Media Carnival - the CUNY Journalism Summit

        So many smart people, so few answers. 

Since getting back to Vienna from the CUNY 2nd Journalism Summit on New Business Models for the Media, the abiding impression has been of a profession in shock, a lot of talented, thoughtful people reeling, disoriented, dizzy with confusion as if they had just stepped out of the tilt-a-whirl at the carnival.  Some of the talk was simply nonsense: People who should have known better were suggesting a media future without form, virtual newsrooms without editors, journalism without journalists, competence and quality without training or experience.  A little eerie, and some of it astonishingly glib. 

But people in shock get a little nuts. We are standing over a seismic shift.  And we are all stumbling from pillar to post, hoping to find one strong enough to hold us up.  

Still there is a real carnival aspect to all of this -- it's raucous, colorful, confusing, creative. Also dangerous, but we knew that.  Best of all is the feeling of wild abandon,  because when everything is thrown into question, all things seem possible. This is what counts because it frees up everyone's thinking. There are few assumptions and fewer rules.  

So in this sense the CUNY Summit brought an extraordinary sense of possibility, a lot of new ideas and -- what I didn't expect -- more respect for what we are already doing.  When no one has any convincing answers, and none of the models are working all that well, an oddball project is worth considering.  In our case a small, university based, commercial non-profit print-plus-web English language newspaper in a European capital sounds like as good a guess as any, and better than some. Which -- admit it! -- is fun.