Fifty years ago, it was fashionable for those with artistic leanings to want to be a writer of literary novels. With the emergence of punk and rock, everyone was suddenly in a DIY band. Then dance music hit, and no house was without its Technics turntables.

Now, it seems, everyone that is anyone wants to be a journalist. The Internet has brought instant, easy and mostly free publication to any budding blogger with access to a computer, digital camera or camcorder. Citizen journalism is the new black – or something like that – but what does it all mean for the future of media?

What was the event?

The Fall and Fall of Journalism, LSE Media Group.

Where was it held?

Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House, Aldwych.

Who were the speakers?

Editor of journalistic.co.uk Leslie Bunder, blogger Suw Charman, editor of the Financial Times Magazine John Lloyd and Dixons Chair in New Media and the Internet at LSE Professor Robin Mansell.

How easy was it to find?

It was snowing, which was prettily distracting, so I got lost. I ended up asking directions from the Royal Courts of Justice, which was fun.

How comfortable were the seats?

Quite.

How many were in the audience?

About seventy.

Describe a typical audience member?

A mix of international students, old skool journos and stream-of-consciousness bloggers.

What was the atmosphere like, pre-event?

Lazily expectant.

How good were the speakers?

They needed a better chairperson to challenge and focus what was said, to encourage them to debate with each other more, and to stem the lengthy audience speeches disguised as questions to the panel.

Did anything distract you?

The poor sound system led to humming microphones and unheard sentences.

The digested lecture?

The debate was broken up into topics, each of which received a response from members of the panel.

The power of new media

John Lloyd: We are told that we, as “old” media, are being superseded, but I think that is wrong. Yes, newspapers are in a crisis and readers are moving to different ways of getting news or entertainment. But look at the Independent and the Times – they have tabloidised themselves better than the tabloids.

It is only a certain sphere of mainly right-wing bloggers that assume that mainstream media is too liberal and attack them for that, and this will continue. Do these bloggers constitute a lynch mob? Up to a point. They do not have the discipline of regulation so how can you judge what they are doing? Only by their effect – Eason Jordan’s resignation, for example.

Suw Charman: Bloggers have the ability to fact-check the media. One of the strengths of the blogosphere is a community of experts can come together quickly. It provides a wake-up call to the journalists that you cannot be complacent. Everyone has an agenda: journalists and bloggers.

But there is no balance at the moment between old media and new media. There is a lot of room for symbiosis, where journalists can look to bloggers for information that otherwise they would not be able to find. There are different opportunities for a much more constructive relationship.

Bloggers are accountable; we are accountable to each other. The speed with which we are fact-checked is incredible, and if one blogger is writing falsehoods, he will soon loose links and eyeballs, which are a blogger’s lifeblood. You cannot get away with being an idiot.

Robin Mansell: What do we mean by media power? The power of the media depends very much on what people listen to or read. Today, there are only 168,000 bloggers, and they are of many different kinds. We have no empirical evidence of how many are actually producers in the sense we are talking about here. Some are just a mode of self-expression and do not care if they are read. As for lynch mobs, they can lynch good guys as well as bad, and we should be careful of that. Let’s not get carried away just because something is possible.

Self-regulation

Leslie Bunder: There is an element of self-regulation going on, and there is not much room for stupidity. But we have to understand the difference between real blogging and hobbyist blogging. We are at the stage of fanzines in the 70s: the Sniffing Glue stage. Good blogs will survive: bad blogs will die.

We have to ask ourselves, why are people blogging? For political gain, for fun, for professional or personal reasons. Lots of journalists, for example, are bloggers, often because they are afraid of new media stealing their future. If you want a career in media, then having a blog can be a good starting point. And journalists can use blogs as an outlet for writing they cannot place elsewhere.

John Lloyd: In the last ten to fifteen years, we have seen the growth of the commentariat, which is much more in your face and much more irresponsible than previous forms of commentary, especially political. It is ferociously anti-government, and there is a lack of balance.

