Representing the "Mainstream media" were SF Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein, NYT media columnist David Carr, and Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel. Representing the "New media" were public radio's John Hockenberry, Politico founder Jim Vandehei, and Vanity Fair columnist and author and Newser yakker Michael Wolff.

Notice anything? That's right, all of these people work in the "mainstream media." Politico, which was cast as some new media vanguard, is a print newspaper with a website. So is the New York Times. And the SF Chronicle! Which led to the main problem of the evening: the entire "debate" was semantic. Panelists spent much time declaring what they weren't arguing against: great journalism, democracy, freedom, media jobs, economic success, etc. That's because they were all on the same side, in reality. They are media people who would like to remain employed somehow, like everyone else. If the proposition had been "Good riddance to print as a medium," or "Good riddance to newspapers," it would have at least been intelligible and debatable; as it was, you had the "New media" people declaring that the way they did things was faster and smarter and more democratic, and then the "Mainstream media" people saying they also did things the same way, so what the hey were they even arguing about? I don't know.

Which is not to say it was not an entertaining evening! Mostly because of the sniping between Michael Wolff and David Carr, who have a history of mutual dislike. Carr gently pointed out that Michael Wolff was arguing for the abolition of the NYT while simultaneously running a website full of NYT excerpts; Wolff said all of Carr's stories are too long, anyhow.

Michael Wolff does not have a winning personality. He whines, he gesticulates annoyingly, he takes obviously ridiculous positions for the purpose of drawing attention to himself. He is a hypocrite, and sometimes embraces his own hypocrisy to, yes, draw attention to himself. That said, Michael Wolff is not afraid to be brutally honest. Which is something media reporting needs! He demonstrated that last night when—after a question from a Hearst lawyer in the audience, and while sitting on a stage with Phil Bronstein, editor of a Hearst paper—Wolff said (we're paraphrasing) "People don't like to say this in polite company, but Hearst's newspapers are really bad. So who cares if you go out of business?"

It's true! Props to you for that, Michael Wolff, you generally grating man.

But he got got, in the end. In Carr's closing statement, he whipped out a printout of Newser's front page. It's a cool site, check it out, yada yada yada, he said. Then Carr pulled out his show-and-tell version of Newser after the "Mainstream media" had been abolished. It was the same printout, full of holes, with every story painstakingly cut out.

Mainstream media is just new media that figured out how not to go out of business. Let's spend our time arguing about important things: Where to get a job.

Let's travel back in time to seven hours ago, around when the story started to break:

When Top Model Boy's been on the scene for seven hours longer than you, you might be in trouble. Reports a tipster:

There's been a bomb threat at LaGuardia airport - but what I found most interesting was that I searched all over the internet for any news on this item - none of the news sites had been updated (Except 1010wins), none of the broadcast networks, nothing was on television, and if you tried googling it at this time, no news. Enter TWITTER- which was going through a shitstorm. Amazing where the new media is headed, huh. Apparently, this has been going on since 4 am according to one of the tweets! Yet the first news article I found was at 730. These are reasons why, sadly, the media industry is dying. :(

Sadface, indeed, though we're not totally without culpability, as even we're not reporting it until now, instead opting to make bad jokes about bad jokes. That being said, our tipster then noted the 1010WINS report that was first filed at 7:30 (and has been updated several times since then). Meanwhile, the New York Times just ran the story within the last hour.

Also sleeping in at the Times? Front-page copy-editors. Fun with contractions!

Again, we're casting the second stone, because I've been known to make the wayward copy-error or two, but I have awesome commenters to copy-edit for me on the fly! But you know what "major" news outlet was on the Bomb Scare Scoop immediately?

It's a Twitter account run by a 19 year-old Dutch kid named Michael Van Poppel that breaks news based on Twitter reports and smaller, non-MSM outlets before anyone else. And that's the future of news: while New Media makes Dick Jokes, and Old Media sleeps off their hangovers, some kid's crushing the scoop in a format perfected to a poetic science by Shaq. Awesome.

Oh, yeah, BTW: some drunkass shut down LaGuardia Airport with a fairly sufficient bomb threat:

Passengers pointed out an apparently drunk man to police officers. When officers approached him, according to the newspaper, the man said he had a bomb in his bag. The report continues to say there was a homemade device inside, rigged up to look like a bomb.

