We divided into three groups and talked about what we think the news media will/should look like in five years.

The groups tended to believe that citizen reporters will be integrated into the “ecosystem,” with the media operating as aggregators of information, or as places, perhaps clustered by topic. Open source content. Creative Commons licensing. Training the young. Niche reporting and advertising. On demand. Cross platform, off PCs and onto mobile devices. Slice-and-dice. More globalized. Conversation is the entry point to the culture.

Jeff Jarvis summarizes each of the three groups’ presentation with a word: Trust, transparency and conversation. [Yup. And how does this compare with the news media’s current values of, approximately, trust, authority and accuracy?]

I believe that if questioned, the groups would disagree about the likely specific fates of, say, The New York Times, the BBC, etc. E.g., will citizen journalists be working for the news media or will the news media of the future be loose aggregations of content, some of which is created by professionals but much of which won’t? Will the business model come top down or will there be small changes and experiments so the business model can grow organicallly?

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