Bytemarks

Hats off to Jay Fidell, Bill Spencer and Mary Fastenau for pulling off a very engaging and thought provoking half-day panel discussion about the future of news. Not only was it timely, coming at the heels of a major television news consolidation in Hawaii and the recently announced sale of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin for the Honolulu Advertiser but it was also headlined with people like Sarah Lacy (TechCrunch) and John Temple (Peer News). For those who were not able to make it down to the newly renovated Plaza Club in downtown Honolulu, the webcast of the day’s panels are all available on the NewsMorphosis channel on Ustream.

My main take away from the first panel called “Transformation of the News”, with Will Moss from Beijing, Mark Platte from the Honolulu Advertiser and Chris Archer from HawaiiNewsNow was that Mark Platte was lamenting the eventual demise of one of the dailies and the possible consolidation of staffs to form the one paper: Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Chris Archer on the other hand, already well into merged operations of the KGMB, KFVE and KHNL newsrooms has resigned himself to accept reality and fully embraced the new HawaiiNewsNow. Archer said it was inevitable that one or two stations were going to shut down. This way at least all three are still delivering the news, albeit the same.

What perked me up during the second panel was Sarah Lacy. As much as I love listening to Olin Lagon (Kanu Hawaii), Dan Leuck (TechHui) and Kyle Tanouye (Talisman), it was Sarah that turned the crowd on its head. (Her part starts about 1:45 hr into the webcast.) She came right out and said she saw the death of newspapers 10 years ago, which got some cheers of acknowledgment from the crowd. She also said it wasn’t the fault of the journalist, but the papers themselves for not seeing it coming. She obviously had no sympathy for the papers. She also make the astute observation that if this conference was held in Silicon Valley everyone would have their laptop open. Out of the 200 or so people in attendance, I think I only saw 2 and one of them was Sarah’s. The point of her observation did not become evident until a little later in the session, right after John Temple concluded his presentation on Peer News. No sooner than when he started taking questions from the audience did Sara post her blog entry about Peer News to Techcrunch. Sarah singlehandedly scooped all the Hawaii journalist in the room and got her story out first. By the time the sessions were over her post had well over 300 retweets on Twitter. That’s the power of new media, the power of a strong brand (Techcrunch) and the power of someone who gets it. More later on Peer News…