The most painful thing about Blah Girls is how boring the Web series is. It's like the writers took all the jokes and memes from last year and rolled them into a Hills-like setting (complete with Hills-like pointlessness). Ashton may not realize that on the Internet, jokes have to be super current. Quips about Naomi Campbell throwing cell phones at people? So five minutes ago.

Aside from the moldy topics (including the fresh-from-2002-joke about Gwen Stefani not having pink hair anymore and living in London), the jokes are pretty flat. An example from the "Ex-patriots" episode:

Blah Girl: British guys are so hot! Prince William, Orlando Bloom, Harry Potter...
(A thought-bubble of Harry Potter holding a broom stick pops up)
Harry Potter (In an Elvis voice?): Rub my broomstick, baby.

Hilarious, right?

Another bizarre thing about the website is the racial stereotyping of the black Blah Girl, Tiffany:

Tiffany's bio reveals that her "current location" is "[her] hood" (that's how black people talk!), her biggest weaknesses are "limited edition sneakers" (another thing black people like, right?), and her biggest fear is "getting caught in crossfire." Wait, what?

The Blah Girls also include a token twee gay blogger named Stewart whose pink fauxhawk might lead one to believe that he's a biting satirical representation of Perez Hilton. But that would be expecting too much from this blog. Instead, Stewart is just a stereotypical flamboyant gay who is totes obsessed with clothes and his weight (his bio says that when he grows up he wants to "always be able to fit into skinny jeans") and he supplies the Blah Girls with their celebrity news (or something).

The site also has a heavy product placement deal with Vitamin Water. In the "Adoption" episode, Tiffany says that she wants to drink "Vitamin Water Formula 50" to be "cool like 50."

Hm, I wonder who the site's sponsors are?

Ah, that explains it.

There are some funny things on the site: One Blah Girls' dog is named "Botox." One Blah Girl complains that her step-mother burned down the family summer house after too many "Lexipro and Limoncello cocktails." A caption on a Michael Phelps photo in which he hugs a girl in a bikini reads, "Feel that? That's my ninth medal."

We'd like to think that the site could get funnier. But, since this concerns the doomed post-Punk'd combination of Ashton Kutcher and celebrities (remember Pop Fiction?), we'll pronounce Blah Girls dead on arrival.

Blah Girls
Dude, Is That Your Gossip Site? [Portfolio]

"Many schools gradually branched into video editing, Web design and blogging, among other media, as they became more widely accepted over the years. More recently, courses are being organized into concentrations and in several high-profile cases, the programs are receiving significant backing from foundations seeking to improve and reform journalism education for the 21st century.

“I think one of the main benefits of encouraging convergence and learning how to tell stories not just through one medium but many media” — such as video cameras, cell phones, pen and paper, Twitter and other tools — is “creating an environment [in which] you are not just preparing a journalist to tell a story with one method,” said Ellyn Angelotti, an adjunct faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank, and interactivity editor of its Web site."

Twitter. TWITTER. Tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition and people are talking about TWITTER, perhaps the most idiotic form of communication of our time.

Anyway! @J-School: Late for my YouTube seminar! One last important fact from the article: between 40-60% of working journalists never went to J-school.

In New Media Programs, Who Benefits?[Inside Higher Ed]

That said, we have a very good relationship with our bloggers; we’re unbelievably respectful of them. By blogging, they get terrific exposure and our brand gives them a unique platform. We’ve had a positive two-way relationship with them. Could that include money at some point? Sure. But it feels very 1993 to say, ‘Hey, it’s all about the check that I get at the end of the month.’

How incredibly, arrogantly out of touch. But hey, but this wouldn't be such a problem if people started REFUSING TO WRITE FOR FREE!

[Q&A: Betsy Morgan]

The point behind social news is, as I said, to empower users. This assumes that users can produce good news. Obviously Digg's user base, which grew from Rose's fanbase from his days as a host on TechTV, hasn't reproduced the New York Times. Instead, they've curated a site focused on servicey news, workday entertainment, and big scoops: lists of funny old cartoons, studies about pot's effect on the body, and updates on new technology. The content reflects the user base. Theoretically, as the site grows more mainstream so will the news, until Digg is as useful as Drudge for a snapshot of what's important today.

But to keep the site interesting to all users, Digg must balance the influence of top users with that of casual or one-time users. Because core Digg users can find each other and often promote each other's stories, they may dominate the site unless Digg actively balances their role. That's what the company did, unannounced, on Tuesday. And the top users were unhappy.

