Participants to the panel, entitled ‘News Online’, included moderator Mogens Schmidt, Director of the Freedom of Expression Unit at UNESCO, Monique Villa, Managing Director of Reuters in the U.K, Neil Budde, General Manager of Yahoo, Rosental Alves, Director, Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, Nora Paul, Director, Institute for New Media Studies, U. of Minnesota and Sankarshan Thakur, Executive Editor of the Tehelka online newspaper, India.

Budde reaffirmed the importance of online news for the expansion of press freedom. Currently, online news portals like Yahoo, MSNBC, AOL, CNN or Google are all crushing the web traffic of US newspapers, led by the NY Times, leading to widespread diffusion of news.

On the other hand, Budde also underlined that 90% of all available online news comes from three newswires, Associated Press, Agence France Press and Reuters. This could lead to a thinning out of news diversity.

The emergence of Internet has changed the nature of news gathering, said Villa. With the Web, Reuters changed its strategy from being ‘business-to-business’ to being ‘business-to-consumer’, and with Web 2.0 it has turned to ‘C to B’, consumer to business. Reuters embraces blogs, uses blog aggregator Pluck and Blogburst, believing “amateur and professional gives a better product,” said Villa.
 
She also said that all media, including newspapers, will have to turn towards more graphic content packaging. “Visual is the language of the Internet and is absolutely key,” she said “Newspapers turn more and more towards a magazine-ish type,” said Villa.

At the same time, of course, Villa reminded that Reuters “still holds sacrosanct straight fact-based reporting.”

Alves discussed the impact of online news on Latin America’s press freedom, a context much different from that discussed by other panelists. Internet has a 16% penetration rate across Latin America, compared with the US’ 70%. As such, online does not impact press freedom as much as one may have thought or hoped for.

Yet the Internet has also “coincided with an unprecedented wave of democracy in Latin America,” said Alves. While the pentration rate may seem low, there are many users per computer, and bloggers and online journalists can have a real impact on the press.

An attendee reminded in the question session at the end that the confusion is often made between freedom of expression, allowed through blogs and online, and freedom of press, which is more institutional. Still, the divide between both notions is shrinking.

“Journalism is not a monopoly of media companies anymore.” “Journalism is not a one-way route anymore,” Alves concluded.

During the questions at the end, participants responded to the issue of online copyright.

Budde admitted there was “no easy answer” and that the “Internet is a place where everybody can steal.” Villa differentiated free access to Reuters’ content with the act of illegally republishing that content. According to Paul, “online copyright attempts are going to be pretty futile,” as the web has allowed for mash-ups, creating new layers of content on top of others.  Alves, on the other hand, stated that “the judiciary system will find a way to respond.”

For conference presentations, the programme, a list of participants and background papers, click here. 

The conference is supported by the World Editors Forum and the Coordinating Committee of Press Freedom Organizations, which includes, in addition to World Association of Newspapers and the WPFC, the Committee to Protect Journalists; Commonwealth Press Union; Inter American Press Association; International Association of Broadcasting; International Association of the Periodical Press (FIPP); International Press Institute; North American Broadcasters Association; and the World Press Freedom Committee.

The conference was made possible by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
 

Source: Editors Weblog - WAN