UC Berkeley Journalism - Events

We host public events with distinguished speakers from the media, politics, business and other fields. You can receive event notifications by mailing list, RSS feed, or iCal.

Many school-sponsored events are also webcast as streaming video, either live or as video archives. All events with associated video are listed on the Webcasts page. Currently featured: Jack Hitt: The Art of the Query and Mao's Revolution: What Remains.

Some J-School-sponsored events can also be viewed at UCTV (Real video format).

Many J-School-sponsored events are also available at webcast.berkeley.edu.

Closing Remarks

Orville Schell, dean, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
Tom Rosenstiel, Committee of Concerned Journalists

Orville Schell: First things first. Besides Deirdre, I want to thank a number of people who helped organize all of this. Paul Grabowicz, not the least of which who's just passing out faxes in the back. Norman Lloyd who's been dutifully filming it. Kean Sakata who has been playing the Wurlitzer organ over here on the sound system. Numerous students -- Michi, Sapana, Josiah, Ioanna, Jim Rendon, and I'm probably forgetting a few - Alex Cohen - this is like the Academy Awards. Anyway, thanks to all of you.

Quickly, to try to take a fairly optimistic view of things, it does strike me in a way that we have been in a kind of a seizure, figuratively speaking. A revolution is a moment when things get turned upside down. Very often revolutions are followed by periods of restoration and reaction. I don't know if we're heading into that period, but it seems to me that it's a possibility and it may be a good thing. Not that things will stand still, but that we are beginning to think of codes of conduct, kind of an effort to stop things from spinning, to gain a new balance.

On the other hand, I hasten to add codes of conduct are something like the instructions for your VCR if they're just on a piece of paper. The conduct, after all, is conveyed through an ethos. It has to be absorbed. It can't exactly be taught, it just has to be observed, become part of the DNA of the way you do things. It takes awhile, and I think we have sort of gotten away from the ethos of good journalism, whether new or old. That gives cause for concern, but I hope we are in a period where after this incredible period of uncertainty and racing around trying to catch up, competition, that this will happen.

Alas, it does run into another incredibly powerful force in the world today. I've oft said that we are living, in my view, without quite knowing it, in a period of mercantile energy unparalleled in world history. Our heroes are entrepreneurs, the people we want to see on magazine, television, are people who are wealthy, have private jets, are doing IPOs, are successful. There is a kind of a zeitgeist of the marketplace. That zeitgeist runs headlong into those quaint codes of conduct lying out on the table in the hallway. They are very poor, like crucifixes in front of vampires -- would that they were as powerful. (Laughter)

So there are two things at work here. It's very easy to know what you ought to do, to do right. It's another thing as Steve Chin I think so graphically and tragically described for us, the fate of his poor Web site. It ran headlong into the marketplace and the editorial side was just literally consumed like in some seedy movie by considerations of the bottom line. This is something which worries me greatly, and I think is the subtext of much of what we've been talking about here -- old or new, it's the same old story.

Finally, I hope that what happened here today, I learned a lot but then I am a real Tabula Rasa on this subject. But I hope we may come back again, that this can be maybe some sort of an Olympian place to look down on this subject from time to time, to keep track of it, to remind ourselves of the verities of putting the old world's best features together with the new world's best features. That does take a bit of observation. It does take people to stand back, to take time out as you all have done today, and again, as I said earlier this morning, I think if the university is worth the powder to blow it up, it's to do precisely this kind of thing.

Thank you all for coming. Tom is going to give you a little bit more, I hope, thorough discourse on what's happened.

Tom Rosenstiel: Thoreau, not.

One of my odd hobbies, a rare one, is journalism history. Actually, mercantilism is not anything new in our business. The first journalism in America was by people in the shipping business who created newspapers in port towns so that people would know what stuff was coming off the ships. And actually, codes of conduct, when they meant something, evolved because they had a market value.

