I attended The Melbourne Future of Journalism summit last week, and didn’t quite know what to expect. What I got was a bunch of laughs and some good insight into current monetisation models of media as well as seeing alot of confused journalists.

The conference began with the release of a report conducted by the Media Alliance named Life in the Clickstream: The Future of Journalism, now available for free download.

The report surveyed journalists around the country asking them what they thought about the future of their career, and the media industry in general. There are mixed reactions throughout the report, and I’ve read it from start to finish.

In relation to the future, a startling 35.03% said that they were staying pessimistic, and were worried about jobs in the future, with 39.35% saying that we need to accept change and work with it.

Life in the Clickstream

That was another subject point on everyone’s mind at the conference, change.

From the journalists I’ve spoken with, the young ones are accustomed to the change currently occurring, whilst the mature age writers are having trouble adopting new technology.

This was also outlined in the report, with 57.34% of the surveyed journalists saying no training was provided!

Life in the Clickstream

Perhaps this is the key to a future in journalism? More training in new technologies?

Once some promotion of the report was done, Phil Meyer, Knight Chair of Journalism at the University of North Carolina and author of The Vanishing Newspaper joined the event via “satellite” (Skype) to discuss the state of the global news media.

His words were scary to some, I’m sure.

“Nature doesn’t like straight lines… newspapers will run out of readers” he said.

“Newspapers will never be as profitable”

“Don’t keep the model of something for everyone,  focus on subset niches “

A lot of the focus seemed to be based around the current broken model of advertising in Newspapers.

Margaret Simons, a freelance journalist told me..

‘Maybe the paradigm we are looking at all of this from is wrong’

I think she has a valid point there.

Most journalists are afraid that journalism will cease to exist, whereas this is not the case, perhaps they will begin to work for themselves, rather than a big media giant.

This was a hot topic at the event as well, the topic of whether full time journalist are necessary.

The topic of contracting out or getting paid for quality was discussed as well.

Joseph Sirucka a photographer for Fairfax (who sat next to me) summarised what the speakers were putting forward as: “eBay for journalism”, it seemed like a ludicrous idea.

I want to keep this post short, but the future is obliviously unknown.

I noticed today that one of the contributors for the Telstra blog Rod Bruem wrote an article about his attendance at the conference of which mentions Joseph and myself:

“Older journalists who spoke were full of doom and gloom, lamenting the end of the world as they knew it.”

“In their view, the ‘traditional media model’ is slowly being undermined by the internet.  As a result, journalists face huge challenges in maintaining  ’ traditional standards’  for balance and accuracy.”

“I chose to sit with student journalists who were live blogging at the back of the room and they couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They see a whole new world of opportunities.”

Maybe Rod needs to do some fact checking himself. Student journalists? I don’t believe I’m a student journalist, nor is Joseph.