I tweet a lot from journalism events. I think I can say that few people tweet as much about journalism as I do. I didn’t tweet much from News Foo Camp last weekend.
But other campers and I tweeted enough that our tweeps wanted more.
howardowens It’s easier to find out what Hilary Clinton said about some third level diplomat from China than what #newsfoo is.
This was my first Foo Camp and the first Foo Camp focused on news. Foo, if you don’t know (I didn’t), stands for Friends Of O’Reilly. Foo Camps are organized by O’Reilly Media, which collaborated on the planning of this camp with Google and the Knight Foundation.
News Foo was one of the best events of my professional career: stimulating and thoughtful interaction with creative and innovative journalists, entrepreneurs, digital thinkers and technology pioneers. Four aspects of the camp, some of which made me a little uneasy, have been the subject of some Twitter grumbling since the event by people who weren’t there:
- News Foo Camp is an invitation-only event.
- People could go off the record.
- Heavy tweeting by participants was discouraged.
- The camp didn’t release any public report or summary of the wisdom shared
I was flattered to be invited and more flattered when I saw the list of people attending. News Foo invited a cross-disciplinary group that included entrepreneurs just out of college and people who have been pioneering technology and digital journalism for decades. The group did include business leaders but also solo entrepreneurs and working journalists. The invitations produced a dynamic group that resulted in creative discussions that might lead somewhere.
Sara Winge, vice president of the O’Reilly Radar group, explained the News Foo approach in an email:
There was much discussion at News Foo about the value of curation of information. The process of constructing invitation lists for Foo Camps is curation of people. A big reason to have these events is to bring together people who might not encounter each other in their regular lives, in hopes of cross-pollinating, exploring the edges, and as Tim puts it, building new synapses in the global brain. So, we engage on a messy and iterative process of thinking about what mix would help that happen.
The really tough part of the process is that we can’t invite everyone whom we’d like to include. Why not? Well, there are limits to the room we have at whatever facility we’re using. We also think there’s something to the Dunbar number — humans probably can’t create the kind of connections and community that happen at a Foo Camp if they’re in a group of 1000 for a weekend. The alternative to invitation-only is first-come, first-served, which does theoretically give anyone a shot at attending, but doesn’t guarantee it, as space limitations still exist.
My last thought on this issue is to quote Larry Wall, creator of Perl, who said, “There’s more than one way to do it.” Foo Camp is one kind of event that we created (building on work done by Harrison Owen in Open Space and even the San Francisco Folk Music Club’s annual NY Camps!). We’re delighted to see variations of it spread — everything from first-come, first-served Bar Camps to other invitation-only events like The Lobby to corporate private events that companies including Disney and Google have run. Anyone is free to create a similar event.
My friend Elaine Clisham noted:
eclisham @stevebuttry I know; entirely up to them. Just felt very exclusive to those not on the cool-kids list to see all the isn’t-this-fun tweets.
It’s a valid criticism, but you would not get the same mix without inviting people. That said, I might encourage more openness by next time inviting 100 or so people and accepting applications for another 50 or so slots (probably not first-come, first-served, but accepting people who enhance the mix of the group).
I was more uneasy about the ground rule that people could declare statements off the record, even after they made them, which made live tweeting or blogging unworkable. Tim O’Reilly calls this frieNDA, a casual sort of non-disclosure agreement. Sara explained:
frieNDA: The frieNDA policy came out of a desire for people to have a place for frank discussions, which at time could include information they (or their employers) wanted to remain private. To reiterate, it means that:
- Everything is assumed to be on the record unless the speaker says otherwise.
- If you don’t want to be quoted, say so.
- You can request that something be “off the record” retroactively, after you’ve said it.
- If you explicitly quote someone, ask permission.
- Please respect any request for privacy.
While I favor openness, I also liked the candor of News Foo. I did not hear frieNDA invoked much. I didn’t use it myself in the group discussions, though I might have said some things in confidence in private chats.
Another point from Sara:
I think people sometimes confuse the frieNDA policy with our suggestion that Foo Campers focus more on participating than recording. I certainly can’t do both with 100% attention, and neuroscience suggests that the same is true for just about all humans. You said, “I listened and talked more than I took notes.” That’s exactly what we were encouraging! How was it for you?