Every major site has a core user base (on Gawker, it's the commenters), which sees the site quite differently than the casual visitors. They feel an ownership, to such a point that they will directly insult those running the site for not catering to their whims. Thing is, those core users are often as important to (and spend as much time on) the site as its official employees, so they can't be ignored.

A typical newspaper or TV station can only do so much to interact with its mass audience. Even then, audience members don't have much influence over each other; the medium is one-to-many. If the New York Times screws up, it only has to face bad press, not a reader revolt. Rose has to put out every fire whenever he decides to change his business. And surprisingly, he's done a great job at it. He's learned from mistakes and changed site policy; the next major algorithm change will surely be better announced.

Digg may not be as big as Facebook or MySpace, but I get the feeling that if it were, users would still feel closer to Kevin Rose than they do to Mark Zuckerberg or Rupert Murdoch. Sorry for having a banal opinion, but I like how Digg works.

[Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid]

No matter how we tried to narrow our Nexis searches, we were still overwhelmed by Boy Wonders from every era and industry, many of whom played baseball or were members of various state legislatures or were Bill Gates. We were going for five but settled for three.

• Mark Fabiani was considered a Boy Wonder when, in 1989, he became LA mayor Tom Bradley's chief of staff at just 32. We don't know what happened after that, but we're pretty sure the '92 riots were his fault.
• Daniel Gordon was Merrill Lynch's boy wonder when he took over their energy-trading business in 1999. He got caught trying to cheat Merrill out of $43 million dollars in the same trading schemes that executives at Enron - his biggest trading partner - were using to fill their offshore accounts. His career was over in March 2001, just a few weeks before the entire energy market collasped.
• In 1984, a young Ricky Martin joined the pop group Menudo. The band was never seen or heard from again.

Buried Alive begins with a terrifying darkness, the sound of staccato breathing, spurts of weeping, and the horrifying screech of fingernails against metal. Someone is buried alive. Rick, a handsome, 20 year-old, is just one of the victims trapped in a coffin. Illuminated in the darkness by the flame of a cigarette lighter, the details of the scene come into focus as a night-vision camera, embedded in the corner of the coffin, captures his every move. On his left, an ominous warning: SAVE YOUR BREATH.

Buried Alive [Sony Pictures]

The website's tagline is "Breaking Business News and Opinion, Executive Profiles and Careers." So what did they break today? There's a piece about Hugo Chavez forcing oil companies out of Venezuela; a much longer and thoughtful piece ran on the front page of the Wall Street Journal today. There's a perfunctory (330 words) update about the Rupert Murdoch-Dow Jones takeover. There's an article about business spending that essentially summarizes a Bloomberg article about the same thing, and another about the Bear Stearns hedge fund bailout that's also a takeaway from a Bloomberg piece. Their fifth lead story is about the pricing plans for the iPhone, with zero analysis or new insight—just a list of prices and features. There's nothing terrible really. None of these are must-reads, or unique stories that the average business executive hasn't already read when he picks up his WSJ in the morning.

Also on the front page today is a story about art market hedge funds, including The Art Trading Fund, which isn't that dissimilar from that outfit's mention in the Economist last month.

And as the magazine spends the next month closing its second issue, are any of the staff writers going to have stories for the web? Not likely. It's like a more serious version of the Radar effect: The more stressful the magazine closing, the less content there is on the website.

Okay. So the Breaking Business News is a wash. How about those much-vaunted bloggers? Well, a couple of them are doing some decent stuff. Veteran technology writer Kevin Maney, who used to write a tech blog on USAToday.com, has a serviceable general-interest technology blog, but it's a far cry from anything you can find on, say, Wired.com. Felix Salmon seems to be updating his Market Movers finance blog the most out of any of the Portfolio bloggers, and it's probably the best one on there. Matt Cooper's politics blog is, surprisingly, mostly a snore, and Lauren Goldstein Crowe's fashion blog suffers in comparison to the others out there. Or to reading Lucky.

What should be a huge red flag, though, is that almost none of the posts—on any of the blogs—are getting comments. Are the bloggers writing into a void? Each post has a big orange link to "Start the Conversation" at the bottom, but no one seems to be taking them up on the offer.

Salmon didn't seem particularly troubled by this when we spoke to him yesterday. "I absolutely don't worry about that," he said. "The way I'm looking at it at the moment is that if people feel like they have something to add to what I'm saying, then leave a comment." Blog posts, Salmon said, are not edited, and bloggers have freedom to write about whatever they want.

