Last night at the Thomson Reuters building in Times Square, Jack Shafer of Slate.com moderated a panel for millennium journalism entitled “Audience and the Media: A Shaky Marriage.”

The speakers at the event each came from a mainstream news outlet, with differing ideas on how to keep credibility and objectivity in their field while maintaining their audiences’ interests.

Michael Oreskes, editor of The Associated Press, came out swinging. “We’re in an era of mistrust…[the mainstream media] have done a truly lousy job [explaining] why we mattered,” he said. “We got away with it for a long time until the Internet. Suddenly why we failed to explain who we were really mattered.”

Lisa Shepard, ombudsman of National Public Radio, shared a similar sentiment, “The public does depend on the media, and loves to kick us,” she said, explaining that news organizations have been “horrible at marketing themselves” as credible resources, even as they have become more transparent and willing to admit their mistakes.

“Lets be realistic,” Shepard told the crowd. “When you are putting out a 24-hour news product, you are going to have mistakes every day.”

But does admitting those mistakes and issuing corrections make a publication seem more credible, or less? Read on for more from last night’s panel.

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TVNewser: Comcast is coming close to closing its deal with General Electric over NBC Universal. An announcement might come as soon as this week.

FishbowlDC: Rumble in the Washington Post newsroom: Henry Allen punched Manuel Roig-Franzia in the face last night.

PaidContent: Time Inc.‘s Vivek Shah is leaving the company after 15 years.

Editor & Publisher: Gannett has issued a list of priorities to its papers’ editors, asking them to beef up investigative reporting, reposition Web sites for breaking news, and better engage young readers and Sunday readers.

New York Times: David Carr mourns the loss of the business press. Another casualty of the recession.

Broadcasting & Cable: An exclusive Q&A with Jay Leno. He talks about the negative press he’s received recently and what’s it’s like to work at NBC: “I find there’s a lot of anger at NBC. But it’s like I say to the people who write the dramas: If I weren’t doing this, it would be “Dateline” five nights a week or reality shows. We’ve kept work in California, we have 22 WGA writers, but there’s always going to be anger and resentment. The last couple of weeks I’ve seen some articles that are a little more, ‘It’s not Jay’s fault, its NBC’s fault,’ and that’s OK, I get it. But when your name’s on the thing, you take the hit and that’s fine.”

New York Times‘ David Carr, always ahead of the curve. Two days ago, a full 24-hours before the news of the 100 staffers being cut from the big gray lady even hit the stands, Carr was writing a treatise on how to save traditional newsroom. Of course, with the advance of communication and “non-accountability journalism” on blogs, coupled with the high cost of print and holding together a traditional news staff (not helped of course by the recent recession), is there any clear solution to saving paper coverage?

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New York Magazine suffered a giant blow last week when it lost its owner Bruce Wasserstein. Still, the publication trucks on, just as fun and relevant as ever, and perhaps even more cleverly than ever with their recent dissection of how news is disseminated. The point of the article was to answer, definitively, who is breaking our top stories of the day; bloggers, television reporters, print journalists, or some unholy hybrid of that trinity. Their findings?

Not very much. The news cycle of the 24-hours in question was driven by stories stemming from unlikely sources such as Andrew Breitbart, Yale Daily News, and the National Enquirer. We could have told you that CNN has basically become a blooper reel for YouTube without the graph. But there’s hope for traditional journalism:

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Editor & Publisher reports today that The Washington Post‘s Baghdad bureau chief Anthony Shadid is leaving the paper to join The New York Times‘ Baghdad staff in January.

Shadid, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, told E&P that both he and his wife Nada Bakri, also a Post staffer based his Baghdad, will be joining the Times early next year. He said they “are going to work in the Times‘ Baghdad bureau, then eventually move elsewhere in the Middle East.”

He added that this is his second time working for the Post in Baghdad, while Bakri joined the bureau in May.

Shadid of ‘Washington Post’ jumps to ‘New York Times’ –E&P

(Photo via ICFJ)

WebNewser: The Huffington Post launched its new technology section today. It’s being edited by former Washington Post national reporter Jose Antonio Vargas.

