On Wednesday I spoke at the thoroughly enjoyable Journalism’s Next Top Model conference at Westminster University. Highlight of the day was keynote speaker Robert Picard, a media economist able to separate publishers’ sense of entitlement from the hard realities of economics and business (mis)management.

Journalism will survive, he said, because there will always be a demand for it. But most print publishers will die because over the past few decades they quite simply haven’t managed their accounts responsibly. While a typical business should have a debt-to-equity ratio of around 1:1, some publishers have racked up ratios ranging from 6:1 to 66:1.

“If you haven’t managed your balance sheet you get in trouble in a recession. Do I feel bad for them? No. They made stupid mistakes.”

One particular mistake highlighted by Picard was the switch in the 1990s from making acquisitions with stock to making acquisitions with debt.

“All the newspapers were making profits when they went bankrupt,” he pointed out. It was their handling of debt that killed them.

I asked Robert about the government’s plans to relax (and consider removing) local media ownership rules – and whether that would indeed create the environment for entrepreneurialism they want to encourage. His response was simple: “You don’t encourage competition by relaxing ownership rules.

“They don’t understand economics,” if they thought that would happen, he continued. “We need people to start more media organisations, not merge into fewer organisations.”

Picard seemed to feel that the Dutch government’s moves to provide funds to help news organisations restructure, or to re-skill journalists, were more intelligent responses.

Given that Roy Greenslade has beaten me to blogging about my own event, I thought I’d better go ahead and blog about it here. I’m talking about JEEcamp of course – a conference-cum-unconference about journalism experimentation and enterprise. Put another way, if you read this blog, the sort of stuff I talk about.

It’s on May 21st at The Bond in Birmingham. Here’s what we’ve got:

• Keynote from Simon Waldman, Author, Creative Disruption, and Digital Director, Guardian Media Group. (When I started blogging this was one guy I always read – and he’s still ahead of the game.)
• Panel: What does the election result mean for publishers and startups? Confirmed so far: Tom Loosemore (ex-Ofcom, -BBC, now-Channel 4), Talk About Local’s Will Perrin and outgoing Creative Industries minister Sion Simon.
• Please nominate who you would like as the fourth panellist.
• Closing keynote: Stewart Kirkpatrick, founder of Scotland’s first online-only newspaper, Caledonian Mercury (@calmerc), which launched earlier this year.

More importantly, in between all of that are a whole bunch of fringe meetings, chats over coffee and group discussions. You decide what to talk about here. Because, really, that’s what we go to conferences for, isn’t it?

And in the spirit of the internet, there’s a low barrier to entry: tickets are only £30

For those who haven’t been before, there’s coverage of last year’s event here and here. For those who have, feel free to post a comment.

You really don’t need to use any more brainpower on this. Book a ticket by emailing Kelly.ONeil@BCU.ac.uk (invoices available!) and sign up on the Facebook page or wiki.

On Monday I attended The Big Debate, an event organised by Birmingham City University with The NEC Group and the Birmingham Post that tasked itself with the question “Can the Midlands’ creative industries revolutionise the UK economy?”

The question itself became less interesting to me than the reaction to the debate from the social media scene in Birmingham. That Twitter stream of reaction is stored for posterity here, and to me the themes running through it appeared to run along the lines of ‘Same old stuff’; ‘Stop talking about it and just do it already’; and ‘You don’t get it’.

I’ve experienced the same frustration myself at many media conferences. As Pete Ashton put it so well: JFDI.

But this was not a media conference: it was a conference for the people in industry who don’t get it, who can’t do it already, and to whom this is still very new stuff indeed.

Beyond the echo chamber

Listen, for example, to Thomas Dillon the “Chairman of Creative Advantage Fund, Europe’s first public venture capital fund for the creative industries,” as he says that “one of my proudest achievements was when The Pirate Bay defendents were convicted in April this year”.

As we say on the Internet: WTF?