This was a major adjustment for me, and not an entirely bad one. I have attended hundreds of journalism events, and since early 2008, I generally have tweeted a lot from them. Tim O’Reilly encouraged being active participants in all the discussions and noted that tweeting less would lead to discussing more. He was right. Over the course of three days, I tweeted only five times from the conference (not counting retweets and late-night or early-morning summary tweets). Mostly I just discussed with other participants issues relating to the future of news: matters ranging from business models to community engagement to ethics. I listened a lot more than I talked, which was a welcome experience for someone who has been a guest speaker at hundreds of conferences and seminars.
A couple tweets in the post-News Foo discussion asked whether other conferences should similarly discourage tweeting. I don’t think so. If an event is mostly speakers and panels presenting to audiences, Twitter can share the experience with a larger community and can provide a dynamic back channel at the event itself (showing tweets on a screen can actually enhance the experience). But I will agree that if you’re a group gathered around a table, you’ll be more involved in the discussion if you’re not trying to share it with a broader audience.
I have blogged critically about secrecy at news-industry gatherings, but that criticism simply doesn’t apply here. The discouragement of tweets was an encouragement to engage in the discussion, not an enforcement of secrecy. I understood that we were free to tweet occasionally and to blog and tweet our impressions and key takeaways. An event with a hashtag and hundreds of tweets is no secret. I have blogged about News Foo, as have David Cohn and Alex Hillman (please add your link in the comments if you’ve blogged about it). Social media accounts were so plentiful that Mo Krochmal, who didn’t attend, see curated a strong account using Storify.
Some of the criticism of News Foo for not being more transparent presumed that something tangible had come from it, perhaps a manifesto for transformation of the news business that we were refusing to share. “If #newsfoo was truly awesome, it can’t just be secret sauce for the club,” tweeted David Johnson of American University.
There was no “secret sauce.” I understand O’Reilly will be posting Saturday night’s “Ignite” presentations. But the results of News Foo will be seen over the coming months and years in the ideas, inspiration and connections that people came away with. I can think of several tangible results I hope to see at TBD from my discussions and contacts from News Foo, and I’ll share those results as we achieve them, but that will take time. And that’s how results are measured, not in reports but in actual change.
One small clarification on live-tweeting and frieNDA: It’s usually pretty obvious when something is “hot” and you should pause and ask before passing it on. This is true in the absence of any frieNDA policy – the whole idea is to act like you’d act with a friend. They might say something intemperate or confidential, and you would know not to broadcast it to the world. But they might say something interesting and juicy, and you’d ask if you could pass it on, with or without attribution.
Thanks a lot for the summary.
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I made a twitter list of newsfoo attendees.
An industrious person could look at the tweets of all those people for the time-window of the conference and get a fair feel.
http://twitter.com/#!/jdunck/newsfoo/members
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You nailed it Steve. It was liberating not trying to feed the beast all day by posting to Twitter. Not only that, the discussions were often so involving that it almost felt rude at times to whip out a smartphone. That, to me, is an indication of the engagement that was possible because of the “unconference” format.
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Thanks for clarifying, Tim, and compiling, Jeremy. And, while we fully agree about News Foo, you’re still going to live-tweet next time I’m at TCU, right, Andrew?
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quote// There was no “secret sauce.” I understand O’Reilly will be posting Saturday night’s “Ignite” presentations. But the results of News Foo will be seen over the coming months and years in the ideas, inspiration and connections that people came away with. //quote
if the results are only seen in the ideas, connections and inspiration of those who attended, steve, then that is the absolute definition of ‘secret sauce for the club.’ the attendees are the only beneficiaries of the forum, which was closed, and those benefits will only be seen in a trickledown effect from the attendees successes. you can’t be so obtuse to not realize the blatant contradiction in your very own words.
i’m glad that foo, knight and goog all underwrote a nice intellectual get-together in a digijournalism champagne room at ASU and that everyone who went was stimulated and energized by getting to go and raved about it.
but for the rest of the world who are slogging it out every day, the hypocrisy of folks regularly clamoring for innovation, storytelling and transparency for the good of society while holding an invitation-only secret kabal and not telling the story of that meeting in any constructive or meaningful way to the world is not lost on us. the first job of journalism is reporting on far away events that others can’t be at, and you’ve all failed at that job. your diaries of awesomeness have no takeaway value. if you were too busy being brilliant to be able to tell that story or crowdsource it, foo and google should have made efforts to document the event for posterity — just as we do for our online news conferences.
