If you're a journalist in the trenches, chances are you're too busy and too poor to attend (and your publisher is too poor to send you to) SXSW Interactive, the annual to-do where all the smart, well-funded bastards go to interact with other smart, well-funded bastards who can afford to think for five minutes about how to get us all out of this goddamn mess we're in.
That doesn't mean you can't eavesdrop. SXSW podcasts the shit out of its panels and keynotes -- and as someone who goes nearly every year (but not this year), I'll tell you a dirty little secret: if you're willing to spend the next few weeks listening, you can get almost as much out of Austin as the muckety-mucks who actually attend. And all 15 of the panels I've linked to below are already available on-demand for your iPod/iPhone/desktop -- so right-click and get future-ing.
THE FUTURE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES. Executive editor Jill Abramson spills the Grey Lady's secrets to future-of-journalism guru Evan Smith, whose Texas Tribune is making everyone else look bad by getting the whole digital-news thing right. [Download MP3]
JOURNALISM FOR THE 99 PERCENT: A PENNY PRESS FOR THE DIGITAL AGE. Fact: of the Americans who make less than $75,000 per year, less than half go online for news. Can anyone make digital journalism for the blue-collar user? Among the academics, newspeople, and entrepreneurs determined to find an answer is former Berkman Center fellow Tom Stites, who is developing a pilot project in working-class Haverhill, Massachusetts based on a consumer co-op model. [Download MP3]
TWITTER KILLED THE SPORTS REPORTER. CBS Sports's Bruce Feldman and Sports Illustrated's Richard Deitsch try to come to terms with getting scooped by their sources -- a phenomenon which most reporters will tell you isn't confined to sports. The Atlantic Wire's Dashiell Bennett moderates. [Download MP3]
SECOND SCREENS: COVERING LIVE EVENTS BETTER. Because everybody watches TV with the Twitter on now. The New York Times's deputy interactive editor Brian Hamman and culture editor Julie Bloom discuss strategies, fails, and successes of live-event coverage with ESPN.com editor in chief Patrick Stiegman. [Download MP3]
AUDIENCE WANTS AND NEEDS IN NEWS. Want to drive an old-school front-page editor nuts? Start talking about how the internet provides all kinds of new ways to measure what the audience wants. [Old school news guy reading this: "I DON'T GIVE A FUCK WHAT THE READER WANTS! HE'LL TAKE WHAT I GIVE HIM!"] The people behind iPad reader/aggregator/magazines Evri and Pulse discuss how they're giving audiences more control over what news they see -- and balancing audience choice with good old fashioned newspaper-like serendipity. [Download MP3]
THE CURATORS AND THE CURATED. Page One star David Carr is incapable of not being entertaining on panels like this -- and here he's joined by Longform.org co-founder Max Linsky and MIT Futures of Entertainment fellow Maria Popova, whose proposed system for standardized attribution has been the talk of news orgs at SXSW. [Download MP3]
BIG BUSINESS: THE FUTURE OF MARIJUANA JOURNALISM. Craigslist killed the classifieds and nearly took a bunch of newspapers with it. But in the wake of legalized medical marijuana in Colorado, our alt-weekly friends at the Denver Westword have stumbled onto an enormous, potentially industry-saving lifeline: pot ads. With a huge injection of weed money has come an impetus for high-minded coverage -- including the world's greatest job title, The Guy Who Smokes And Reviews Different Brands of Chronic. Here's what That Guy and That Newspaper have to say for themselves. [Download MP3]
WHAT JOURNALISM CAN LEARN FROM SCIENCE. The Economist's Gideon Lichfield and NPR digital strategist Matt Thompson examine how new developments in data and accountability are helping take the guesswork out of sourcing -- and suggest ways that newsgathering can become more "replicable, trackable, and reliable." Somewhere, David Carr is having a seizure. [Download MP3]
TWEETING OSAMA'S DEATH: FROM CITIZEN TO JOURNALIST. Sohaib Athar -- better known as That Guy Who Accidentally Tweeted The US Raid On Bin Laden's Compound -- makes his first US appearance since scoring the scoop of the century. Poynter Institute managing editor Steve Myers is along to make it less of a ROFLcon appearance and more of a case study. Is there such a thing as a celebrity citizen journalist? There is now.[Download MP3]
