Could the iPhone rescue journalism?

E.B. Boyd covers the Journalism Innovations II conference in San Francisco ahead of the launch of mediabistro.com’s newest blog BayNewser—Coming May 11.

Here’s a sign of the times delivered at a journalism conference populated largely by MSM folks: advocacy for how mobile tools can be key to driving (online) newspaper readership.

Said Bill Densmore, of the Media Giraffe Project and a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, during a panel on “What We Were and What We Must Become”:

“I just finally broke down and got an iPhone about a week ago, and in that week, I’ve read more news than at any time in the last few years because it’s there when I have a minute and want something to read. It’s actually feeding my habit in a way that nothing else has in a long time.”

(Just to clarify, we’re pretty sure that Densmore, a thought leader in the whole discussion about what’s going to happen to journalism, meant he read more news in that one week timeframe than in did in any other one week timeframe in the last few years—not that he read more news in one week than in the past few years.)

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