I attended a National Press Club forum at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication last night. The topic was “The Future of News”. The forum was mediated by Donna Leinwand, a USA Today correspondent, the press club’s vice president and a UNC alumna. The four-member panel consisted of:

• Orage Quarles, publisher of the News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.)
• Penny Muse Abernathy, the school’s Knight Chair in Digital Media Economics
• Deborah Potter, director of NewsLab, a nonprofit journalism resource in Washington, D.C.
• Jim Hefner, professor at the school and former VP and GM at Raleigh-based WRAL

A couple observations from the forum:

• It was sparsely attended. The forum was held in Carroll Hall’s auditorium, and the room wasn’ close to half full.
• The ages of the audience also struck me. I’m 29, and while in the workplace it may be relatively easy for me to still be in the younger half of the crowd, that’s usually impossible on a college campus swarming with 18- to 21-year-olds. Yet that was the case last night at the forum. I could count on two hands (and maybe even just one) the number of young, student-age people in the crowd. The audience was made up mostly of much older people, probably many faculty. The old-to-young ratio was easily at least 3-to-1. That struck me as ironic since the forum is supposedly talking about the future of news. Where were the people who would be part of that future?
• While the panel definitely had a lot of experience and knowledge, I would’ve liked to have seen a working journalist, in particular one working primarily in online media, as part of the panel. That would have brought another, and very relevant, perspective to the discussion.
• The panelists’ comments showed that they were definitely aware of the issues and challenges facing journalism, yet there wasn’t much talk about how to actually go about tackling those issues and challenges. I remember at one point one of the panelists was asked plainly by Leinwand how journalism might be financially supported in the future. The panelist’s answer pretty much just repeated the question, agreed that it is a challenge, and left it at that. At this point in the evolution of journalism toward online media, I would’ve hoped for more discussion about how to solve the problems, not just an acknowledgment of what the problems are.

Some snippets:

• Leinwand talking about the history of the NPC: I would like to say they formed the club for lofty goals … but really they formed it because they wanted to have a bar (I thought that was pretty clever, and then I found that it was something from the DVD the NPC produced for its centennial celebration).
• Quarles: Go back 30 years, and newspapers had very little classifieds. Technology spurred the growth of classifieds and so for the last three decades the news has been supported by a model that wasn’t really planned on.
• Potter: Rise of citizen journalism raises the bar for vetting.
• Hefner: The Internet is not a challenge to TV, but a complement.
• Abernathy: The first amendment and the press freedom it guarantees enables the American press to set the bar for accuracy and truth around the world. This point was challenged by an audience member later on, who felt that many foreign pubs were more “honest”.
• Quarles: In 1975, the N&O had 400 employees. When he took over as publisher in 2000, it had 1,200. Today, that number is down to 750.
• Hefner, on the need to be a multi-faceted media company: The notion of “channel” should be quaint to us. … TV stations of media companies that happen to own a TV tower.
• On outsourcing and how far it can go:
  • Abernathy: It’s more important to keep editors and writers local (the boots-on-the-ground mentality), while some other functions, perhaps including copy editing, can be outsourced without too much impact. This drew an objection later from an audience member (a school facult member, I think) who was a veteran copy editor. I happen to agree with him that it does hurt accuracy to have copy editors who are not familiar with the coverage area.
  • Quarles: At this point, it doesn’t make much sense for the N&O to outsource news content.
• An audience member complained about the “entertainment-ification” of news and how college kids are now just getting their news from the likes of Jon Stewart. Potter responded by saying that so far, such programs have remained more or less in their own realm and haven’t been mixed in with the “real” news programs. She also asked, “Where do you think Jon Stewart gets his information from?”
• The same audience member also complained about newspapers and TV news programs becoming basically tables of content for the companies’ Web sites in that it’s all “see our Web site for more”.
  • Quarles responded that it’s a balance that’s necessary to drive people online because that’s the future.
  • Hefner followed by saying that anyone who just says “See our Web site for more” on a TV broadcast should be shot. His point was that when TV broadcasters refer people to their Web site, it must be to something specific and complemental, such a copy of the warrant for a story about an arrest.