Robert Kaplan, for example, has likened modern journalism to the medieval church. There is a tendency to find in the smallest thing evidence of a government corruption. I still believe, quaintly, that you can do a journalism of fact but it is very hard and often dangerous, especially considering most of our reporting is from foreign wars at the moment.

In the blogosphere, how does one person do a difficult, detailed analysis of a complex topic, when newspapers with all their resources find it hard enough? Also, most bloggers’ sources will have to be secondary – from other blogs, websites, or even the mainstream media.

You need to talk to a lot of people and read a lot of different things to report properly. Journalism is not an individual endeavour; it is cooperative, with editors, journalists and subs. I do not see how a bottom-up weblog consensus can work. We risk losing complex narratives of a complex world.

Robin Mansell: I do not go along with this theory of self-regulation online. There is a sense in which a notion of self-regulation is not enough. Regulation used to step in when something appeared to be relevant to the public interest. Today, the idea of regulation is less popular and less easy. We have a breakdown in consensus in what we mean by public interest. It is also hard as the Internet is so global.

Citizen reporting

Suw Charman: Journalism involves one person and one article. In the blogosphere, it is not just one person or one blog. The conversation gets bounced from one person to another, over a period of hours, days or even years, and you get a network of commentary so you can build up a detailed coalition of information.

Groups of people and individual experts can probe a subject in depth. Participatory journalism also exists, where bloggers can supplement one another or even the mainstream media. Look at the New York Times’ coverage of a subway train stuck in a tunnel. Yes, it was full of correct facts. But the really emotive response came from a blogger that was actually stuck on the train.

Leslie Bunder: On Oh My News in South Korea, a team of professional journalists and sub-editors work with citizen journalists to check for libels and other mistakes in copy. Bloggers need to smarten up their act. It is a great concept that citizens can write without the need for editing, but it is not entirely true.

Open source movement and citizen reporting

Robin Mansell: The open source movement is a small minority of people in any country that are active developers. The parallel between them and citizen journalists may be that there are lots of people able to blog in their spare time because they are paid well at work, and then there will be seriously involved bloggers who do it on a full-time basis - so there must be a revenue stream.

In open source communities, there are some altruistic software developers but we are also seeing more companies developing open source as they see it as a the way forward in terms of making money. A mix of bloggers doing it for money and for altruism could be the future. How long will the really altruistic kinds of blogging survive, when the more commercial aspects seep in and have more influence over what is said?

Accessibility of the blogosphere

Leslie Bunder: The technology is available to everyone. It is cheap and anybody can have access to it. Blogging also gives those disenchanted voices an outlet – newspapers do not always publish your letters to the editor. RSS feeds lets information be quickly spread around the world, which is why big media owners are scared.

Robin Mansell: Who is this “everyone” you talk about? A study has shown that only 18 per cent of UK personal home computers have ever set up a blog. Only 7 per cent of US internet users have a blog. Bloggers tend to be people that are relatively well off and relatively well educated. Everyone says participation by anyone that has access is good – that is a participatory democracy. But if you have a skewed population participating, you have to question it. Are access and participation enough?

The digested lecture, digested?

John Lloyd: There is a group of right-wing bloggers who are out to cripple what they see as a mainstream liberal media.

Suw Charman: Bloggers are fab – and if some of them write badly or make mistakes, then so do a lot of journalists!

Leslie Bunder: Why is everyone talking about politics? Blogging is about culture and other things, too.

Robin Mansell: Bloggers are an elitist bunch, increasingly doing it for the money. And there are not that many of them anyway.

Was anything left out of the speech?

The speakers did not discuss how some mainstream media has embraced blogging – for example, the Guardian and Observer weblogs. Again, they did not touch on the idea of accessibility in developing countries. When they talk about the “world” in terms of blogging, do they really mean the west?

The most surprising thing?

Most of the speeches were anecdotal. Only Professor Mansell brought in some solid statistics and empirical evidence to support her arguments.

Did you get a souvenir?

No.