ONA 2005: Where's the passion?

Someone must have snuck oysters into my Korean meal last night because I threw up five times and consequently didn't get to sleep until 3am. But I still made it to the Hilton for 8am to moderate the Online News Association's first discussion session for international members. And I was one of the few people there without a debilitating hangover. Journalists are the same wherever they are from...

Where's the passion?

Closing the ONA conference 2005 this afternoon, Jeff Jarvis quoted Rafat Ali complaining of industry malaise: "This is perhaps the most exciting time to be an online journalist, at the most exciting time in the media sphere.

"Yet, at ONA, where was the passion? Where was the excitement about working in the most innovative time in the history of media? In its place what I see is self-doubt, existential crisis, a siege mentality."

Well, the passion - or perhaps the venom - appeared to be represented by Robert Cauthorn. He's former vice president of digital media for the San Francisco Chronicle and a seasoned news industry ranter.

He said that the evolution of newspapers is being held back by the current generation of executives. Friday's speech by New York Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger about the paper's 'platform shift' had sent shivers down his spine, he said.

"It's not what we do to reform newspapers but what we do to replace them," said Mr Cauthorn.

He predicts that newspapers are likely to become a three-day-a-week product, and that in ten years newspaper firms themselves will be far smaller operations.

Pointing to a shrinking advertiser base and stagnating sales, he said that print has demonstrably failed as a product.

"Business logic moves in generational cycles and we will have to wait until this generation of executives dies before things will change. And the industry will be diminished in the process."

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