One of the media panelists we’re excited about having at mesh 2011 is Emily Bell, the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and former director of digital content for The Guardian in Britain.
Bell was also the editor-in-chief of the Guardian Unlimited web operation from 2001 to 2006, during which time she oversaw such groundbreaking projects as the launch of the “Comment Is Free” open blogging platform — one of the first major efforts at crowdsourcing by a traditional media outlet — as well as the massively successful MP Expenses project, which saw 20,000 people comb through close to 300,000 public expense reports filed by members of parliament.
Now running the Tow Center at Columbia, Bell is a leading media commentator for a number of outlets, as well as writing on her own blog about the future of media and journalism online. During a recent presentation at Massey College in Toronto, sponsored by Samara Canada, Emily talked about her experiences at The Guardian and about how newspapers need to be “of the web, not just on the web” in order to succeed.
Bell has also written about how WikiLeaks represents a fundamental shift in the world of the media and journalism, saying: “If you follow the latest cache of diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks and reported by the Guardian, The New York Times and others it is impossible not to conclude that this is a pivotal moment for journalism, its teaching and its practice.” Bell went on to say that WikiLeaks represents “the first real battleground between the political establishment and the open web,” and that it forces journalists and news organizations to “demonstrate to what extent they are now part of an establishment it is their duty to report on.”
Bell will be taking part in a panel at mesh 2011 — along with media consultant and author Jeff Jarvis and Micah Sifry of TechPresident and the Personal Democracy Forum — about this exact question: how WikiLeaks and others of its ilk are changing the nature of what we call journalism in the 21st century.