STORYTELLING BEYOND WORDS: NEW FORMS OF JOURNALISM. Three of the smartest minds in online news presentation discuss how they're integrating data, video, and interactivity into their narratives: New York Times editor of Interactive News Aron Pilhofer, PolitiFact creator Bill Adair, and former TBD general manager Jim Brady, now with the Journal Register/Digital First. [Download MP3]
MOTHER JONES AND 'REPORTED AGGREGATION'. Cue the eye-rolling. Will "Reported aggregation" replace "military intelligence" as the most widely-mocked oxymoron in newsrooms? Not if Mother Jones editors Clara Jeffery and Nick Baumann have anything to say about it. Here they try to define a new, totally-not-just-stealing-other-people's-shit version of aggregation that includes projects by Huffington Post and Slate, Andy Carvin, and MJ's own explainer series. Now that everyone from the Atlantic's Atlantic Wire and Newsweek's Daily Beast is getting in on the aggregation business, we might as well start trying to justify it. [Download MP3]
HACKS, MEET HACKERS. Jenny 8. Lee, HuffPo interactive news editor Andrei Sheinkman, and WSJ Deputy Managing Editor Raju Narisetti attempt to narrow the gap between coders and reporters -- an idea that it's impossible to oversell. Journalism may be headed for an over-abundance of innovation -- but that's exactly what's required at the current moment. [Download MP3]
NEWS ENTREPRENEURS TAKE ON THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA. J-Lab executive director Jan Schaffer gives a state-of-the-state of the nation's 4700 local journalism startups, many of them hyperlocal and independent. And Oakland Local pioneer Susan Mernit gives a case study of running a community news site on $150,000 per year, while argues that "entrepreneurial" shouldn't be a dirty word. Fast-forward to her feud with the aforementioned Jim Brady of Digital First. Wonder if those guys bumped into each other on Sixth Street. [Download MP3]
CAN SYNDICATION SAVE CONTENT? The news-wire model of syndicating content is suffering just as much as every other old-school journalism model, but companies like Outbrain and Publish2 are reinventing the model to allow new players into the game and enable small content producers to share headlines without stealing each others' content. Wait, neither of those companies is on this panel? Um. OK. Here's what Flipboard, the Associated Press spinoff NewsRight, and Free Range Content -- the company behind the embed-friendly sites Curate.Us and Repost.Us -- are thinking about. [Download MP3]
PUBLIC RADIO IS MEDIA'S FUTURE. Oh, go ahead and rub it in. But it's true: one of the biggest success stories in digital transformation is the way Public Radio has leveraged its favorable licensing agreements, its hyperlocal outposts (sorry, "stations") and international muscle, to dominate the iTunes charts, develop smart APIs, and build audience . . . all on user-funded platforms. Jake Shapiro, the CEO of Cambridge-based Public Radio Exchange, is one of the people you need to listen to about this stuff. [Download MP3]
BONUS ROUND:
SOCIAL MEDIA AND POLITICS. Former Mashable editor Ben Parr and Huffington Post senior polling editor (and Pollster.com founder) Mark Blumenthal are among the panelists examining the tools available to crunch Big Data in real time -- and how those tools are transforming political practice and political coverage. Includes brief discussions of Kony2012 and Obama For America's scary, top-secret, info-sucking database, Project Narwhal. [Download MP3]
DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE 2012 ELECTION. Same basic idea as above, this time with PBS Newshour Political Editor Christina Bellantoni and the He Who Shall Not Be Named of journalism, Craig "Craigslist" Newmark. [Download MP3]
IRANIAN OUTLAWS: SATIRE VS. CENSORSHIP. Meet Sarman Arbabi, the Jon Stewart of Iran (only as Stewart says, Arbabi has "real guts"). He's one half of the creative team behind the TV show Parazit, which has become a runaway hit in spite of its radical irreverence. [Download MP3]
POLITICAL HUMOR 2.0: A roundtable with guests including HuffPo comedy editor Carol Hartsell, Agorafabulous! author Sara Benincasa, and Daily Show executive producer Rory Albanese. [Download MP3]
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