We’ve got some good news and some bad news about the media stream at mesh 2011: the bad news is that Jeff Jarvis, who was scheduled to be our media keynote for the conference this year, has had to bow out — with many profuse apologies — because of an earlier commitment. The good news is that the equally excellent Emily Bell has agreed to take Jeff’s place as the media keynote, and we couldn’t be happier about it.
Emily is the director of the newly-founded Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and the former director of digital content for The Guardian in Britain. She was the editor-in-chief of the Guardian’s 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.
In addition to her job running the Tow Center at Columbia, Emily 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, she 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.
Emily 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.”
In addition to her keynote, Emily will also be taking part in a panel at mesh — along with The Economist’s digital editor Gideon Lichfield and Micah Sifry, co-founder of TechPresident and the Personal Democracy Forum — that will look at how WikiLeaks and others of its ilk are changing the nature of what we call journalism and media in the 21st century.