so, in full disclosure, how much did this little confab cost to put on and attend collectively – just so we can measure the cost of the opportunity to the greater good you all champion? the knight meeting of highly-paid news executives at the aspen institute last year — which although livestreamed, produced absolutely nothing constructive or useful except hot air and rehash of publicly available information — likely cost millions in salaried hours, transportation and lodging, and other logistics. at the same time, how many reporters were laid off last year? how many boots were removed from the battlefield while the generals discussed strategies and shared their financial pain at a lavish mountain resort?
now imagine if that cost had gone to an opportunity to fund storytelling and development of a platform where stories could be told, something open sourced, scalable and shareable. how much did #tohack cost at the nytimes and look what came out of it.
the last thing the world needs is more how-to-save-journalism-meetings where people have brilliant conversations in pretty conference rooms or over lots of drinks and gourmet food in lovely hotels. that does great things for the service industry, but does precious little for journalism or the societies journalism serves.
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With all due respect, David, bullshit.
As I noted in the blog, the story of News Foo is being told in blog posts and tweets and in the sharing of the “Ignite” presentations. It was invitation-only, and criticize that if you wish. But it was not a secret cabal just because O’Reilly allowed people to go off the record now and then to discuss revenue figures that they could not discuss publicly or projects they haven’t launched yet (which were a couple examples of topics discussed under the cone of frieNDA) and just because we were more engaged with the discussions than with our phones.
The News Foo story will continue to be told as people apply and try some of the things discussed (and that’s the most important story from any event, however well it is shared in real time). For instance, a couple of the most valuable things to me were discussions at a break and at a lunch table (which wouldn’t have been covered by any livestream, liveblog or livetweeting) with people who have developed tools that I think will be great for TBD. I’ll blog about those tools once we’re using them (and I may remember to credit News Foo), but I don’t know enough to blog knowledgeably yet. My list of things to follow-up on from News Foo is 20 items long. I am under no illusion that I will make it all the way through the list, or that all the ideas will work, but the experience will be tremendously useful to me. I will share what is useful (including, no doubt, some lessons about things that don’t work) in the blog, as I always do.
As noted, I have been to hundreds of conferences, conventions, seminars and workshops, with varying levels of openness. As a frequent speaker, I provide some of the value of these events, and I’m telling you I have seldom, if ever, attended an event that was as valuable as News Foo. Some of these conferences livestreamed and reported on themselves. Some did not enforce any level of secrecy, but didn’t bother to share much with the outside world. As I told you on Twitter, one size does not fit all. I prefer sharing and would encourage O’Reilly in the future to have some students (surely Arizona State could have supplied some eager students) blog about each session in some way, respecting frieNDA requests. But the hallway and mealtime discussions are always an important part of the experience and were even more so at News Foo because of the dynamic combination of people (certainly a result of the invitations). The value of any event, however open, is always greater to the people attending than to those following from afar. And that value is realized in results over time as people apply the results of their learning or brainstorming, not in some secret sauce recipe you can pass along right away.
I hope you get invited if O’Reilly convenes another News Foo, and I encourage you to share what you gain from the conference however you feel like sharing (as I am). You’ll find that the food is rather ordinary, but the conversation is extraordinary. And valuable.
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Steve,
David’s tone is in stark contrast with the collegiality of Newfoo.
That said, he is spot on in noting talkers vastly outnumbered anyone who could be considered empowered to actually implement anything coming out of the conference.
In short, the talkers had little chance for conference-level feed back from boots-on-the-ground types, as valuable as the conference’s clean-sheet-of-paper freedom may have been by clearing away those whose response could only begin with, ‘But …’
I’m reminded of a conversation with a small-town Nebraska publisher who in a previous career used to set type for the Milwaukee Journal, powering his way through the night with a six-pack of Pabst I believe he said.
As we were coming to the end of our conversation about the publishing business and the business climate in town, he remarked, ‘You know, Bill, there’s not a business in this town I couldn’t run better than the guy running it … with the exception of my own.’
Admittedly, few publishers are so self aware. So perhaps this side-bar of a conference has its place.
As for David’s call for open source (communal and profitless?) solutions, I’m thinking otherwise. The Golden Age of journalism was powered by the Golden Age of newspapers–not television or radio, newspapers. It takes gold and plenty of it to pay for journalism.
It was advertising in copious quantities that made press barons, barons. Indeed, it was a special kind of advertising, classifieds, that accounted for 45% or so of newspaper revenue in the Golden Age. No wonder Murdoch referred to classifieds as ‘Rivers of Gold.’
