Massive Yale conference is latest in media soul-searching

Journalism & the New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay the Messenger?


Nov. 13-14. Yale Law School, Yale University, 127 Wall St. $75. 203-432-4992, law.yale.edu.

A small but vocal set of critics claims that, lately, journalists are writing too much about journalism. But are journalists conferencing too much about journalism?

On Nov. 13-14, Yale Law School will host a massive two-day conference on the future of journalism. The event includes reporters and management types from the Associated Press, The New York Times, CNN — even the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. But it also overlaps to a surprising degree with a conference that took place at Harvard just two weeks ago.

Consider the titles: "Journalism and the New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay the Messengers?" (Yale) vs. "How to Make Money in News: New Business Models for the 21st Century" (Harvard).

How about panels? "The View from The Newsroom" (Yale) vs. "New Models for News, in Practice" (Harvard); "Who Uses the News and How?" (Yale) vs. "Reflections by Carnegie Researchers on New Business Models for News" (Harvard).

And speakers? Four of Harvard's 20 panelists are scheduled to present at Yale. (The Harvard conference itself overlapped with UC-Berkeley's "Media Technology Summit" held last month — and on down the conference-circuit line.)

In these admittedly perilous times, are such conferences the best use of media resources?

Not surprisingly, no one would reveal how much Yale's conference cost. (Harvard also declined to comment.) But when you estimate the cost of an event that includes 17 Yale and 37 non-Yale speakers — with two or three nights at The Study for out-of-towners; travel expenses from North Carolina, Michigan, and even Sweden; and meals, including an invitation-only cocktail reception and dinner — it's easy to see how quickly it adds up. To be fair, no one at either conference received any kind of speaking fee.

"We try to keep the expenses within reason, since they come out of our general budget," said Jack Balkin, the Director of Yale's Knight Law and Media program. Nancy Palmer, the Executive Director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center, said the Carnegie Corporation funded Harvard's event.

It's also worth noting that neither Harvard nor Yale could have recognized these particular overlaps until it was too late. Yale started planning its conference over a year ago, and Harvard started planning its this summer, after the Carnegie Corporation asked the school to host.

Still, it's a question not only of investment, but return. During the last hour of Harvard's conference, Alan Mutter wryly tweeted, "Holy Grail undiscovered." Later, on his influential Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, Mutter worried about the amount of "wistful thinking, seat-of-the-pants supposition and wild-ass guessing."

One of the Yale speakers is local media stalwart Paul Bass, who edits the New Haven Independent and will take part in a panel on "Preserving Local Journalism." In 2005, Bass founded the Independent with an $80,000 annual budget, and it seems safe to say the combined budgets of the Yale and Harvard conferences could have supported a similar venture for six months or so.

Full disclosure: Bass worked at the Advocate from 1989 to 2004. Since he left, the stable of full-time reporters at the altweekly has dropped from six to two, and this gets at an impulse behind journalistic soul-searching.

The Yale organizers seem to have the best intentions, and they've assembled an impressive lineup. (To their credit: They plan to stream video of the conference in addition to live-blogging and -tweeting; you can follow along at yaleisp.org.)

Nevertheless, it's worth considering whether these events are important steps toward a solution or an inefficiency the industry can't afford.

We'll find out starting Friday at 10 a.m.

Craig Fehrman lives in New Haven. His writing has appeared in Salon, Slate's The Big Money and the occasional newspaper. He blogs at craigfehrman.com

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