April 13, 2004

HobbsOnline Live Recap

I had a very enjoyable time participating in a panel discussion on the changing media landscape, sponsored by the Nashville office of BusinessWire, today. Also on the panel: Catherine Mayhew, managing editor of the Nashville City Paper, and Terry Heaton, owner of Donata Communications and a blogger on the subject of, well, of the changing media landscape. Heaton, a former TV news executive, is an evangelist for the new people-driven changes in the way The Media works. His blog is going on my blogroll.

Some in the audience - made up mostly of PR professionals - audibly gasped when I related that my blog once got a total of four hits from a link on a local television news program's website and a mention on its ratings-leading newscast, but has received many thousands of visits from a single link on Instapundit.

The City Paper, by the way, is one of two Nashville dailies and the only one of the two that, I believe, truly "gets" the new interactive nature of online journalism. The City Paper, for example, allows readers to post comments below stories, while The Tennessean, wedded to the old top-down we-know-what-you-need-to-know model of traditional Big Media, doesn't. Mayhew, who formerly worked both in teevee news and at The Tennessean, remarked that one of the ways the City Paper is different is that it is free - and has remarkably high readership among the college-age readers as a result. Mayhew remarked that newspapers must be free because that generation is used to getting their news for free on the Internet and aren't going to be willing to buy a newspaper subscription. That's just another way the Internet is changing the news business.