Looks like social media of a kind actually drove the Golden Age of journalism the first time around.
So did Newsfoo have an inkling of just how it may be possible to use CATV thinking (charging for free TV) to bootstrap a new revenue model in the age of Facebook and Twitter? Was there any ignition with respect to how to sustainably generate the mother’s milk of cash that has always nurtured journalism?
The problem isn’t Craigslist, the problem is we haven’t figured out how to sustainably generate the levels of cash needed to do news in the present context.
I’m looking forward to hearing more about Newsfoo in this regard.
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Actually, Bill, I was impressed by how many of the News Foo participants were doers: entrepreneurs, CEOs (some of them perhaps CEOs of one-person operations, admittedly) and developers who can make things happen and are making things happen. News Foo had lots of talkers, true. But many of the people attending have actually built the things they talk about.
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Thanks Steve for the further illumination. I admit to not recognizing a good many names in the attendance list, though those with titles were seldom from the media where the big money used to flow most freely, and thus powered big journalism historically. Indeed, maybe its time to move on to enterprises where history is not a drag.
What an adventure Newsfoo was I’m sure. You certainly represented the ‘working’ press well I have no doubt, with little need for reinforcements 🙂
Thanks again for sharing our experience!
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David,
I couldn’t help but take pause when you wrote NewsFoo “attendees are the only beneficiaries of the forum.” Quite the contrary.
I can’t speak for all of the attendees but I thought less about myself while I was there and more about all the people who absolutely require the reconstruction of journalism. This starts with my friends in Indiana and expands to the countless number of Americans who can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction. Folks who live in a digital world dominated by loud voices and a collapsed system of traditional filters. Folks who are so utterly confused they don’t know who to trust.
On a similar note, your comment above didn’t do much to reinforce the integrity and open-mindedness that I find central to quality journalism. Two qualities I found in abundance at NewsFoo.
Erica
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This whole News Foo “controversy” seems like a whole lot to do about nothing – the search for some kind of scandal to have something to talk about on twitter.. Generally, this whole thing gets filed in my, “I could give damn, but I have a tree to trim” file.
However.
Jeremy, thanks for posting your list of attendees on twitter. It was interesting to see how un-diverse the crowd appeared to be. And Steve, thanks for linking to the wiki for much the same reason.
And that gives me pause.
Ethnically, for sure. And by the record kept on the Wiki, it didn’t appear that anyone was too interested in discussing racial diversity as it plays a role in online journalism in their suggestions of sessions.
Lacking in diversity also in the places from which invitees originated – Bay Area, NY, DC a few other markets and major international markets. Saw a couple of Texas folks – good to know there’s at least some folks with brains amid that great expanse between the coasts.
The markets people originated from and appear to be working leaned – far more than that tower in Pisa – toward larger markets. I’m sure that shapes the conversation.
So, this doesn’t actually seem to be all that much different than so many other media conference around the country. And let’s face it, there are plenty of media conferences held that we don’t hear about because its participants just don’t do much with them via blog or social media.
Of course, I recognize that there are some excellent minds for whom I hold great respect.
But all this talk we all here about recreating journalism and recreating media falls a little flat to me when the rooms seem all the same as what came before – celebrities and the usual suspects.
This isn’t meant as an attack or even as an accusation of some kind of malfeasance. But it is just my take and observation on what I’m seeing develop.
Since, of course, I wasn’t at the Foo, I have no idea whether my concerns are truly justified and welcome someone having attended the Foo letting me know whether I’m off target here.
Thanks you.
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Henry,
You raise a valid issue that I noticed myself and probably should have commented on. Without question, white men from coastal urban centers and the UK were disproportionate in every discussion and in the full event. Some female and minority voices were prominent: Jennifer 8 Lee, Sara Winge and Karen Wickre were among the planners and presumably had a voice in the invitation list. I’ve already noted the contributions of Matt Thompson and Andrew Chavez (who has commented here and noted his New Mexico roots in his Ignite presentation). Monica Guzmán led a couple discussions. Kenyatta Cheese, Cory Haik, Erica Anderson and Meg Pickard led other discussions that I attended, so the minority and female participants felt welcome to speak up and lead.
In at least a couple respects, I would say that the group reflected strong diversity: age and professional background. The group included people fresh out of college, old farts like me (and even older) and every age in between. The diversity of disciplines and roles was perhaps the strongest aspect of the group.