Then look, for example, at one of the list of actions that came out of the conference itself: ‘more networking events please’.

“More?” We can’t move for meetups and unconferences in this city. Or is that just us?

The Big Debate was about moving people out of their comfort zones and mixing them up with people from other fields – and maybe exposing parts of the region’s creative industry that we aren’t used to seeing, like the Jewellery Quarter, like the industries where Facebook is banned at work.

So yes, there are people in this region who do think that the 3 Strikes concept is a good one; and clearly there are people who are not so plugged in as to be spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing which social media networking event to attend that week.

There are also, I discovered, people who feel excluded from the ‘Birmingham clique’.

And there are people in the room who have not read We Think. And there are people who think social media is a “channel” to sell things. (And if the history of Web 1.0 is any guide, it may well become that).

So getting them to listen to Charles Leadbeater (who, by the way, was a great speaker and a credit to the ambition of the organisers) say that they should make Birmingham “a home for pirates” is important.

Likewise, understanding why they might disagree with Leadbeater is important too, because if you want to persuade these people to do the right things to support creative media, then you have to make the most effective argument, which means listening.

Ultimately the whole event is an exercise of power. Use your vote – have a voice – because if you don’t, and let ignorance exercise power unchallenged, then you can’t complain when the other side does something you don’t like.

JFDI

Because ultimately action will come out of The Big Debate – glacier-like, not at the pace we would like, but hopefully in the right direction. The results of the conversations, I’m told, will be used with external funding agencies to review priorities moving forward; within Birmingham City University to inform what it does; it will be used with research centres; and with meetings with Birmingham City Council.

The organisers could have been better at communicating all of this – it wasn’t clear during the event – but there it is.

Likewise, the event could have been more porous: have a Twitterfall on the big screen so those participating from afar could do so genuinely. Use facilitators to show the people on the tables who don’t use Twitter how it can be genuinely conversational and productive rather than just another channel or waste of time. Have a genuinely conversational web presence.

(That said, I got to speak to people who weren’t on Twitter, which is always useful. And a physical meeting space can be just as levelling as social media, when done right.)

That’s all for next year. For now, we throw in our opinions, and we wait for the lumbering behemoths to squint and read what has been written, and then we go off and JFDI anyway.

UPDATE: Dave Harte has written a wonderful post busting the myths propagated at the event (I particularly like no.2).

Paid content online is a dead end, say the founders of Rue89 and Demotix.

-If you want people to buy your content, you need to provide a lot of added value and that is very expensive. The paid content will never cover you expenses, says Pierre Haski, one of the founder of the French online-only news site Rue89.

Rue89-founder Pierre Haski and Demotix-founder Turi Munth at the Digital News Affairs conference in Brussels. (Photo: Bente Kalsnes)

Online Journalism Blog follows the Digital News Affairs conference in Brussels, and going to media conferences can be quite depressive these days. Even more refreshing then to hear the founders of Rue89 and Demotix with some fresh and brave ideas for the future. Demotix is a brand new citizen-journalism website and photo agency, started in January 2009 by Turi Munthe and Jonathan Tepper. Rue89 was started by four blogging journalists from Le Liberation in 2007. Rue89 has today 20 staffers, an impressive achievement for a journalism startup.

- The old media world is crumbling, and you can’t use the old methods for new media world, says Haski.

Common for the two websites are interesting combinations of business models. Both of them started with “love money”, investments from friends and family. Rue89 is now, in addition to external investements, combining three revenue resources: online training for journalists, building websites (for NGOs, etc) and a new “wall” with micro advertising. Haskin says Rue89 is hoping to earn money next year. Demotix is still brand new, but they have already signed subscription agreements with several mainstream media for image delivery. At this point, Demotix has 3500 citizen journalists contributing images from more than 90 countries.

- We’ve experienced that it is easier to sell images from citizen journalists to mainstream media then text, says Munthe.

