NVision, the Future of Journalism, and Social Media

I’m delighted to report that I’ll be hosting a panel today at NVision 2009, a gathering of journalism editors, reporters, business leaders at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

Our panel is about — stop me if you’ve heard this before — social media. Panelists include Patrick Cooper of USA Today, Etan Horowitz of the Orlando Sentinel, Scott Karp of Publish2 and Jennifer Golbeck, a professor [computer science!] at the University of Maryland.

I’ll do a wrap-up post, including the slides and best-of Tweets. The hashtag is #nvision. In fact, Etan is Twittering as I write. I better get downtown quick.

Update, 1:07 p.m.: I’m here, and have discovered the event is live-streaming. Our panel’s on at 3:45 p.m. EST.

Update, 9:28 p.m.: Great panel.  Of course, I have to say that. But that doesn’t mean I’m not serious. These folks were great.

Read the NVision Twitter stream:

Here’s a writeup of the NVision social media panel by Mary Ellen Slater, my former Washington Post colleague and now editor of SmartBrief on Social Media. [Note: SmartBrief on Social Media is a daily e-mail newsletter that does an excellent job of vetting and summarizing social media news. Between that one e-mail newsletter and Twitter, I don't need an RSS feed for social media any more.]

Here is the slideshow, cheerfully entitled “Everybody’s Talking, No One Cares About You, and Nobody Can Hear You Scream”.

Here are my takeaways from our panel. [These should not be trusted, since I was at the podium keeping an eye on the watch, containing the unruly crowd, etc. and so couldn't take notes.]

Patrick Cooper: USA Today actually has a strategy for using social media, and it seems to be working. [Italics of surprise mine]. It’s collaborating with marketing folks to figure out what vertical niches around which the news organization can build social content. [Check out its Cruise Log, a lively microsite mashup of journalism and reader-generated content on taking cruises.]

Etan Horowitz: The key to success with social media is low expections. Use it, join in, find out what’s valuable…but don’t expect some dramatic payoff.

Scott Karp: By using social media tools to collaborate rather than compete, journalists can produce more high-quality stuff than they can working in silos–especially at a time when fewer people are working in fewer silos. See Publish2, especially if you’re a journalist.

Jen Golbeck: Using Facebook, people can filter their own news based on who they know and trust, a fact which is having all sorts of consequences for the media, users and society. One of these is the mass disappearance of cows in Texas. [You had to be there. But go here anyway.]

These four kept the crowd in their seats for the last panel of the day. Afterward, people hung around so long asking questions that the Newseum people had to kick us out.

And I came away thinking that, maybe, a few journalists and publishers in the audience will wind up diving into the world of social media, or diving in deeper.

I take no responsibility for the consequences.