I’ll suggest you right now for an invite if there’s a News Foo Camp II.
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Thanks for you reply, Steve. I certainly don’t mean to make you ‘Foo Defender #1’ but it did raise concerns for me about how leaders in the emerging industry can be perceived to fall into the same patterns as those from the industry from which they emerged.
There seems to me so much potential to embrace what is new but our relationships with the inertia with what came before can be so dicey and complicated.
Thank you.
HML
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Not defending, Henry. Just passing along my observations. I also called your comment to the attention of the organizers. I’ve been having an email exchange with Jennifer 8 Lee, one of the organizers and an ethnic minority herself. I’ve encouraged her to join this comment thread. She says diversity was very much a factor in invitations. She says about 20% of RSVPs (not sure about actual participants, which is what I saw) were people of color. The gender diversity stood out to me as a greater issue with the group than the racial/ethnic diversity.
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As another #newsfoo attendee, I think that the list of attendees doesn’t serve to reflect the diversity of ideas that was present at the event.
There were female, minority, and international participants. Perhaps the strongest critique that could be made was that the event had a US/Western bent. But even that bias was pushed on by attendees in sessions. For example:
> Kara Andrade, who’s involved in setting up citizen witnessing networks in Honduras, and others like Patrick Meier, who works with a multinational and multi-ethnic team of developers on Ushahidi, were quick to remind us that US expectations about reporter roles and safety (and the ethics of reporting) don’t apply to most of the world.
> Likewise, Sameer Padania, who has been working with journalists and documentarians in developing nations across the world, also contributed a huge amount to discussions about collaborating with indigenous reporters and eye-witnesses and also about the asymmetrical power relations that have typically structured those interactions.
> Danny O’Brien also helped represent those not present, thanks to his outstanding work with the Committee to Protect Journalists.
More importantly, there was a lot of diversity of ideas. There were developers there, alongside reporters, alongside execs, alongside academics. There were a lot of well known names there. But there were also a lot of unknown names there.
The Foo format allowed for a sort of structured chaos that meant people were discussing what was on their minds and what was keeping them up at night. Emphasis there on Discussing (versus presenting). “Friction” as I note in a post on my blog was brought up many times. Ideas were challenged. People stormed out of sessions. This was not cocktail hour. Matt Thompson, for example, definitely fielded his share of tough questions in a discussion he led on context.
And I should note that Sponsors were not immune from critique. Google was pressed in that session about its role (via the search algorythm) in encouraging the design of SEO optimized pages instead of reader optimized pages.
What O’Reilly and company are so good at is curating a discussion. And to get that discussion going, there needs to be a plurality of voices and experiences. There also needs to be a mix of old and new. And, for this particular type of event, it does need to be a curated list. That said, as Steve Buttry has noted, Jennifer 8 Lee, Sara Winge and Karen Wickre and the other planners worked to make sure that curated list brought a number of diverse voices to the table (and made sure they would connect with people who were prepared to hear them).
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Good points, Matt. Read Matt’s blog post on “friction,” plus two other News Foo posts, one of them a reading list: http://www.waking-dream.com/
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Thanks, Matt for that reply, also.
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I’ll absolutely be live-tweeting your next trip to TCU. But that’s because I agree with you that live-tweeting is far more effective for panels and speakers than for a Foo Camp session.
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[…] News Foo Camp: Not fully open, but certainly not secret « The Buttry Diary I have blogged critically about secrecy at news-industry gatherings, but that criticism simply doesn’t apply here. The discouragement of tweets was an encouragement to engage in the discussion, not an enforcement of secrecy. I understood that we were free to tweet occasionally and to blog and tweet our impressions and key takeaways. An event with a hashtag and hundreds of tweets is no secret. I have blogged about News Foo, as have David Cohn and Alex Hillman (please add your link in the comments if you’ve blogged about it). Social media accounts were so plentiful that Mo Krochmal, who didn’t attend, see curated a strong account using Storify. (tags: newsfoo blogging secrecy openness) […]
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[…] So what does “FrieNDA” mean, anyway? And more on NewsFoo […]
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This wasn’t a party I would have been expected to be invited to, so I’m not miffed about not being there. But I do find it ironic that some of the biggest names/thinkers/doers in social media had a discussion about the future of the news business in an atmosphere that discouraged (explicitly or implicitly) real-time discussion with people outside.
It was like TED for news geeks . . . and you still can’t come!
