The final session of JEEcamp saw randomly selected panels from a list of attendees discuss crowdsourced questions, with the first being chaired by Joanna Geary, a web development editor at the Times.
New business models
John Thompson, founder of Journalism.co.uk, discussed the changing nature of journalism as traditional business models evolve and publishers struggle to keep up.
“I really believe good journalists know their readership and their communities and they can use that commericially – they just don’t realise it because they have always had the luxury of support structures in place.
“Conversations I have had today are discussing the idea of putting pay walls up and I sincerely believe that is a no hoper strategy.
“Publishers are going to have to realise they are being forced to compete with other business than just publishing – they are going to have to get into other areas.”
There were concerns voiced that this could make journalism come too close to advertorial but Thompson dismissed these fears, arguing “I wouldn’t say it it a way of advertising services, it is a way of building communities that you can sell services into and create content.“
Local democracy
The second panel tackled the role of local authorities in regional journalism and specifically the prevelance of council-published newspapers. Andy Dickinson, lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, said “I think it is a convenient lie for councils that they can’t engage with journalism organisations because they don’t disseminate information properly.“
Dickinson said he saw a changing dynamic in this historic relationship, and advised professionals to engage in existing communities instead of emulating them in an attempt to chase profits:
“Maybe we just have to accept that in terms of democratic interplay the movement of information from government institutions to the great public – the fourth estate role – is something we can’t make money out of.
“Where I see things like that working really well and an opportunity for journalists to get involved and make money is fantastic websites like What Do They Know and Fix My Street.”
With so many debates, ideas and arguments sparked by the unconference, Paul Bradshaw, lecturer at Birmingham City University and organiser of JEECamp, was hopeful concrete developments would come as a result:
“There all kinds of exchanges of mediums and contacts so interesting things come out of that – hopefully people will have great ideas. It’s the big fight about what comes of all this change.
“It is not a revolution, I think it is more complex than that and the people in this room will to a large extent determine what shape the future takes.”
Photo taken by These Digital Times on Flickr, videos shot by Kasper Sorensen on Vimeo.
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