I stole this straight from the Congress program:

The Futures of News and Journalism in the Internet and Mobile Age
Michel Venne, Concordia University.

On the occasion of Montreal Le Devoir’s 100th anniversary in 2010, four distinguished international panelists working within various news entities such as print media, web-based broadcasting, and participatory internet news forums, join Le Devoir Director, Bernard Descôteaux to reflect on the future of media in the internet and mobile age, and the current state of news reporting and journalism. This distinguished panel will also include Reisa Levine (the Producer of CitizenShift), Amy Mitchell (the Deputy Director of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism), Pascal Riché (Editor of Rue89), and Geraldine Cahill (a Toronto-based journalist previously with The Real News Network).

This animated event on the future of media in light of massive technological changes. will be moderated by Michel Venne, former deputy editor at Le Devoir and founder and Executive Director of the Institut du Nouveau Monde, a Montreal-based non-partisan organisation aimed at civic participation and renewal of ideas in Québec.

And in case you want to see the video too … I will post a link to the video when I find it – Fedcan/Concordia Ustreamed it so it must be floating around on the interrwebz somewhere!

Online journalism panel – You Can’t Fight the Future with Kirk Lapointe of the Vancouver Sun, Greg Horn (Kahnawakenews.com, David Beers of The Tyee

Ottawa’s Information Lockdown and What Journalists Should DO About it with Rob Russ, CP, Kady O’Malley, CBC Ottawa and Pierre Duchesne, Radio-Canada – please note the stars I’ve drawn are book marks in the audio if you want to move around the recording.

The first panel was “Business sustainability: who will provide quality content and how?”. It featured Robert Picard, who is the Director of Media Management and Transformation Centre at a University in Sweden as well as a Fellow of the Reuters Institute, University of Oxford and Dr. Fred Fletcher, UBC Grad School of Journalism and Canadian Media Research Consortium. The panel was moderated by Ottawa’s own Carleton University prof, Christopher Waddell.

The second panel discussion was the “Role and relevance of national cultural policymakers and regulators in a borderless world” – any star is a bookmark and you can download it. Panelists were Sheridan Scott, Bennett Jones LLP, Richard French, CN Tellier Prof of Business and Public Policy at the University of Ottawa, and Peter Menzies, Commissioner, Alberta and Northwest Territories, Canadian Radio and Television and Telecommunications Commission, all of whom were moderated by Mary Lou Finlay of CBC fame.

The third panel of the day was moderated by the very talented and lovely Jennifer Corriero from Taking IT Global (who tried to get me to be a big brave girl and ask a question but I couldn’t bring myself to face the microphone), and she was in charge of the discussion entitled “Alternative content production and distribution models” which was gave the audience a good view into The Tyee through its Founding editor, David Beers, Tou.tv by Executive Director of Internet and Digital Services, Genevieve Rossier and Donna Logan who is President of the Canadian Media Research Consortium. Again, each star is a bookmark so that you can fast forward through the talks.

Andrew Potter gives a reflection/summary of the two day symposium:

David Mitchell, president of the PPF and David Walden, Secretary-General, Canadian Commission for UNESCO did the introductions:

Download research paper

As always feedback welcome!

C.

http://twitter.com/caitlinkealey/statuses/9557944081

Hope it’s helpful!

Thanks,
Caitlin

I’m also hoping that if you think anyone is missing from my list please let me know. I’ve averaged each user’s Klout and Tweetlevel scores. The last column is whether or not the user discusses the future of the news every day or not, if they do not regularly talk about it, I will have to pull them off my list = which is unfortunate because it means that someone like @cshirky will not be on the list. Obviously I will still use his stuff in my thesis but just not as part of my data set.

Please feel free to let me know what you think so far!

Thanks.

***edit: I’m having problems putting the excel table into html so I’ve attached it as a pdf but the names, without the data, are:
@scobleizer (doesn’t talk about media’s future daily so not usable)
@davewiner
@jayrosen_nyu
@jeffjarvis
@mathewi
@cheeky_geeky
@cshirky (doesn’t talk about media’s future daily so not usable)
@journalismnews
@digiphile
@ajkeen
@dangillmor
@jdlasica
@poynter
@themediaisdying
@mediatwit
@journalistics
@yelvington
@knightfdn
@harrisj (doesn’t talk about media’s future daily so can’t use)
@iwantmedia
@stevebuttry
@kirklapointe
@NYT_JenPreston
@thefutureofnews
@digidave
@hermida
@david_a_eaves
@steveouting
@bxmx (doesn’t talk about media’s future daily so can’t use)
@CodyBrown
@howardweaver

twitter_data Sheet1

In brief, my thesis will look at:

The proliferation of the Internet is challenging mass media’s age-old arrangement of producer and consumer as well as the economic models on which the centuries-old industries have relied. These factors in combination with a worldwide recession and its resultant drop in advertising revenues have caused a crisis in the newspaper industry; a crisis in which they question their long-term survival as a viable news delivery system. This study will apply a discourse analysis to explore how the online debate on the future of the news, and more specifically newspapers, is structured, and will look at what that says about the issue. These conclusions will then be used to build a framework of the major concepts in the current discussion. The purpose of this research is to explore, describe and evaluate the scope of existing discourse in order to arrive at an in-depth understanding of the issues surrounding the debate on the future of news and newspapers.

To do my discourse analysis I am going to to track 20 Twitter accounts for 2 months. So my question to you, helpful readers, is who do you consider to be the most influential, interesting, verbose, engaged/engaging people on Twitter who are discussing the future of the newspaper?

Once I’ve finalized the list I will put it on listerous and make a Twitter list for others to use.

*edit*

Suggestions thus far (thanks all!):

From Leems:
@jeffjarvis
@buzzmachine
@knightfdn

From @memeticbrand:
@wemedia
@the_standard

From @CNWgroup:
@kirklapointe
@mathewi

From @laheadle:
@jayrosen_nyu
@niemanlab
@megangarber
@jny2
@steveouting
@howardweaver
@chanders

From @bxmx:
@david_eaves
@cheeky_geeky
@bxmx