Seattle conference

["bill london" <bill_london@hotmail.com>]

On September 25, I represented Moscow Vision 2020 at a conference 
co-sponsored by the University of Washington and the Committee of 
Concerned Journalists.  The Seattle conference was entitled, "Quality 
Journalism in the 21st Century."

Moscow Vision 2020 was invited to participate, since the primary focus 
of the conference was the impact of email and WWW communications on 
traditional journalism (newspapers and TV).  

Among many other things, I discovered that Vision 2020 is a remarkably 
successful experiment in building an email network that is broad-based 
and meshes with the existing media.  For conference participants, what 
we have done with 2020 added to their hopefulness about journalism's 
future.  I shared the 2020 address with enough people that I suspect we 
will find lots more folks snooping around our website and maybe even 
subscribing to the list.

This conference was one in a long series sponsored by the Committee of 
Concerned Journalists around the US.  If you want to read more about 
that group, or read about their conferences (the report from the Seattle 
conference will be available soon), check out their website:
<www.journalism.org/concern>.

In sum, the conference was optimistic.  Participants generally welcomed 
the reality that the power in journalism was shifting from the 
journalist to the consumer, as news sources proliferate and become more 
interactive and democratic.  In fact, the journalists were primarily 
concerned about the capital concentration of media outlets limiting 
choices in the future.  With the generally positive view of online 
communication, participants assumed that there would continue to be a 
need for media--with the role of serving as the voice for the entire 
diverse community.  Of course, throughout the conference, participants 
stressed that nobody does know what the future will hold: what 
technological breakthroughs will arrive, and what kind of problems will 
result from the YK2 crisis (or others). 

BL

































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