some places that one doesn't think of as media but which have solved a variety of problems and have other problems associated with them.

The White House. I want to point out first, this is a federally funded source. And yet the only thing you can find out on the White House page is the response of the White House to the referral from the Office of the Independent Counsel. If you turn to Free Republic [or] the Drudge Report, you find all sides of the story [But] there are some very important things that [the government] managed to do that have made this an important news source for people.

[W]ho knows how the federal government is organized, and yet there's so much information one might want to have. They've managed through a very complex process to pull together lots and lots of information that might be scattered all over the place into one domain.

Now there's one other point about the organization of complex material. Notice how, and this would be true no matter what domain you're working in, notice how no matter what information you're interested in, it's organized the same way. There's a principle here called small multiples by Edward Tufty. There's a lot of trouble in figuring out any one graph, but that trouble that you went through carries over to everything else you might want to know.

So to the extent to which you figured out how to make one of these work, you've figured out 90 percent of what you need to know to make any of the rest of them work.

A Smoking Gun. Pointed out to me because it's interestingly laid out, because of its graphic appeal, and it is also... This is the closest thing to I.F. Stone that I've found on the Web. That is raw material from a variety of sources which is made available for you to do your own perusal.

So if I try to get this story, I get the original memoranda. How it was marked up. What was deleted from it. Not only does it make it a more interesting experience, it makes a more resonant experience

Native American Perspective. [T]his is written from a Native American perspective, gives you details of the ways in which things are thought about which one just can't get in other media. It solves a problem of being effectively represented from the point of view of these users.

Slate Daily. Every morning the major newspapers, before you get to your desk, are summarized and compared to one another. One thing you learn is how similar they are to one another But this, nevertheless, is an effective way to find out what's happening in the major media, and it has a voice.

Good Morning Silicon Valley, Pat Sullivan's contribution, has a voice. It has enough of a voice that Pat told us last night that on days like today when she's not here, people write to say, why weren't you writing? They know who it comes from. But she's done an extremely interesting job of pulling together information, mostly on high technology issues, which her major audience is interested in and has become affordable for those purposes

What you will learn by exploring the sites associated with this one is there's a whole other way to think about what's happening in Iraq, who's being endangered, what the associated politics are, what the people who are looking for weapons are like, how they're being perceived abroad. This site tends, in great detail, to give you information about other perspectives. You only have to read it to know how infrequently information like this is made available. Mother Jones has just redesigned itself and has a mission statement which includes finding things from other media, telling you the story behind the story, doing investigative journalism...

This is wonderful here [T]hey tell you exactly why they decided to use the Web in a unique and innovative way. [These sites] should be thought of not as challenges in the sense that there's competition to be thought about, but as provocateurs about what the media should be up to.

If you take that lens and apply it to what you find on the media, on the Net now, I think there's a lot to learn for contemporary journalism, much less what one might shape it to be in the future

Katherine Fulton: What we want to ask everybody to do now is drill down for a couple of hours inside a particular perspective -- an hour before lunch and an hour after lunch. Then we'll come back and hear reports from all of the small groups, and then spend some time seeing what patterns we can see and what may be new ideas which we have, which would be great, for how it is that quality journalism, however it is that we want to define it, will be possible.