When the Internet delivers the news

Moderator Andrew Rasiej noted that when the Iranian election protests began, people found news about them on YouTube, not on television. "When The New York Times published, its story was old even though it was only six hours after the fact," Rasiej said.

Gillmor earned applause when he said, "broadband consolidation, the phone and cable duopoly, scares the hell out of me."

"When they have it, they will want to control content," Rich agreed.

But Tumulty said that Google influences content with its search engine algorithm as writers try to improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of their stories. "Journalists are writing stories that are designed to get hits. It distorts the way they frame and emphasize things."

Google's influence on the Internet is not likely to change soon.

Others blamed the Internet for ignorance.

"My brother, who I dearly love, believes that man never landed on the moon," said NPR's Simon. "He keeps sending me links to prove it. My point is that on the Internet, he can find the news he wants. People need stories that upset them occasionally."

"How will we get people to eat their spinach," asked Rich. "People seem to want celebrity news, Michael Jackson 24x7."

But it's not true that celebrity news is what people want, according to a report from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. "About two-thirds of the public (64%) say news organizations gave too much attention to the death of the 50-year-old performer, who had been rehearsing for a major comeback tour," the report said.

Celebrity news isn't what people want. Instead, celebrity news is what's selling, according to the Economist magazine. "The two biggest [gossip magazines], People and Us Weekly, each sold more copies last year than they did in 2001. In a world of fragmenting audiences they boast an enormous reach. Fully 43m Americans, about two-thirds of them women, flick through a copy of People each week," the article said.

"This is odd, because the forces blamed for the decline of print news are no less potent in the celebrity sector," the article added. "Celebrity news has its own online aggregators, several of them linked to web portals.... There is more direct competition, too, with three big glossy magazines having launched since 2002."

Because celebrity news is selling well, the industry is already producing too much of it, the Economist added. "The field is probably too crowded," the article said.

Who will bring radical change?

While the panel lacked urgency in its dissection of the flaws in the journalism business model, a presentation by John Byrne, executive editor of BusinessWeek.com, at the Mediabistro Circus at the start of the month, preached pain and change. Byrne said that media properties are in a death spiral borne of hubris and denial, overexpansion and willful technological ignorance.

For example, Byrne said that BusinessWeek.com has joined the aggregators rather than fight them and has a service called Business Exchange containing over 1,500 Web sites that requires two full time staff, one of them an intern.

A recent Economistmagazine editorial also contained suggestions that were more radical than those the panel was considering, such as micropayments, perhaps facilitated by better mobile devices and more sophisticated mobile phone software.

In addition, the Economist editorial said that companies would have to charge for news. "Up to now, most have been offering their content free online, but that is unsustainable, because there isn't enough advertising revenue online to pay for it. So either the amount of news produced must shrink, or readers must pay more," the Economistsaid.

One news site is hiring. TalkingPointsMemo, funded in part by donations and in part by advertising, is looking for eight new employees in New York and Washington, D.C., which will roughly double the size of its staff, the site's founder, Joshua Micah Marshall, wrote recently.