Media Events

New York Times' Mark Bittman Makes Dinner for Mother Jones Magazine Photo credit: Sarah Kehoe
Last night Mother Jones, the political magazine founded in the 70's with a focus on investigative journalism, hosted a fundraiser at the Institute for Culinary Education. The New York Times' food writer Mark Bittman, who just completed the New York City Marathon two days earlier, hosted dozens of donors in the Institute's kitchen, where they cooked up a "minimalist" meal.

Bittman, who contacted the magazine after their issue last year on food security, spent the night mingling with admirers and Jones staffers while teaching them how to roll their own pasta and make their own casseroles with more greens than meat.

Meanwhile, Mother Jones' had a couple announcements of its own.

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The New York Times' David Carr stole the show at last night's Intelligence Squared debate on the merits of the mainstream media, when he pulled out a print out of fellow debater Michael Wolff's Web site Newser all full of holes. Carr had cut out every story on Newser that came from the main stream media to prove his point: new media couldn't exist without venerable mainstream pubs like the Times.

Ultimately, Carr's side -- debating against the proposition "Good Riddance to the Main Stream Media" -- won the night, with 68 percent of the audience agreeing that we should not, in fact, say good riddance to the MSM. But Carr and his mainstream-representing colleagues, Phil Bronstein from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel, may have just lucked out. Their argument for maintaining the mainstream media seemed to simply boil down to the fact that there are some good things about it that need to be preserved, and new media is taking the best and claiming it for itself. Also, without the mainstream media, where would the debaters all work?

(More video and pictures after the jump)

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Lockhart Steele with Jake Dobkin, Jonathan Butler, and Mark Josephson

"300 words, max...anything else, it's an essay." Those were the words of New York blogger Jake Dobkin at last night's panel for The Future of Local Media.

The topic this month was "Local Journalism: What's Cool In Your Hood?" But, the only thing the panelists could seem to agree upon was the more posts, the better -- even when it means the death of any original journalism.

"We write 20 to 24 pieces of content a day," said Jonathan Butler, founder of Brooklyn blog Brownstoner. "Generally all but three of those pieces are original reporting...Picture posts are great."

Dobkin, who founded Gothamist in 2003, was definitely seeking to provoke his audience. When asked about the concept of pay walls for online publications, the young entrepreneur flippantly replied that this would be the best thing for his business. "Have them charge $20 for content! No one else will pay, but we will, and we will steal their stories," he said. "That's my two year plan."

Behind the bluster, Dobkin has a point: Why pay for original content when blogs will aggregate it for their readers for free?

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Vivian Schiller, Soledad O'Brien and Alan Miller Photo via Meredith Goncalves

Last night, Time Warner hosted a litany of major media players, all gathered in support of The News Literacy Project. Founded by Alan Miller, who left his investigative reporter position at the Los Angeles Times to do the unthinkable - teach students to think critically about the barrage of information thrown at them on the Internet -- the program attracted the attention of board members like NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, CNN's Soledad O'Brien and Paul Mason, formerly of ABC News. Also on hand yesterday evening was The New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., one of the evening's co-hosts and participants in last night's silent auction to raise money for the NLP.

Launched last spring, the NLP brings journalists from across the media world to social studies, English, and history classes in middle and high schools in New York City, Maryland, and Chicago where they teach students how to think critically and pick out reliable information from the overwhelming amount of news that bombards them every day.

Last night's fundraiser included panels with some of the inaugural members of the program, including Anabel Rivas, a graduate of New York's Facing History School (one of the three public schools that participated in the first NLP program), as well as Facing History's principal Gillian Smith, Vice Principal Mark Otto and AP English teacher Kristina Wylie, whose classroom was one of the first to benefit from the News Literacy Program.

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Yesterday, the Columbia Journalism Review held a conference entitled "Beyond the Newsroom: Traditional journalistic skills in a nontraditional world" with panelists Michael Calderone from Politico, David Banks of Civic Venture and Encore.org), New School professor and former Associated Press correspondent Clara Hemphill, Charles Sennott of The Global Post and Paul Steiger of ProPublica.

So with these veteran reporters speaking about new media endeavors, did anyone produce a new perspective on web journalism or its potential lucrativeness?

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NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller claims she is an optimist, yet she opened her keynote address at mediabistro.com's UGCX conference with a scary premise. "I'd like to start by really, really depressing you," she said.

Schiller then took a moment to run quickly through some sad statistics of the media industry -- statistics we know all too well. Like, for example, 11 percent of full time news jobs were cut in 2008. Or that major newspapers in San Francisco and Boston lose about $1 million a day. Ouch.

"This is pretty grim stuff," Schiller admitted. "But we're in the middle of such a change, an evolution or revolution in the news business."

Schiller said she remains optimistic because new models will rise out of the ashes of the dying media business model.

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Rome Hartman, Rachel Sterne, Michael Meyers and Scott Karp on the UGCX stage

This morning we visited mediabistro.com's user-generated content focused conference, UGCX, to listen in on a conversation about how social media is changing the face of the newsroom.

The morning panel, moderated by "BBC World News America" executive producer Rome Hartman, featured Ground Report editor-in-chief Rachel Sterne, NowPublic co-founder Michael Meyers and Publish2 co-founder Scott Karp and conversation ranged from water-skiing squirrels to Fox News.

Sterne and Meyers talked about how user-generated journalism and informational content can change the face of reporting news, using their own models as examples of that. Both Ground Report and NowPublic use a Wikipedia type model that allows citizen journalists to publish their own work. Meyers also oversees Examiner.com, which hires expert "examiners" to write about specific topics. Karp's company helps traditional media organizations curate social media from the Web in real time, helping reporters gather news.

The result of these new sites and tools is that "regular people, like us, or anybody, have more power to contribute to the news process," Sterne said.

Karp pointed out another upside: traditional media organizations can quickly update or correct stories. Where once a newspaper would publish once a day, sometimes with incomplete information, now they can constantly update stories, folding information from social media into reporting done the old fashioned way. This is more important than ever, he said, since "people are following in real time."

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It takes a lot to bring America's greatest living fiction, non-fiction, and journalism writers into one room, but if one woman could do, it's Tina Brown. The Daily Beast editor-in-chief hosted the first ever Norman Mailer Colony soiree at Cipriani last night, to celebrate the non-profit in which promising young writers get to live in Norman Mailer's house in Massachusetts for a week to a month.

Guests included Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, Richard Goodwin, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, Annie Leibovitz, New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick and master of ceremonies, Calvin Trillin.

Among the revelers were also editors and writers from The Nation, Budget Travel, The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Week.

A few pictures from the night after the jump.

Earlier: Norman Mailer Writers Colony To Honor Toni Morrison, David Halberstam

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You'd never know from last night that there were any concerns about bridal magazines being shut down. Far from it: In celebration of 15 years of Martha Stewart Weddings, throngs of people whose lives revolve around your special day came and raised a glass at the Plaza hotel to the televised image of the woman who kept their careers comfortable. (Martha Stewart couldn't actually make it to the event)

There were a couple signs that all was not right in the state of Denmark.

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The second day of Magazine Publishers of America conference fell into three tracks for attendees to choose from; Advertising, Marketing, and Editorial. The editorial forum included a final, much-anticipated panel titled "The Decline and Rise of Magazine Journalism," moderated by Slate head honcho Jacob Weisberg and included panelists Nick Denton from Gawker, Simon Dumenco, and Susan Morrison of The New Yorker.

So what was said behind these closed doors?

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