Live Blogging HuffPo Luncheon
Tons of journos are at the Huffington Post’s luncheon today, which features a panel with will.I.am, George Stephanopoulos, Katharine Weymouth, Charlie Rose, Rahm Emmanuel, Fred Armisen, and Arianna Huffington, to name a few.
Quotes and notes after the jump…
Weymouth: “I’d like to get rid of this old notion of old media. I want to be in the hip happening new media. That’s the way we think of ourselves. … What’s changed is the tools. … It’s engaging a generation in a whole new way. … I see old people on Facebook and young people on the good old dead tree edition. It’s adding lots and lots of new voices.”
Stephanopoulos: “We have a much broader audience on the web. We have about 30 million people online. ‘This Week’ has about 3 million and the evening news has eight or nine million. … The audience that we reach on the web is very different from the ones that watch the evening news or my show. It’s a constant struggle to figure out who you’re talking to. … If you try to push of the new media on people it turns off the people used to the old ways. You have to bring them along slowly.”
Huffington: “The best of the new media are incorporating the best of the old media: Fact checking, honesty, transparency. …
will.I.am: “Yesterday’s media is bias, it puts it from that person’s perspective, left up to you to interpret it. … New media gives people power to voice their opinions … ”
Rahm Emanuel on Saturday Night Live: “It holds a mirror up to society…That’s how humor works. It also was able to take certain candidates’ foibles and make humor. … It had the ability to drive some of the coverage on Hillary. …”
Says New Yorker cover went overboard. “That cover was off sides.”
will.I.am: “Companies yesterday don’t really know what they’re making as it applies to the Internet. … Yesterday’s media — there’s advertisers — so they’re making content based on TV and based on the old model of ratings. … Politicians follow yesterday’s way of making content. New media is a whole new way of engaging person … Giving them vocabulary and spices to express themselves when they’re at work or at home. These companies need to see what the kids are doing online … You want to make content that you can put in your pocket, not through it away in a garbage can.”
Stephanopoulos: “Barack Obama could not have been the Democratic nominee if it wasn’t for the Internet.”
Weymouth: “The so called old media also brings to the table expertise and resource that a lot of people don’t have and when you think about what it costs to have a bureau in Baghdad or Dana Priest’s stories on the secret prisons or the Walter Reed series … Those conversations we have to bring to the table..and I do think it takes expertise and resources.”
will.I.am: “The difference is that the news coming from Baghdad is going to come from people living in Baghdad.”
Weymouth: “We have journalists at the convention who are Twittering. … It’s fascinating.” “Readers love opinions but there’s also a value of presenting the facts and our readers value it. .. .There’s so much out there on the Web and not everyone is out there 24/7 and we view ourselves as a responsible filter and there’s a role for that.”
Armisen: “I want to see how commenting is going to grow. Right now it’s something that I think is going to play a much larger role. I feel like I’m always looking at comments and it shapes so much of what we think other people are thinking about something.”
Weymouth: “The tools are the tools but what shouldn’t change is the expertise. … The whole ADD generation we’re creating…And I’m guilty of it. I walk into the street and I almost get run over because I’m on my BlackBerry. I hope that we’ll still be an appetite for substantive conversations that really go deep and not just looking at a page.”
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Nadine Cheung
Editor, The Job Post
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