Online News Association Conference 2009 (ONA), San Francisco

Allvoices is exhibiting at the ONA conference in San Francisco for the first time. This conference is great, the attendees are advocates of new media for mainstream organizations.

I really enjoyed the session by Paul Saffo, the futurist, who predicts that there are tremedous opportunities for news organizations. The news companies need to think of themselves as media companies.

The world of news is changing and the news producers are the consumers. This is very different from how mainstream news organization perceive themselves as just producers of news. He forecasted that more news is going to be produced by censors and robots connected to the internet. ( eg earth quakes being detected by sensors and and producing a text message reporting it on the internet). He said that mainstream media keeps complaining about the quality of news produced by consumers and sensors.... he believes that quality will come but they should embrace change and technology, and the time is now!

This is the era of great change and opportunity to create news organizations of the future.