Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the Media Center are sponsoring a conference called Whose News? Media, Technology and the Common Good. There are about thirty people sitting around circled tables and another twenty in chairs outside the magic circle. The invitee list is heavy with mainstream media folks, new media folks, and academics, with a handful of bloggers who blog about blogging. Mainly white, mainly male, mainly American, skewing 40+.

The official agenda:

Mainstream media and the connected society: Will the traditions of professional journalism survive? Should they?

Technology, humanity and the digital datastream: Who or what is in control? Who profits?

We media, the culture and the common good: How we know, how we learn, and how we trust in the emerging ecosystem of participatory, always-on media

We go around and introduce ourselves and an idea we care about. Impressionistically: Change in authority, enlarging and globalizing the conversation, whether journalists are becoming free agents, whether the youngest generation is going to care about news and reading at all, preserving brand, how to “aggregate eyeballs across platforms,” how can we measure and monetize trust, what does the market want us to do, can the new media (e.g., MSNBC, NYT online) support the great operations that MSM support, how can MSM embrace the passion arising among readers who are discovering their voices, how do we scale business models, how do we maintain craft, how does our media system serve (or, currently, undermine) democracy, how to give ethnic and alternative media access, how to engage people politically,

This is clearly intended not to focus on blogs v. journalism, which is fine, but as a blogger I am feeling under-represented. I’d guess the MSM folk feel that bloggers are over-represented. And I’m confident the blogosphere feels blogging here is mis-represented.

You can read an opening position paper — actually, a short book — here, written by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis, edited by J.D. Lasica. I’ve skimmed it and it looks really good.

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