Thanks in part to Overseas Press Club member Chriss Swaney, Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh does its best to keep pace with all the latest ins-and-outs of the media business.
Swaney, the director of communications for Carnegie-Mellon’s School of Engineering, in October put together a “Media Summit” to discuss “The Rise of the (Private) Niche News Model.” Chriss invited Allan Dodds Frank, as a contributor to Internet news via The Daily Beast, to be part of the hotly-contested debate.
The panel was chaired by a professor, Ted Selker, who came from Carnegie Mellon’s Silicon Valley California campus CyLab Mobility Research Center. Ivan Oransky, a doctor who is an executive editor of Thomson-Reuters and John Bendit, Editor of Nomad, a new group of news-oriented publications, also came from New York for the panel. From Pittsburgh, the panelists were Deborah Acklin, President & CEO, of WQED Multi-media and Kathleen Knauer, the Executive producer of “The Allegheny Front,” a non-profit group that produces news about the environment.
The consensus was that more and more readers will indeed self-select the news they want to receive and miss more stories they might have encountered randomly while scanning a newspaper. The debate, of course, was about whether anyone beyond Bloomberg & Reuters will succeed in getting people to pay for content.
Part of the battle among the panelists was about the quality of internet news and whether it makes a difference to pay professionals in light of the crumbling news environment. Allan and John Bendit- who hopes to give journalists a share of the proceeds from Nomad Editions, were among those who argued that professionalism does count for a lot and, more important, the day needs to come again soon when people are willing to pay for it.