Stonybrook

Earlier story: http://wwww.mediagiraffe.org/stonybrook

This afternoon's panel:

What responsibilities do journalists have to educate their own communities?

• Neil Budde, president, chief product officer, DailyMe.com
• Vivian Schiller, CEO, NPR
• Andrew Hayward, retired CBS News president
• Ted Koppel, former anchor, ABC News and managing editor, Discovery Channel
• Alexandra Wallance, senior vp, NBC News

Neil Budde: TV shows measured. Now every single page and click is trackable. "And that's really what's changing the economics of this business . . . .Each piece of content is now available and selectable by the user, and that get's measured."

Hayward: "He's solid inthe journalsit sense. The evidence he shows is verifiable. And he also devotes more resources to the stories he focuses on than most news organizations."

Koppel: "Jon Stewart is to television news what a great editorial cartoonist is to a newspaper. If you are going to look at a great editorial cartoon and think you have grasped everything that a story is about, you're missing something."

"What troubles me about Jon, is not his program, it is that so many young people look at that and operate under the illusion that they are getting a full newscast . . . part of the problem today is that the full newscasts are not full newscasts."

Morning Edition has more audience than any of the morning network TV shows -- about 16 million listeners in a given week, Schiller said.

KOPPEL: "Money affects what a business does, and we have discovered we are just like any ohter business -- but we're not. ... it is there to inform the public and inform the public on issues that may or may not be entertaining. And sometimes we are going to have to be a little bit dull . . .I don't think we have to be dull to be substantive. But we do have to get an audience."

SCHILLER: Talks about a chance in the dynamics of the business that is relevant to news literacy. She talks about . . . "promiscuity . . . That's the notion that news consumers today are much more promiscuous in their consumption of news from a variety of sources than ever before . . . we have to think about how we help people that are coming up, the digital natives, to undestand that they can get their understanding of news through the constellation of news media."

BUDDE: DailyMe tries to elevate the brands which are part of the mix of news. When he was at Yahoo, most users they surveyed thought they were getting their news from Yahoo. They didn't understand that it was coming from The AP and many other sources. News doesn't just come from "where you found it," observes Budde.

Wallace argued that network nightly news has never been more substantive than it is now and that audiences have grown over the last year. Earlier, she said she had come to grips early in her career that the TV news business is in large part about selling automobiles (the key advertisers) and that's in inevitable reality.

HAYWARD: "There are a lot of examples of journalism that are drawn by pure pandering . . . to what extend to you feel that we as news providers live up to the standards that Howie is now teaching his students about."

KOPPEL: "When we add the term democratization to a topic . . . we Americans respond it has to be good. I don't think so. I don't think the democratization of news gathering is necessarily of itself a good thing." Having 10 million bloggers creating news without being able to determine their motives, he said, "I think is horrifying." At least on "60 Minutes" there are 40 people "who have been there since before the flood . . . but at least we know something about them, we know about how the process takes place . . . people who make sure that certain standards are met. . . . if we don't make sure that our own standards are meet, then they will dump us by the millions."

HAYWARD: What about a new kind of news where citizens get to have their own voice.