Editor and Publisher Interactive Media Conference
A couple weeks ago, we attended the Editor and Publisher Interactive Media Conference in New Orleans. I've been going to these types of conferences for a long time, as well as following all the trends in media - both on and offline, so there were no big surprises from the speakers. But I was surprised by a few things.
Generally, when talking to online publishers about their content management systems, there is a sense of frustration regarding proprietary systems. They are often very expensive and lack flexibility, both of which are significant requirements of online news publishing content management systems. Yet, there were quite a few vendors at the conference offering proprietary systems with closed code and limited flexibility - often unable to integrate with the latest and greatest in social media. Now, this could be perceived as an effort by these companies to win back the hearts and minds of publishers, I don't know the rates of adoption. Perhaps, I am showing my open-source bias on this, but it just seemed to be a dated technology trend.
Some people were forward-looking too. It was great to hear and see what the Knight News Challenge winners were doing. I can think of a ton of great uses for Placeblogger and Printcasting (both built in Drupal). And, Spot.us struck me as something that could be a viable model for some small-scale journalism...or of nothing else, it lets people see that news gathering costs real money.
And there were more surprises. The Suburban Newspaper Association met the day before the conference. The SNA folks were much more upbeat about their future and did not seem to be suffering as much from the downturn in advertising revenue. I was impressed with creative uses of technology and that they had so totally embraced hyper-local content as the best way to reach their audience. In addition, many of the suburban papers are effectively using citizen journalists to cover the neighborhoods and communities within their readership. We are barraged constantly with reports of the terrible trends in news, and they are very real. But some glimmer of hope and examples of good resource use was really refreshing.
We'll be headed out to more media conferences through the summer and fall, and it will be interesting to observe more trends in the industry.Hopefully, each conference will have some pleasant surprises!
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