Brain food: Here are 15 smart people talking for 5 minutes each about journalism’s future

Brain food: Here are 15 smart people talking for 5 minutes each about journalism’s future

Smart people talking about building a startup culture, the value of small projects, the curse of expertise, and more.

By Joshua Benton @jbenton Feb. 16, 2016, 9:15 a.m.

What’s the view from Europe on where news is headed? Check out these videos from Newsgeist

June 30, 2015

Newsgeist is “a gathering of 150 key practitioners and thinkers from the worlds of journalism, technology, and public policy who are re-imagining the future of the news,” usually (though not always) at Arizona State University. It’s sponsored by Google and the Knight Foundation (disclosure: a Nieman Lab funder), and it serves as a significant meeting of the minds; Google’s AMP was born out of brainstorming at one recent iteration of Newsgeist, for instance. I’ve been a happy attendee over the past few years.

Most of Newsgeist is made up of unconference-y sessions that are off the record. But there is one part of the event that is recorded and rendered public: a series of Ignite sessions featuring some of the smartest people in digital media. Those have been posted to YouTube, but seeing as none of them have even 200 views at this writing, they could use a little more publicity. So here’s a selection of videos of the Ignite talks held at the most recent Newsgeist in November — lots of smart thinking embedded in each.

Marie Gilot of CUNY on continuing education for journalists

Mizell Stewart of Journal Media Group on local journalism, advertising, value creation

Moiz Syed of Wikimedia on the power of small projects

John Keefe of WNYC on the appeal of simple sensor journalism

Robert Hernandez of USC on what Drake can teach journalism

Maryanne Reed of West Virginia University on building a startup culture in a journalism school

Sharon Chan of The Seattle Times on the curse of expertise

Bill Adair of Duke (and PolitiFact) on falling in love with journalism

Katie Zhu of Medium on personal media

Andrew Losowsky of The Coral Project on journalists as trolls

Justin Kosslyn of Google on structured journalism

David Bornstein of the Solutions Journalism Network on journalism’s theory of change

Tracie Powell of All Digitocracy on winning as journalists

Michelle Ferrier of Ohio University on fighting harassment

Jeff Jarvis of CUNY on the death of the mass media business model

Photo via Arizona State University.

Joshua Benton is the senior writer and former director of Nieman Lab. You can reach him via email (joshua_benton@harvard.edu) or Twitter DM (@jbenton).

POSTED Feb. 16, 2016, 9:15 a.m.

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