Day 1 of the InJo Conference

Today is the first day of the Innovation Journalism conference at Stanford, hosted by the VINNOVA Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism. It's lunch time and so far we've seen a plenary session and a small-group session on best practices (not to mention a very necessary breakfast and lunch buffet).

I got a lot out of my small group discussion on covering biotech, but the highlight so far was the speech and Q&A session with Vint Cerf, one of the creators of the Internet. He had a lot of interesting things to say about the relationship between privacy and transparency, but what was most notable was his answer to the question that was on everyone's mind: how will print publications continue to survive in the current economic/digital environment?

His answer was fascinating, not for its brilliance but for its naivete (no offense, Vint, and thanks for making the web). He suggested that an advertising model would be the savior of print journalism as it transitioned to an online format, and asked one of the audience members as to why that wasn't the obvious solution. The poor guy couldn't come up with a response, which infuriated me. If advertising was the obvious answer, why hasn't it worked across the board for online publications already? Why can't most digital newspapers convert pay-per-click or pay-per-view ads into enough money to hire back the staff members they layed off? How are we going to maintain quality of content with a platform that places a higher value on quantity, the better to place more advertisements? Unless Vint has some magical advertising model hiding in his back pocket, it's clear that the answer is going to be a lot more complicated than just ads.

Sigh. Time to get more coffee and hope the second half of the day will offer more answers . . .

UPDATE: It did not. Left early, but optimistic about tomorrow.