Will Bunch, our norgs guru, weighs in:
Frankly, I won’t get too much on my own high horse and pontificate, not yet, anyway. Ironically, those of us in the middle of this are all a bit too mentally and emotionally exhausted to make pithy sense out of it. But I loved pretty much all the ideas that were talked about, the creation of a news organization that would be engaged in a constant dialogue (and possibly be owned by) its local community — continuous, transparent and not afraid to either aggressively pursue investigative reporting or to link to our competition. There were some very good specific new ideas, such as a Philadelphia wikipedia that would help our norg use hyperlinks to better tell complicated local stories.
What was both neat and surprising, to me, was the way that our effort will be proceed on two tracks. One is what you might call the Platonic norg, an effort to create a “blue sky” kind of playbook for the perfect news organization of the 21st Century. That’s the express train — but occasionally, I hope, the express will stop to let off some ideas for the local train, i.e., the Daily News and the Inquirer here in Philly.
The future of Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc., currently up for sale, was the crazy aunt in the attic Saturday — no one knows how the down-to-earth realities of investment-banker types are going to collide with our high-flying journalistic ideals. We’ll find out more this week.
It all may not matter as much as you think. Most of us were downright giddy as we filed out of the Annenberg School on Saturday, because we realized that we have started to create the model for journalism that is going to work in this town (and elsewhere) over the long haul, regardless of what happens to the Daily News and Inquirer in the short term.
Yeah, I’m still taking it all in, too. I can tell you the hardest thing in the world is to get people out of their mental ruts, and I think we made some headway Saturday. I hope so.
In the meantime, read this and let me know what you think.
