One of the most remarkable results of social networking is the redefinition of journalism, if you see social networking on the Web from the point of view of Michael Arrington, the keynote speaker at the Mesh Conference being held in Toronto today and tomorrow.

Arrington said he founded Techcrunch.com, a website dedicated to tech news, “purely for fun,” but it has now grown into a major and influential site.

So he might not have started off as a journalist, but he has become one, or at least something like one — he confesses that he’s still not sure what a journalist is.” But he does know that getting news on his site very quickly is very important. It doesn’t even matter how accurate it is — “Put it up as soon as possible, then correct it,” he said. Moreover, his postings are larded with opinion, and “If I say outrageous things, I get more money.” When asked by a member of the audience about his responsibility to his readers, he answered simply: “I try to be fun.”

What’s more, this philosophy of news gathering is washing back on to traditional journalism, as evidenced by attitudes toward embargoes, a journalistic word meaning an agreement not to o to press with something before an agreed time. The idea is an old one, and was meant to help journalists get a story together with enough time to get it right.

But that’s all changed, Arrington said.

“A lot of bloggers don’t respect embargoes,” he said, “and a growing number of print journalists are also not respecting them.”

So if you want to know what happened to credibility in journalism, you know where to start looking.

Giving and getting

Carrying on a theme started in an earlier part of the current Mesh conference in Toronto, a couple of 20-something entrepreneurs echoed Arrington’s view that social media are replacing the old.

Tom Williams and Austin Hill work in the charity end of entrepreneurship, both having set up and sold a number of other businesses, making them veterans at a tender age. That prompted Williams to preface one slightly negative comment with the warning that he’s “afraid of sounding like a curmudgeon at the age of 28.”

Hill said his motivation was a comment someone made after Hill buried a 19-year-olod brother, tragically cut down by cancer. It was time, this friend said, to celebrate his brother’s life, not his death. And that led him to see his mission as “How to save the world, one random act of kindness at a time.”

As lofty as that sounded, Hill added a few moments later that “social media is about monkey see, monkey do,” and that the way set up an effective online charitable organization is to get people involved in the results of the charity, not the process of raising the money.

“Pulling out your credit card and giving money to a charity is not fun,” he said.

Williams agreed, and added that social networking must change the traditional way of doing things. “The establishment is entrenched, and needs to let go of its control,” he said.

Both speakers agreed that the agenda of the traditional media is all about delivering bad news, while online charities are about good news. People who donate to online charities can seee the results in a way they cannot in the traditional way of doing theings.

“It’s the ultimate experiential media,” Williams said.

Beating up on absent friends

“Old Media” – in all their glory – took another beating from the “New Media” at the afternoon sessions of the Mesh Conference. Trouble is, no one thought to invite the old media to hear their opinions on the subject.

A conference was chaired by Mark Evans, who announced he had made the correct decision to leave the old media for the new when he bolted from the National Post. He presented video blogger Loren Feldman, Huffington Post new media critic Rachel Sklar and emerging-media analyst Cynthia Brumfield, who all agreed that the old media should be cowering before the new, and perhaps should simply throw in the towel.

Feldman was the least explosive here, suggesting that newspapers will always have a place, and they will certainly be around for another 200 years. But, he added, they will have to change — perhaps whittle themselves down to four pages, a length Feldman evidently feels is about as long as his attention span can handle.

Brumfield said that newspapers “have been severely impacted by the Internet” because “they have to hang on to their old distribution methods” and so will become dinosaurs. She added that “20 or 30 years ago, people were limited to one newspaper a day, but now we have 20 or 30 online.”

How this passed for truth is perhaps explained by the fact that most of the people in the room had not been very conscious or even born 20 or 30 years ago. There were clearly many more newspapers then, and many households subscribed to two. If people had read only one paper day, it was perhaps because they were limiting themselves to one paper — but limiting one’s reading habits is a function of preference, not availability.

Oddly, one theme that ran through this fear-based analysis was that bloggers can, in fact, easily replace news organizations, ousting professional news reporters with freelance amateurs and opinion-mongers who might well have (as Brumfield mentioned) webcams fixed to their heads. Blumfield confessed she had become mesmerized by a cheese-maker’s website in England, which had a webcam trained on a block of cheese and she could watch it age.

I’m not making this up.

While most of the discussion was about individuals writing for the social-networking sites, Rachel Sklar didn’t seem to see a conflict between her view of the brave new world of blogging and her work for the HuffingtonPost.com website, funded by the fabulously wealthy and formidable Arianna Huffington. Sklar never addressed the fact that her employer, wealthy and powerful, was more like most of the owners of old media, rather than standing as one of the new media moguls.

The next session fared better. Entitled cryptically The Death of Newspapers: Digital Blinders — Are We an Inch Wide and a Mile Deep?, the panelists were much more realistic. Never mind that we use the metric system in Canada, and had embraced it before many of the attendees were born.

Mark Schneider, a veteran of both old media (as a reporter for CTV news) and new media (he’s now working with the Vancouver-based “citizen journalist” site called Now Public), and Nora Young of CBC Radio’s Definitely Not The Opera, seemed to have a firmer grasp on reality.

Schneider, clear-eyed, was the only one to note that no one really knows what the effect of the Internet will be; all around him everyone seemed to be speaking as though the glorious future of New Media is a foregone conclusion. But he said he was much encouraged when he discovered that on his site, at least five bloggers from Lebanon and Israel had discovered each other on Now Public, and formed their own little community, offering many different perspectives.

Young was concerned about the effect of the new media on dialectic; she noted that “we’re trying to figure out how to construct an argument” — a point I wished she had been allowed to expand upon.

Mark Federer, originally of the McLuhan Institute, spoke at great length in fluent McLuhanese, and appeared to be making fine headway framing and reframing the questions he had been given.

The conference continues tomorrow.

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