Last week, Techdirt held its “Techdirt Saves Journalism” event, a workshop to come up with ideas for, well, “saving journalism.” JD Lasica at PBS’s “Mediashift” blog has a post enumerating and elaborating on six ideas he brought back from the event. Those six ideas are:
- Mine the data
- Elevate your writers
- Create a platform for your community
- Multiple revenue streams
- Expand the brand
- Changing ideas about news
Most of the discussion seems, at root, to be about building community and finding new sources of revenue and publicity.
Another participant, Rick Klau, blogs about the workshop exercise he participated in, where attendees were divided into groups and told to pick one publication and “save it” in 45 minutes.
Klau’s group chose Harpers, and came up with four approaches the magazine could take: expand its “Index” features to let users particpate more, hold events that allow readers to connect more easily with writers, add more freely-accessible online content, and bring the last ten years’ worth of Indexes to print.
While it is not yet clear whether the results of the workshop will make a difference soon, in the long run they might be helpful as media properties continue to try to figure out how to adapt to the ever-changing Internet world.