Most of Condé Nast's magazine's websites fall under the umbrella of the company's online division, CondéNet—to the growing displeasure of some magazine staffers, who resent the control CondéNet has over their magazines' sites. But Portfolio's website is an experiment: It's managed by Portfolio, and not by CondéNet. Still, the print magazine and the website have little crossover; insiders say that magazine editor Joanne Lipman is almost entirely hands-off, leaving the operation of the website to managing editor Chris Jones, who was a reporter and editor at Wired and Yahoo before coming over to Portfolio.

"The magazine had months of people sitting around and working on it," Salmon told us. "With the website, they were basically hiring people at launch. It was all very last-minute." Hence, beta! Of course, that's a slightly odd state of affairs; the original announcement about the launch of the magazine, in August 2005, included the information that there would be a website that Lipman and publisher David Carey would be developing.

The website still has some kinks—in addition to the uneven content—to work out. "The site will be cleaned up," a source at the magazine told us. "Right now it's hard to find some stuff." There are also little things that make us think that no one's minding the store; the five articles on the Most Emailed Stories list were all published at the beginning of May, which raises two questions: Is that feature broken? Or is no one reading the site? (Also, letting Portfolio contributor Deborah Schoeneman pimp Hampton Style, which she's editing, on the site is pretty tacky.)

According to Portfolio spokeswoman Perri Dorset, the website will be moved out of beta in September, when the second issue of the magazine comes out, and at that time several new features (she declined to say what they were) would also be rolled out.

The website's advertising structure mimics the print magazine's; according to Dorset, the website sold 10 packages "for this first beta testing" period, from April to September, and advertising for the fall is being sold now. "People are very interested," she said.

Traffic information would not be available until September, Dorset said. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the website did not hit Nielsen's reporting threshold of 360,000 unique visitors in May. By comparison, neither did business-related websites like Dealbreaker.com and TraderDaily.com. More established sites include Forbes.com, which pulled in over 6.4 million uniques in May, while BusinessWeek Online had just over 2.3 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

We are looking forward to the day when we don't have these discussions about "the future of newspapers." Every time, it goes like this: Journalism lives, but print is dead! Investors are, mostly, evil! Let us not forget that profit margins are still healthy! And most important: Newspapers are not losing readers! Remember the Internet!

Charlie Rose and Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, came to the stage. Mr. Rose was wearing bright red socks. He loves newspapers too! "I have seven newspapers dropped on my doorstep 10 blocks from here, every day," he said. It is no secret that many newspaper people, implicitly or explicitly, at least partially blame Mr. Newmark for the slow and steady demise of newspaper profits, particularly in classified advertising. Perhaps what they find most frustrating about Mr. Newmark is his (so-far) almost total disregard for making a huge profit off of Craigslist—he's a competitor, but he's rejecting the cash that so many othes would gladly, desperately take.

But Mr. Newmark says he believes, very strongly, in the importance of journalism, particularly investigative journalism, and he has begun to support these efforts financially. He has a clique of Internet friends—PressThink's Jay Rosen; Jeff Jarvis, who writes the blog Buzzmachine; Ellen Miller, of the Sunlight Foundation, which aims to reduce corruption and increase transparency in elected officials; and citizen media-ist Dan Gillmor—whom he consults regularly about investigative reporting matters. He watches Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, CNN, the BBC, and Keith Olbermann, and reads the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle (the "Chron"), and the Huffington Post. He also suggested that the crowd "take a look at the Soho Blogplex, around Broadway and Prince," where several media blogs have their offices. (Gross!)

Mr. Newmark has what he calls "nerd values," which means, he says, that he continues to run Craigslist because it "feels right," that "once you make enough money to take care of things, money enables you to change the world." Power, he says, is "a pain in the butt." —Doree

Lead editorial team across multiple platforms toward production of content for direct and ad revenues, marketing/PR, membership and audience development. Oversee complex network of blogs covering multiple industry verticals.

Speak publicly, to the press and on air on digital media and community.

Optimize traffic through use of Web analytics, search engine optimization and marketing, RSS, e-mail and other PR, marketing and technological techniques.

Increase editorial coverage in key revenue-producing areas. Maximize editorial effectiveness to increase audience and attract quality advertisers.

Negotiate editorial and commercial partnerships.

Recruit and train staff to assemble peak performance teams.

Conceived, oversaw, launched and moderated highly profitable breakfast speakers professional series. Produced concurrent video.

Dorian Benkoil's Professional Web Page [Benkoil]