Future of News summit at MPR set next week
A public media summit called the Future of News, to be convened Nov. 16 [2009] by Minnesota Public Radio, will take a stab at defining a model for local and regional public media news coverage.
The gathering in St. Paul will bring together dozens of leading journalists, pubcasting execs and foundation and business leaders to consider the prospects for public media or hybrid news startups to do the local reporting that may disappear with the decline of advertising support for newspapers.
The final panel of the day will challenge participants to define what must be done to strengthen local journalism and sign on to undertake the challenge.
Those who can’t attend the summit in person can watch a live video stream and participate online at thefutureofnews.org. Online attendees will be encouraged to submit questions for panelists.
The event precedes a CPB Board meeting to be held at MPR headquarters in St. Paul the following day.
Summit planners want to open a debate over the appropriate roles for public-service media in the digital news-and-information landscape. Lately, that discussion has been led by reports released in October by the Knight Commission and Columbia University’s journalism school.
Panelists with direct roles in public media — including CPB, NPR and PBS leaders, station execs and journalists running local news startups — will examine what the “public media community” can do to address the decline of local news organizations, said Chris Worthington, MPR managing director of regional news.
“We recognize that we are not the solution. We are a solution in the journalistic ecosystem of the future,” Worthington said.
Panelists won’t gloss over the challenges that have been laid out for public broadcasting to reinvent itself. “There are no third rails in this conversation,” said Jeff Nelson, MPR government relations director. “We will have folks there who fall on both sides of this, and the hope is that we can really confront it.”
Discussion of related subjects will continue into the CPB Board meeting Nov. 17 and 18, according to CPB. In addition to reports on the Knight Commission’s recommendations and the previous day’s Future of News Summit, the CPB Board will have panel discussions on topics such as staffing of local/regional newsrooms, ways to encourage more stations to expand their newsgathering capacity, and the challenges faced by local public radio stations in governance, leadership and funding.
—Karen Everhart
Web page posted Nov. 10, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC