The Jeff Beckham Weblog

Austin American-Statesman editor Rich Oppel was one of three newspaper editors to attend the We Media conference this month, and Oppel wrote about his experience there in his Sunday editorial.

“The media are an unsettled lot today,” Oppel writes, “with new media drawing audiences but rarely making money. Some rather ceremoniously swear off the almighty dollar.

“But not all. The angst rose when a panel of venture capitalists said they would insist on financial returns, traditional as that may be, and when foundation executives spoke of “investments” in new media based on performance instead of merely handing over money.

“Traditional media acknowledged declining paid print circulation and fragmenting TV viewers. Yet they also are bringing new talent, capital and tools to bear on the building of new audiences.”

There have been plenty of other reports coming out of the conference. Here’s a roundup of some of the reaction:

• Rich Skrenta, the CEO of Topix.net: “The problem is that the hopes that Dan Gillmor raised for the media industry in his book (We the Media) — which kicked off this whole business — have largely failed.”
• Chris Anderson, Wired editor-in-chief: “In short, We Media is alive and well. It’s just the would-be We Media institutions that are not. A phenomenon is not necessarily a business. That doesn’t make it any less of a phenomenon.”
• Mark Glaser, MediaShift: “These were all great examples of what’s happening in citizen media, but there was a self-congratulatory and self-promotional tone that didn’t feel very ‘we media.’”