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Maybe I’m poorly connected, but I think I only knew 3 people at the conference before-hand. I certainly didn’t consider myself an insider at the conference. I’m a white male, but hope that’s not held against me.
I count 33 females out of my 113 twitter list; about 1/4, but not exclusive (I’m probably skewed here, because I come from open source, where female involvement is terribly low). I’d wager I spent as much time speaking to women as men, though maybe that’s not generally true of all attendees.
As far as major-market dominating, yeah, I think I saw that, but there were definitely some local/small advocates as well (I count myself there.)
Also, hmm, are we talking about exclusivity because it was invite-only? I doubt attendance to open conferences is representative, either. Should we not have them?
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Thanks for passing along the numbers, Jeremy. I think the planners got a good mix of people together in many respects. I also think it’s practically impossible to get a good mix in all respects. But I’m glad someone raised the diversity issue, because it was noticeable to me as well. On gender diversity, I would guess that the Online News Association conference had notably stronger female participation (or perhaps I was less observant at that conference). I also wouldn’t be surprised if the ethnic/racial mix was stronger at News Foo.
Given the long history of exclusion based on gender, race and ethnicity, I think it’s good to raise these questions, even at an event organized by three women, one of them a woman of color. Even when people sincerely strive to achieve diversity, continued questions keep the pressure on in this important issue.
I should add that this was not the first journalism event where I have noticed diversity issues. I notice them at most events I attend. But when you organize an invitation-only event, you certainly bear more responsibility for the group assembled than when you organize an open event. You risk leaving someone like Henry wondering if he was excluded or overlooked because of who he is or where he’s from.
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Hey J – Add me to your NewsFoo List and you’ll have one more female. Somehow you left me off. 🙂
Cheers, Erica
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Thanks Jeremy for your reply to the concerns I brought up earlier. I am not meaning to put anyone on the defensive, but sharing my observation.
Regarding “I’m a white male, but hope that’s not held against me”
I’m not, just note that in my experience it’s very easy for a diversity of experience and background to be left out – call it benign neglect.`
I felt it was an important issue – regarding diversity – to bring up. I was not holding anything against anyone, merely looking to understand something better.
My experience and yours are likely different, and that’s good and not something to argue over or hold against anyone.
Regarding “Also, hmm, are we talking about exclusivity because it was invite-only? I doubt attendance to open conferences is representative, either. Should we not have them?”
To be clear, I never brought that up and that wasn’t any part of what I was talking about. I suspect you might be referring to the whole broo-haha overall.
But I’ve been to enough conferences to know that there isn’t enough diversity throughout the industry and it’s not likely to be reflected in most gatherings.
I think it’s great that there was such a gathering. Smart people getting together is a good thing. Did I have a concern about what the mix was? Sure. And that’s why I asked.
By the way, sometimes the “cone of trust” is a great thing and I suspect the frieNDA isn’t much different than my whiskey sour policy of talking candidly with others in hotel lounges, knowing that I can let down the wall of bullshit and be frank.
Let me end by saying that I have a particularly high amount of respect for Steve, who I met through a Maynard Institute fellowship he presented at. Thanks, Steve. I also give him credit for helping me develop some of my presentation skills that I used in getting my current position.
Best wishes to you all. I am one of the moderators on #wjchat and will be getting ready for tonight’s show. Jim Brady is the guest tonight, we’re talking about news startups beginning at 5 p.m. pacific.
Happy Holidays, I still have a tree to trim.
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Thanks for the write-up, Steve.
FWIW, I thought it was a particularly male crowd when I first arrived, but I actually didn’t notice after the first evening. Certainly being in the minority didn’t dissuade me from speaking up!
And on the subject of tweeting, can I just reiterate that there wasn’t a ban on tweeting during the event, but we were encouraged to be “in the room” – fully engaged with the conversation taking place around us? That felt like a good thing, and meant I focused on the conversation and participating in it, ruminating over ideas in my head overnight and on the journey home, some of which will be channelled into a blog post at some point, and some will be incorporated into my work.
One thing I noticed was that since the sessions were much smaller than you might see at a normal conference – I counted 5 in the smallest session, 30 in the biggest – it was very involved and discursive. A discussion among engaged peers rather than a presentation from someone on a stage, witnessed by an audience. There was no audience. Everyone was involved and engaged. As a result, there was actually very little opportunity – or time, or desire – to tweet or liveblog in real time. Doing so would have involved making a conscious shift from “participant” to “observer” – stepping out of the conversation, focusing attention on fingers and the context of an external audience, not presence in the room at the time. And there was so much to discuss! Plenty of time for distillation and external exploration (and exposition) later – but who’d want to waste the opportunity to be present and engaged?