The ever shrinking foreign desks in international media was one of the reasons behind the creation of Demotix. According to journalist Nick Davies and his book, Flat Earth News, only four of the American newspapers have a foreign desk, the rest relay on Reuters, AP and a few other newswires.

- Journalists are not where it happens. Everyone is copying the newswires, says Munthe.

- As one of very few agencies, we could provide images from the war in Gaza, because we had local people shooting pictures for us, Egyptians and Israelis. They were competing among themselves to contribute  the best pictures, says Munthe.

The blogging journalists at Liberation could have tried to change things from inside the newspaper, but they decided to start from scratch with Rue89. For them, Rue89 was a way out of two crisis – the general economic crisis within media and the lack of trust from readers.

- Internet was a way to bypass those two crisis. We work for full transparency and to develop a community with our readers. When we managed to raise 1,1 million euros last year, we had a two day long debate with our readers in order to reassure them that we would stay independent from our investors. The community is our best asset, and they can defend our company. For me, this is huge and very positive change. I’ve worked in traditional journalism for 26 years and was used to readers who didn’t trust journalists. Now, I work at a place where people are happy to interact with journalists, says Haski.

Both founders are strong believers in quality journalism, and are sure new and stable business models will develop.

- I believe there is room for high quality journalism, both online and print. It is completely silly that online content is only quick and of low quality, says Haski.

- I also have hope for print. Just take a look at Monocle and see what they’ve been able to develope, adds Munthe.

Last week I spoke at the BBC College of Journalism’s Future of Journalism conference about the future newsroom, and the News Diamond specifically. Chair Louise Minchin asked the following question: did these new production processes mean journalists would become more passive?

It is a great question. On the surface that’s what would appear to be happening: in posting alerts and blog drafts you are inviting the input of the audience and therefore being more reactive.

But that’s only half the story. Journalists who grapple with social media have to be more active in many other ways: digging up stories and leads remains important but thinking you have the definitive version is increasingly problematic.

Posting Twitter alerts and blog drafts rather than just a finished ‘package’ means a little more work, a little less passivity. The payback is feedback.

Ultimately the production team has become increasingly porous, involving experts, witnesses, accidental contributors, and anyone else who can add something valuable (what I’ve previously called Distributed Journalism).

As journalists we used to be active in seeking those people out – and we used reliable, often official, channels to do that, meaning we were often too reliant on particular sources. Now sources are increasingly coming to us and the work is in making ourselves visible, accessible and trustworthy; and in filtering and verifying the information they provide.

That’s not ‘more passive’ journalism, it’s getting out of your silos and making contact; it’s moving from being a conduit to a stimulator. It’s moving from a linear production process to a networked one, and too few journalists are doing it.

I’ll be at the Society of Editors conference in Bristol on Monday. I’m promised wifi so I’ll try to Twitter away and Qik too if a suitable opportunity arises. If you’ll be there too, let me know in the comments below, or on Twitter.

On Friday I’m on a panel at Blog08, an international bloggers’ conference in Amsterdam. The topic is blogs and journalism. The conference will be taking questions posted on De Nieuwe Reporter (the new reporter), an online platform for Dutch journalists, but they’d also like to take questions from the panellists’ blog readers.

So… got a question you’d like to pose?

Another Twitter lead led me to this one:

“Going Solo is a chance to learn how to do things like set your rates, make yourself known, close deals, find clients or let them find you, explain what you do to the world, find a life-work balance, or deal with administrivia in the networked world we web people work in.

“Who’s involved? Until we get a proper ordered list, here is a bunch of names (organisers, advisors, helpers…): Stephanie Booth, Elisabeth Stoudmann, Charlene Knoetze, Stowe Boyd, Suw Charman, Imran Ali, Stephanie Troeth, Sibylle Stoeckli, Martin Roell, Carlos Pacilio, Anne Dominique Mayor, Chris Brogan, and others…”

More here, including an early bird discount if you book by the end of March.