TVNewser: CNBC canceled former Forbes managing editor Dennis Kneale‘s “CNBC Reports,” but he’ll still anchor the network’s “Power Lunch.”

Toledo Blade: President Barack Obama said he would be open to a possible newspaper bailout bill. “I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them,” he told reporters from The Toledo Blade and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The New York Times: Atlantic.com blogger Andrew Sullivan asked readers to subscribe to the print version of The Atlantic and it worked. “Within two days after last Monday’s post, Mr. Sullivan’s appeal pulled in 75 percent of the subscriptions that the Web site draws in a typical month…The Atlantic expects this month’s subscription orders to be double an average month’s.”

Associated Press: The New York Times Co. has corrected some errors in an SEC filing relating to stock options granted to CEO Janet Robinson and Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

Yesterday, The Huffington Post launched its third locally focused site HuffPost Denver, just over a month after Howard Kurtz revealed that White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod‘s son Ethan Axelrod had snagged the role of the site’s editor.

Our sister blog WebNewser reports that HuffPost Denver will feature “Colorado-targeted news and a group blog including contributions from Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, author and historian Dr. Patricia Limerick and former Sen. and presidential candidate Gary Hart (D-Colo.).”

The site will also include content from local partners, including The Denver Westword, The Watch in Telluride and The Grand Junction Free Press.

In July, Kurtz revealed in hi Washington Post column that Axelrod had been named editor of HuffPost Denver straight out of college, to the surprise of many including Westword reporter Joe Tone.

“It’s not a shock, obviously,” Tone said of Axelrod’s appointment. “That [HuffPost Denver] will be manned by a 22-year-old college grad with no professional journalism experience who’s barely (if ever) lived in Denver — and who happens to be the seed of the President’s top offensive coordinator — is certainly an interesting play.”

Earlier: White House Advisor’s Son Joins HuffPost In Colorado

Related: HuffPo Launches New York Page

AgencySpy: Following in the footsteps of the Coneheads, Mary Katherine Gallagher and Stuart Smalley, MacGruber (played by Will Forte) is set to become the latest “Saturday Night Live” sketch to make the jump to the big screen. Next up: Forte for governor.

TVNewser: Michael Jackson‘s memorial yesterday drew 31 million U.S. viewers, less than the number that watched Princess Diana‘s funeral (33.3 million).

FishbowlDC: Former Washington Post blogger Dan Froomkin shares more details about his new gig at The Huffington Post.

Associated Press: The Washington Post was also a target of cyber attacks that hit the White House, Pentagon and New York Stock Exchange starting on July 4.

ASSME: Calling all unemployed or work-from-home types! ASSME, an organization representing those many media workers who have been laid off over the last year or so, has designated this Friday as “Freelancers Put On Your Pants” Day, asking all freelance, unemployed, or underemployed employees to put on some freakin’ pants already.

Our colleagues over at FishbowlDC have news about a new post for former Washington Post blogger Dan Froomkin.

Froomkin, who wrote the political blog White House Watch, was unexpectedly dumped by the Post last month. But he’s landed on his feet, snagging a spot at The Huffington Post where he will “oversee a staff of four reporters and an assistant editor, guide The Huffington Post’s Washington reporting, and write at least two posts per week to be featured on its main page and Politics page,” Salon.com‘s Glenn Greenwald reported today.

(Photo via the Post)

While we were immersed in the Personal Democracy Forum in New York last week, the Aspen Ideas Festival was underway out west.

The conference, hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic was chock full of media movers and shakers discussing weighty topics (that we love) like the future of journalism. It’s taking us awhile to sift through all the video clips (suggestions and tips welcome) but we did find Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth espousing “disciplined cost cutting and finding new revenue streams” in the clip above.

Meanwhile, news of one new revenue stream designed by the Post — off the record salons with reporters in return for cash — broke while Weymouth was in Aspen. (Listen in to today’s podcast for more about the salons.)

In the clip above Weymouth, speaking on the “What’s Next for the News Business” panel, said papers had gotten “fat in the happy years that I tragically missed.” She pointed out that in its glory days, when it broke the Watergate scandal, the Post‘s newsroom was half the size it is today.

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