Meanwhile, new data emerging from the U.S. on how people use different media types at the same time suggests that even traditional measures of audience "eyeballs" don’t accurately reflect who’s paying attention to what at any one time.

With these forces in mind, last month The Media Center at the American Press Institute initiated a cross-sector conversation intended to lead to new thinking and new approaches to the media enterprise of the future. The conversation began with an executive retreat in Newport Beach, California, called MediaMorphosis.

The program attracted 110 participants, which was a record for a Media Center event. Media Center seminars typically involve no more than 30 participants in a confidential, off-the-record setting.

MediaMorphosis was different – bigger, on the-record, and designed to kick off a new kind of conversation involving leaders, executives and innovators from media, technology, mobile communications, business and research.

The conversation continues today, and the goal is practical and actionable, with an eye on the future. The communications enterprise of the future must develop systems and objectives suitable for this visible future, not for the economic or social imperatives of today – or yesterday.

A principal part of our agenda at The Media Center is to expand the knowledge, ideas and discourse about how society is informed in a connected world.

The traditional approach has been to round up the usual suspects – peers and fellow stakeholders who share the same interests and values. This approach has produced valuable product-centric or industry-centric perspectives and approaches to news and the business of news.

The Media Center is attempting to look at the media world from the outside-in, rather than inside-out. We’ve embarked on a research agenda that is audience-centric and collaborative, and we’ve engaged leading executives, innovators and researchers from other sectors in a multi-disciplinary expedition exploring how the media landscape is changing, what that means for society, what it means for the business of media, what forces are at work, and how they can best be understood to serve citizens in an informed society.

We’re committed to gathering people who don’t know each other – but who should be talking, learning from each other and working together on new projects and relationships.

MediaMorphosis was just the first step in a conversation that continues.

One of the outcomes of the retreat was creation of three volunteer away teams. These teams are working on defining opportunities that emerged from the symposium:

- Team Biz – focused on disruptions to media business models, and new business opportunities
- Team Ops – focused on disruptions and adjustments that ill be necessary in media operations
- Team Change - Focused on managing internal expectations, culture and leadership challenges in the disrupted media environment.

The most important outcome of MediaMorphosis was the initiation of a cross-sector network of professionals and organizations. The volunteer away teams are one piece of that network. The Media Center is also working with a group of companies most committed tapping into The Media Center’s network of researchers, consultants, thinkers and industry leaders.

We knew the smart people who gathered in Newport Beach would come up with a lot of ideas. We expected some would be keepers and some wouldn’t. The findings will inform our next wave of research and upcoming seminars. Our findings will also be discussed in more detail in a presentation at the 11th World Editors Forum meeting in Istanbul, May 30- June 2.

We wanted more than a pile of ideas or hints at where we might go next: we wanted to mine those ideas and extract from them some real opportunities for action. So now we’re mining. The away teams are digging deeper into the MediaMorphosis brainshare, and we want to open this conversation to as many informed contributors as we can manage.

If you would like to participate in future activities, or explore formal network participation for your company, or send a note to: morph@mediacenter.org.

Meanwhile, an archive of a March 24 webcast reviewing the away team progress and SIMM research, along with a full list of MediaMorphosis participants and other coverage and feedback, is available online at mediacenter.org.