On a chilly morning last week, hundreds of journalists, advertisers and technologists gathered at The TimesCenter in New York for the Mashable Media Summit. Not surprisingly, tablets, laptops and smartphones were sprawled across laps, as Mashable’s Founder and CEO, Pete Cashmore took the stage to make the opening remarks.
Over the course of the day, speakers explored the growing overlap between journalism, technology and social media. Some of the key moments included:
· Terry McDonell, editor of Sports Illustrated talked about the evolution of his magazine, while a screen displayed original sketches for the publication’s iPad edition. “Sports is so ripe for the iPad tablet,” McDonell said, noting that his team used to publish 5,000 pages a year. Now, the magazine’s page count can reach up to 100,000 or sometimes 200,000 a year. “None of us have the same job we had three years ago.”
· Bloomberg West’s anchor, Emily Chang, sat down with Foursquare general manager Evan Cohen. Cohen himself admitted that he hadn’t checked in when he arrived to the conference. To help remedy such oversights, Foursquare will soon be launching a check-in reminder. Users will be able to click a tab and the service will save the name of, say, a restaurant they’re interested in trying. And, the next time that user is near the restaurant, Foursquare will remind them that they wanted to go there months ago.
· Mashable editor Lauren Indvik, Gilt Group founder Alexis Maybank, L2 researcher Maureen Mullen and Esquire’s editor-in-chief David Granger discussed the new model of content and commerce. Granger talked up a new venture between Esquire and J.C. Penney called “Clad,” an e-commerce fashion site for men. Maybank, meanwhile, stressed how important their editorial content is becoming, noting the company’s hiring of Kate Maxwell from Condé Nast Traveler as editor of Gilt Groupe’s travel blog and deals site Jetsetter in August. When Granger mentioned that Maybank hired Josh Peskowitz, from Esquire.com, to be Gilt Groupe’s style director for the men’s retail site, she spoke into the microphone and said, “Sorry. Maybe you should have sat between us,” looking to her other side at Mullen.
· Vadim Lavrusik, Facebook’s journalist program manager, discussed the best ways for journalists to take advantage of the site. He highlighted the benefits and disadvantages of enabling people to subscribe to your page, creating a fan page, and the purpose of the timeline, a feature which will be released shortly. “Profiles and ‘subscribe’ are going to be the most useful for journalists that are posting as themselves,” said Lavrusik.
· New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter spoke towards the end of the long day, but made points that stuck with the audience. “We benefit when we listen, but we benefit even more when we respond.” He tries to tweet back to every single person who writes him on Twitter (he currently has 88,398 thousand followers), because he thinks that if he connects with his fans they will be more likely to pay for The New York Times. He told the audience to embrace conversation, and that print guys are no longer adverse to change. “The more I put into the machine, the more I get back,” Stelter said. He also told the journalists in the audience not to self-censor, and that they should pitch that crazy story idea they have, because they’ll have a lot more power if they don’t hold back.