As
The Recount Turns: Journalism Conference 2000
Lots of coffee was consumed,
and there were plenty of bleary eyes in evidence, but the air
was electric as The New York Press Club Foundation convened its
annual Journalism Conference at the Columbia University Graduate
School of Journalism.
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Nikki Endo photo
ABC Correspondent John Stossel
says life is chock full of risks that
citizens of a free society should be
free to choose or reject. |
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The November 11th Conference
had been planned as a great opportunity to get together and brainstorm
on the state of the news business just days after the first presidential
election of the new millennium.
But many reporters, anchors,
producers, editors and other news professionals found themselves
caught in Campaign 2000: The Never-Ending Election. |
Most found time to get to
Columbia and all present were glad they did.
The conference kicked off with
a panel discussion by CBS
Evening News With Dan Rather executive producer James
Murphy, senior producer Ingrid Ciprian-Mathews, and correspondent
Jim Axelrod, on the challenges of putting together a network
news broadcast and the constant battle to fit the news into a
very small amount of air time.
Participants in the conference
then broke up into smaller groups.
WNBC-TV
Reporter Gabe Pressman, Marist
College pollster Lee Miringoff and Evan Cornog of the
Columbia School of
Journalism found no shortage of material as they analyzed
media coverage of Campaign 2000, a topic that's bound to be scrutinized
in the history books for some time to come.
Television reporters and would-be
television reporters who had submitted demo tapes in advance
had their work critiqued by WNBC-TV News Managing Editor Phil
O'Brien and Joanne Stevens of Stevens Media Consulting.
Other journalists with dreams
and plans of turning news stories into books and movies turned
out for sharp advice from Alice McQuillan and Denene Miller,
both of the Daily News;
Maria Efthimiades of People
Magazine; Ingrid Sturgis of Savoy
Magazine; and Beverly Poppell, attorney and journalist.
News junkies with plans to leap
past print and broadcasting straight into the Internet got a
jump start from Kourosh Karimkhany of Yahoo!
News, Lucy Scott of ThirdAge.com,
John Guglielmetti of Staten
Island Live, and Robin Lynn, who is developing a new
web site for Ziff Davis.
Lynn spoke of the power of the
web to amass previously unimagined amounts of information and
the fact that web journalists are immediately and constantly
accountable to the commercial pressure of "page views"
- that is, the degree to which a story posted on the web is succeeding
in pulling in readers.
"Page views determine content,"
said Lynn, who was most recently a producer for Women.com and
who has also been a producer and assignment editor for CBSNews.com.
Karimkhany provided a rebuttal
to those who revel in stories of dot-com failures, pointing out
that "the New York Times, at one time, was a bankrupt newspaper.
A German immigrant bought it...it took ten years to build it
into profit." The Yahoo! News senior producer says it will
be the same with the web, as journalists and managers learn more
about this still new medium, which incorporates the disciplines
of all other media.
ABC "20-20" Correspondent John
Stossel, who made
his reputation as a consumer reporter, challenged all conference
participants as he gave the keynote address at lunch, suggesting
that much of today's consumer reporting is way off the track.
Stossel made a impassioned argument
that the push for government regulation of consumer products
has gone too far and disregards the fact that risk is part of
life and freedom to take a risk should be our right in a free
society.
Stossel sees many stories billed
as consumer reporting as nothing more than lazy reporting done
to scare people and produce big ratings.
Who gets hurt by that?
We do, says Stossel, who says
the free market does a better job than government in regulating
products and industries, and the vast sums spent on regulation
and lawyers could instead be spent on making a better world -
for example, reducing poverty, a risk factor far greater for
mortality than a long list of regulated dangers.
The New York Press Club Foundation
would like to thank its lead sponsor for this year's Journalism
Conference, New York
Life, and our co-sponsors, Columbia
University, 1010
WINS Radio, NY1 News,
News Channel 4,
11 News
At Ten, WB11
Morning News, Bloomberg
News, the Daily
News, and U.S.
News & World Report.
Thanks also go to the chair of
the planning committee, Debra
Caruso, and committee members Stephannia Cleaton, Don
Ennis, Francie Grace, Anne Marinho, Phil O'Brien, Ilyssa Panitz
and John Shanahan. |