Traveling Geeks: A Guardian Newspaper Media Panel, Twitter, From Back to Front And Beyond…
by Tom Foremski on July 8, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Tuesday evening our third event that day for the Traveling Geeks (but not the last) was to take part in a media debate at The Guardian newspaper’s offices in north London.
The Guardian is one of the UK’s largest newspapers and its media section is superb — anyone that is anyone in the media industry reads it, and anyone that’s interested in media — reads The Guardian’s media section.
It was a very good turnout for the event despite horrid downpours. Part of our TG gang (Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, and JD Lasica) were on the panel discussing the future of media with the Guardian’s Emily Bell, and the BBC’s technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones.
It was a good discussion but it felt very “2005” in terms of the subjects, which kept returning to blogger/social media versus mainstream media.
The Butcher of Fleet Street
I was sitting at the back of the room next to fellow TGer Craig Newmark of Craigslist. And inevitably, the panel’s moderator couldn’t resist asking him to stand up and explain himself for killing the newspaper industry.
Craig is mightily fed up with this question. And I agree. It is not his fault that the newspaper industry is in trouble. But Craig handled it all very well, throwing in a line “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” which drew laughs and distracted the panel from further pursuit of a tired line of questioning and drew the discussion back to the favorite subject of the day: Twitter.
From Back To Front
It was fun publishing from the back of the room and having our Tweets projected onto a big screen in the front of the room.
Here is the evening’s Twitstream.
And here are my contributions:
