If you follow the media business in Chicago like me, you hotly anticipated the Chicago Journalism Town Hall last February. It was a rare meeting of about 350 media-minded people in Chicago, all trying to figure out what comes next in the industry.
Almost as soon as the meeting began it became clear to the audience and organizer Ken Davis, that the topic had too many tendrils to be covered in one conference. Although Ken gamely tried to cover it all, the meeting seemed to divide into two main topics, the how the nature of journalism is changing and how what a successful media businesses will look like.
Sitting in the audience together, my friend Scott Smith and I decided that we wanted to move forward the discussion about successful media business in Chicago. We both wrote for Chicagoist.com, he's been web editor for Time Out: Chicago and Playboy.com, and I've had the media bug since college, and led an investor group to purchase alternative newspapers a few years back.
After batting some ideas back and forth, Scott and I hooked up with Barbara Iverson, a Columbia College professor that does a lot of "big think" on media issues - exactly the kind of person we needed to shape the event right.
The conference, The 2009 Chicago Media Future Conference, set for Saturday, June 13 at 1:30 pm, sounds grandiose, but we've decided to dream big. The website is nothing more than a splash page at the moment, but we've got plans for a sign-up page, discussion of the conference, and after the conference to post video of the panels so that people can watch the discussion in perpetuity.
What are we discussing? We've got two questions:
- How do people consume news and what do they do with it?
- How do you make money selling the news and who is willing to pay for it?
We plan to stock the panels with folks involved in the business of the media - everything from SEO specialists to managing editors to advertising sales managers. We want to focus on finding solutions to problems - and figuring out the questions to ask. More than anything we hope this conference to be about forward movement.
I'm not going to get into too much detail here, since Scott did a much better job on his blog, and we'll definitely talk about it more once we get the conference site up. But there are a few things that should be said:
- Stephen Schmidt is building the conference website, and it already looks amazing. Anyone looking for a strong web designer should check out his portfolio.
- We need help with video taping the event, running the check-in and helping to pay for room rental, refreshments, etc. Anyone want to sponsor this thing?
- Nothing is set in stone, and we need your ideas on how to do this right. Drop us a line if you've got a solid idea. We need them.
Dad, husband, MBA, homeowner, Roman Catholic, Cubs fan, media junkie and Democratic political consultant in Chicago. Drop Mike Fourcher a line at mike (at) fourcher-dot-net.
Leave a comment