Upasna Gautam
senior platform product manager CNN
Damon Kiesow
Knight Chair in journalism innovation Missouri School of Journalism
Ben Werdmuller
senior director of technology ProPublica
Journalists are charged to "seek the truth and report it" but also to "minimize harm" to the communities we serve. On news product teams, the work we do can seem an abstract distance from those concerns – yet every design choice, paywall adjustment, build/buy evaluation, or marketing campaign carries a potential risk of violating journalistic ethics or harming reader trust.
We will explore this network of technical, business, and ethical decisions and impacts and try to develop a strategy for how best to foresee the unforeseen in such a complex system of cause-and-effect, and how to talk about the risks in a way that makes sense to engineers, product thinkers, and journalists.
Social is radically transforming. Search is flatlining. AI continues to rapidly change the web. News organizations that relied on unearned audience windfalls to drive programmatic advertising revenues are in similar straits. It is time for local news organizations to return to their roots: serving local readers and local advertisers and giving up on the dreams of limitless scale and geographic reach which is the pipedream of Silicon Valley and the bête noire of local sustainability.
The tension between scale-based business models and the locally-focused need for quality community information raises a question: do the existing digital tools and approaches we’ve used for decades actually support the needs of newsrooms and their communities? We will discuss some of the key metrics and trends that point to “No” and identify the alternatives that create rather than extract value from local readers.
Moderated by Damon Kiesow.