Plus as a participant, it was actually quite liberating to feel that I wasn’t going to be quoted out of context, or would have to limit what I said, or had to speak in soundbites (as is often the case when speaking at conferences).
Usually, “anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence…” – but not this time.
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Protip: If you want to get invited to stuff like this, make interesting, novel things relevant to the new/media world and send them along to the people who organize events like this.
There are lots of people making great things out there who fail to put in the effort to promote them properly and put them in front of people who champion new people and ideas.
And then there are lots of people who are great at promoting themselves but don’t really have anything deep or useful to promote.
I felt like NewsFoo was a conference for people who checked off both boxes. Everyone there had done something cool and worked to get it known and discovered by the outside world if they weren’t someone working at a prominent place.
In my case I spent two years working away on WindyCitizen.com in obscurity before some people who help newsy startups took notice and let me know about new opportunities and how to take advantage of them. I felt pretty awesome getting an invite to NewsFoo, but I also felt like I had something to contribute there and had earned my way in by taking some risks others I know in the industry didn’t take.
It was a fun conference. The people who connected there will now make great things together that will benefit the broader industry. I’m glad I got to go. I’m sure if they do it again, there will be a new generation of people doing neat, new stuff who will snag invites.
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[…] Steve Buttry is particularly worth reading, along with the lively dialogue in the comments: “News Foo Camp: Not fully open, but certainly secret.” Buttry reached out to Sarah Winge, who provided a lengthy, informative comment about what […]
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[…] is likely to be quite different. Here’s the Rasho-blogging of Alex Howard, Steve Buttry, Matt Bernius (once, twice, three times an anthropologist), Wade Roush, Alex Hillman, and Dave […]
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[…] rule), just not in real time. And since the weekend in Phoenix, there have emerged a number of stimulating, informative and thoughtful blog posts – and I expect more will emerge in […]
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[…] obituaries, competition, research, anonymity and adding value. Henry pitched in to discussions on News Foo, obituaries and bloggers. Elaine commented on copy editing, generational differences in journalism, […]
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[…] was scrolling through my Google Reader earlier this month when I read this Dec. 8 post on Steve Buttry’s informative blog on multimedia. He was writing about News Foo, an […]
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“I prefer sharing and would encourage O’Reilly in the future to have some students (surely Arizona State could have supplied some eager students) blog about each session in some way, respecting frieNDA requests.”
I was one of the ASU students who happened to be at the Cronkite School late on Friday afternoon when the News FOO reception was taking place. A classmate and I had been at ONA in DC in October and found it sort of an honor to have many of the same opinion leaders gathered in our First Amendment Forum.
Yes, I would have loved to linger and hear the conversations – and better yet, blog about them (great idea!). But unlike others who have commented here, I wasn’t resentful for being excluded; I was inspired to see those young industry people in the crowd who were included in the event and motivated by their being able to contribute to the conversation.
P.S. During the event, I followed anyone who did manage to post a #newsfoo tweet and definitely will be using your attendee Twitter list, so thank you for taking the time to compile it. (See, right there is an example of how we all benefited from News Foo.)
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Update from O’Reilly’s Sara Winge, in an email today, on the promised video of Ignite presentations from News Foo Camp: “After much back-and-forthing with the folks at ASU and extensive wrangling with the video footage we have, our video team tells me they just can’t massage it into something that’ll be watchable (and believe me, I pushed for ‘good enough’). They could give you every gory technical detail, but I’ll just tell you it was too small and low-res, even by YouTube standards. I’m so sorry!”
She has invited presenters from News Foo to present at Global Ignite Week Feb. 7-11, so some presentations may be reprised. I may turn mine into a blog post.
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[…] and the possible lack there of, was raised as a concern after the recent invitation-only Newsfoo […]
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[…] rule), just not in real time. And since the weekend in Phoenix, there have emerged a number of stimulating, informative and thoughtful blog posts – and I expect more will emerge in […]
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[…] News Foo Camp: Not fully open, but certainly not secret I tweet a lot from journalism events. I think I can say that few people tweet as much about journalism as I do. I didn’t tweet much from News Foo Camp last weekend. But other campers and I tweeted enough that our tweeps wanted more. […]
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