The independent newsroom and the ethical newsroom evolved because audiences wanted it. As you were saying earlier, these are valid things for readers, and they gravitated to these things. If readers or viewers or audiences or consumers or whatever term we have, if these things don't mean anything to them, then it doesn't matter whether we have these codes or not.

The other thing that I wanted to say is that we will have a synopsis of today. A transcript and then a synopsis on our Web site which is www.journalism.org/concern, should be up in a few weeks. We get these things out as fast as possible. This is part of a piece. This is the first of two of these sessions on on-line. The organizers of the one in Seattle are here today, and we will essentially sit down and figure out what were the issues raised and unresolved today, and they will be picked up and in a coordinated way be dealt with. Some of the same speakers may even be brought back to answer questions that were not answered or perhaps not even raised.

What were some of those questions that we heard today? One other thing I should say about process. The committee started out with a small budget and plans to do eight forums. Our budget has not grown, but the eight forums are now 20, because 12 other institutions have come forward and said this is something that they want to be a part of. The 20 people who started the committee are now 950 and growing. We're not even trying to get members, and last week somebody dropped by in the mail 95 signatures from the AP.

So what we heard today and what we will hear in Seattle on this topic will all go into the mix of the 20 that become a monograph. The people who organized these things and worked on these things and worked on this can take proprietorship of the aspects of it that they worked on, and at the Poynter Institute in Florida, for instance, they developed what they considered the 10 elements of competency that a journalist should have, and they're going to make that part of their curriculum and a feature and a focus of the Poynter Institute for the next few years. So I encourage you guys to have a summit meeting once a year. I'll see if I can get some dough.

So what did we hear today? One of the things we do is we try and do a little summation. It helps for the transcript. It also helps people walk away and say I disagree with where they're going with this. I want to e-mail them and tell them that they're wrong.

We heard Jack Shafer talk about disintermediation and reintermediation. We heard about whether this is orthodoxy leading to heresy, which is a good thing. We heard Katherine Fulton talk about coming out of a period in which radically non-commercial ideals were held and resided inside the cocoon of large institutions for the last 30 years in a kind of odd golden era of journalism, and that cocoon is unraveling. We heard John Markoff talk about how this is all changing so fast that we don't know where it's going -- a theme I think we heard a lot today.

But we also heard, it seems to me from a lot of people, that certain values on various Web sites do seem to have a kind of enduring validity. They're not complicated, but they're not always easy to achieve. It sounded like to me, at least, that honesty, accuracy, being fair, not shilling for advertisers, trying to get at the truth -- that these are things that have some value for audiences and are the elements of whatever the medium will be. Those will be the values that will be a driver.

One of the things we've heard that I think has come through all of the forms we've had so far is that journalism, whatever it is, is providing people with something that they need, and what they need is something they can rely on that's credible. Perhaps the greatest risk we have is infotainment because then we become an amusement that people don't necessarily need. As a form of entertainment, journalism is not going to compete very well.

But I also think one of the amazing, most interesting themes we heard today, and Oppenheimer talked about it a lot, was this notion that rather than the villain, the new media is now strangely being looked on as the thing that might heal the wounds of the old media, the weaknesses of the old media.

I'm not sure that we should necessarily rely on the new media to magically heal the old any more than the old could magically heal the new. But I do think that increasingly as the day progressed, we heard that the issues here are not issues about new media, but they are issues about the news media in general, and that the values of one are probably the values of the other in the end. But the form may change, and the grammar and the conventions.

Maybe the lesson that we begin to explore at the next session is two-fold. One, it seems to me unresolved today is what are the revenue streams and where are they taking us? Is there an economic imperative or rationale for quality journalism in this new media? I don't know if there is. We should probably talk some more about that. Clearly that was an issue that Katherine was talking about.

But it seems to me that the other is the notion that we in journalism have often confused technique with principle. And this is the thing that we need to get away from. This is the thing that the old media needed to get away from. The inverted pyramid is not a principle, it's a device. If we can get away from that confusion, we may find ourselves a way into the future.

Back to: The Conference Program

Panelists and speakers at the conference came from a wide variety of new media companies and organizations.