Law Technology

Future of News Workshop, May 14-15 in Princeton

By Ed Felten

We’ve got a great lineup of speakers for our upcoming “Future of News” workshop. It’s May 14-15 in Princeton. It’s free, and if you register we’ll feed you lunch.

Agenda

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Panels

Panel 1: The People Formerly Known as the Audience:

How effectively can users collectively create and filter the stream of news information? How much of journalism can or will be “devolved” from professionals to networks of amateurs? What new challenges do these collective modes of news production create? Could informal flows of information in online social networks challenge the idea of “news” as we know it?

• Dan Gillmor, Director of the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Steve Boriss, Washington University in St. Louis and The Future of News blog
• Reihan Salam, The Atlantic

Panel 2: Economics of News:

How will technology-driven changes in advertising markets reshape the news media landscape? Can traditional, high-cost methods of newsgathering support themselves through other means? To what extent will action-guiding business intelligence and other “private journalism”, designed to create information asymmetries among news consumers, supplant or merge with globally accessible news?

• Gordon Crovitz, former publisher, The Wall Street Journal
• Mark Davis, Vice President for Strategy, San Diego Union Tribune
• Eric Alterman, Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

Panel 3: Data Mining, Visualization, and Interactivity:

To what extent will new tools for visualizing and artfully presenting large data sets reduce the need for human intermediaries between facts and news consumers? How can news be presented via simulation and interactive tools? What new kinds of questions can professional journalists ask and answer using digital technologies?

• Matthew Hurst, Microsoft Live Labs. Blogger at Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media
• Kevin Anderson, the Guardian
• David Blei, Princeton Department of Computer Science

Panel 4: The Medium’s New Message:

What are the effects of changing news consumption on political behavior? What does a public life populated by social media “producers” look like? How will people cope with the new information glut?

• Clay Shirky, Adjunct Professor at NYU and author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
• Markus Prior, Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
• JD Lasica, writer and consultant, co-founder and editorial director of Ourmedia.com, president of the Social Media Group.

Panelists’ bios.

For more information, including (free) registration, see the main workshop page.

Full post as published by Freedom to Tinker on April 29, 2008 (boomark / email).