Hermitage Won't Cure Insularity | Digital Deliverance

Last week, we criticized the decision of Advance Internet President & Creator Director Jeff Jarvis not to speak at the Online News Association‘s annual conference because the ONA plans to charge each speaker a regular attendee’s registration fee. We think the ONA’s policy is wrong, but we think Jarvis’s reaction is wrong, too. However, another reason Jarvis mentions is:

“…I said that what makes these industry organizations worthless to me — the reason I have maintained a hermit’s distance from them — is that they are usually just newspaper people talking to newspaper people. And that may be fine for newspapers (that’s for them to judge) but it’s not for this new medium.
“What an ‘Online News Association’ should be doing is expanding its worldview to incorporate and learn from new definitions of news and new challenges to old views of how news is gathered and how it is used.”

We entirely agree with him that most of these conferences (including the Newspaper Association of America’s ‘Connections’ and Editor & Publisher magazine’s ‘Interactive Newspapers’ conferences) are woefully insular and regurgitate the same topics and discussions each year. We remember the wisdom of Christian Science Monitor Online Associate Editor Tom Regan, who once said that a newspaper executive will learn far more attending any consumer electronics, graphic arts, or other conference outside his industry than he will attending an online newspaper conference.

Nevertheless, online newspaper conferences will continue to be insular unless speakers speak in them about how insular they are, bring them outside ideas, new concepts, and shake them up. (That sounds like a wonderful opportunity for Jarvis, whose savvy could benefit online newspaper executives.) Being a hermit — neither attending nor speaking at those conferences — won’t solve the problem.) It’s a cop-out, not a solution.

3 Replies to “Hermitage Won't Cure Insularity”

Oh Puleeze – associations charging speakers for tickets is as old as the hills. In fact both the Newsletter & Electronic Publishers Association and The DMA and infamous for it.

I didn’t say I wasn’t going to speak at the conference. I just said I was going to whine and piss and kick up my heels and generally be an ass about it.

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Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

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