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You probably saw the ad in last Saturday's Claremont Courier. The League of Women Voters of the Claremont Area is sponsoring a panel discussion called "Print Journalism and the Challenge of the Internet."
The event is scheduled for next Saturday, March 21st, from 11:30am to 2pm at the City's Hughes Center. It costs $10, and the price includes lunch. The discussion begins at 12:15pm.
According to the ad, the panel includes:
- Peter Weinberger, Editor and Publisher, Claremont Courier
- Steve Lambert, Editor and General Manager, San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group
- Meg Worley, Assistant Professor of English, Pomona College
- Larry Pryor, Associate Professor, Department of Journalism, USC
- John Seery, Professor of Politics, Pomona College
- Danny Paskin, Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism, CSU Long Beach
- Eric Richardson, Publisher and Founder of blogdowntown.com
- Anand Gupta, Ace Reporter, Claremont Insider
Just kidding about that last guy. We all know he's really in Bangalore. Besides, no one in Claremont reads Gupta's gossip rag, or at least no one will cop to it.
In all seriousness, though, it's a shame the League didn't see fit to invite any actual local bloggers, of which there are many doing fine jobs. The list of speakers seems a little talking heads-heavy, as if this newfangled Internet thing had just now arrived and needed proper LWV-sponsored study. Panelist Eric Richardson's blog seems to be just the type of serio-communi-non-profit the LWV would like: "blogdowntown is a project of verbdowntown, a non-profit whose mission is to build community online resources for Downtown Los Angeles."
We think the event could use some local balance from writers actually doing the work. David Allen from the Bulletin, for instance. What about Tony Krickl from the Courier's City Beat, or former Courier reporter and current "To the Point" producer Gary Scott? How about Charles Johnson from Claremont McKenna College or the folks at the Metro Pomona Blog? Or Jack Pitney, whose GOV 101 and GOV115 classes at CMC maintain blogs about politics and journalism?
Print Journalism and
the Challenge of the Internet
Sponsored by the Claremont LWV
Saturday, March 21 - 11:30am to 2pm
Alexander Hughes Community Center
1700 Danbury Rd.
Claremont, CA 91711
Cost: $10
* * * * *
Coincidentally, Gary Scott wrote about the venerable Columbia School of Journalism having to come to grips late in the game with the rise of the Internet.
Scott was referring to a New York Magazine article about the fact that when the New York Times decided to try out a hyperlocal blog called "The Local," the NYT approached the City College of New York rather than Columbia for interns.
Columbia's apparently fallen behind the times when it comes to new media, not that everyone on Columbia's faculty considers this an imperative. The magazine article said:
But the push for modernization has also raised the ire of some professors, particularly those closely tied to Columbia’s crown jewel, RW1 [Reporting and Writing, an intensive journalism training class, see here]. “Fuck new media,” the coordinator of the RW1 program, Ari Goldman, said to his RW1 students on their first day of class, according to one student. Goldman, a former Times reporter and sixteen-year veteran RW1 professor, described new-media training as “playing with toys,” according to another student, and characterized the digital movement as “an experimentation in gadgetry.”
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