Alumnae Ponder the Future of Communications
of The New Yorker (center right) led a discussion on trade and mass-market magazine journalism.
The screen behind Elizabeth Spiers, founder of Gawker and Dead Horse Media, had a banner headline eliciting chuckles from all corners of the room: cryingwhileeating.com.
“There’s never going to be a ‘crying while eating’ magazine or TV channel,” Spiers said. But in an age where traditional print media are scrambling to hold on to subscribers and searching for traction and profit, such niche markets have taken hold on the Internet. Online pioneers like Spiers may hold the key to how we get our news in the future.
This was the subject of a winter conference, The Future in Communic@tions, coproduced by the Alumnae Association and the MHC Office of Communications. As the printed word adapts to life with the Internet, alumnae working in communications gathered to network with students and each other—and to hear about their profession’s future.
A panel moderated by Carol A. Sliwa ’80, which included Sheryl Y. McCarthy ’69, Linda Giannasi O’Connell ’69, Julie L. Sell ’83, an Avice A. Meehan ’77, reviewed the financial difficulties facing news outlets in the Internet age, the profession’s rewards, and their own career paths.
That the conference was tailored to alumnae in a specific field resonated with Carlyn Saltman ’80. “I’m so glad this happened,” she said. “We get together with classmates during the year, but I would come every year to meet with other alumnae in my field.” The Alumnae Association plans to offer similar conferences for alumnae in other career areas; the next will be for educators, this fall.
Spiers (right), Saturday’s keynote speaker, spoke about the inroads made by “new media”—online outlets such as blogs and podcasts—of which she is a pioneering entrepreneur. Gawker and Dead Horse Media sites have become enormously popular with the nine-to-five crowd, who would have picked up a newspaper in a previous era.
New media have both transformed news sources and proven cost-effective. Spiers compared her venture to Condé Nast’s Portfolio, a new business magazine, which took $125 million to launch. “I think we spent about $125,000 to launch DealBreaker,” she said, referring to the Wall-Street-gossip site she established. Spiers’s talk gave Amy L. Cavanaugh ’06 “a good feel for career options in nontraditional media.”
Friday’s keynote address was delivered by Priscilla Painton ’80, who recently left Time magazine to serve as editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster. Painton focused on the pros and cons of Internet and traditional news reporting. The instantaneous nature of the Internet and pressure to break news quickly makes it less likely that what is released has been fully fact-checked, she explained. “Big stories that change minds or the course of events take the one thing we’re missing lately—time.”
While “the Internet has cut into the news-breaking muscle of traditional journalism,” Painton admitted, bloggers “will never open Baghdad bureaus.” She seemed hopeful that journalism’s “holy trinity” of “patience, diligence, and focus will find a way to resurface” in this period of rapid media evolution.
One thing hasn’t changed, Painton added. “The craft of old-fashioned walking the beat will always have to be there,” whether the result appears in The New York Times or online. —Meg Massey ’08
Photos by Paul Schnaittacher
Learn More:
- Additional news coverage of the conference, produced by the MHC Communications Office
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/news/newsfull.shtml?node=5543694 - Audio of both keynote speeches, and photos from the conference
- Alumnae interested in future networking and career events in communications and journalism are warmly invited to join an online discussion group, led by Kate Axt ’01 and hosted on the Alumnae Association Web site.
