Clients gather at Media Forum

More than 130 MDLF clients, funders and friends came together at the Media Forum in Bratislava, Slovakia, on 13-15 May for two days of discussions and ideas exchange. The biennial event focused on issues shaping the future of the media, like the explosion of video journalism and the emergence of the networked society, with insights and experiences shared by clients and specialists.

After an opening dinner at the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum to mark both the opening of the Media Forum and MDLF's 15th anniversary - Slovakia is the country where MDLF made its very first loan to the daily SME - the first two sessions set the forward-looking tone with experts and thinkers outlining their visions of the future of media.

Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of Visual and Interactive Communications at Syracuse University in the USA, identified four trends that are transforming the media landscape: the convergence of media appliances into a single mobile device; the transformation of information scarcity to overload; the rise of individuated media; and the growing impact of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries on the media.

Jeremy Wagstaff, award-winning writer, columnist and commentator on technology, social media and journalism, examined the massive changes in how news is collected and reported, and the impact it is having on media businesses. In a world where news is often gathered and distributed by people involved in breaking events, such as bombings or floods, using Twitter and other social media, news outlets need to change how they work. He said that they have to make information smarter, to cede control to their audiences and to add metadata. Media need to embrace the role of collator and curator as well as collector, and help enable the public to create news and information through sharing and collective intelligence.

David Dunkley Gyimah, videojournalist and Artist in Residence at the Southbank Centre in the UK, outlined his vision of a different kind of storytelling in videojournalism, one in which pictures drive the story, rather than the narrative driving the pictures. He also explained his belief that VJs will develop a kind of cinema vérité cinematography to help drive their reporting.

Other future vision presentations included Rosental Alves, Director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, who portrayed a media landscape changing from the current desert - one dominated by a relatively small number of traditional media companies - to the complex abundance of a rainforest, where information flows through a symbiotic network of individuals and media outlets. Ivan Sigal, Executive Director of Global Voices, explained that one of the main challenges facing media is to organize, contextualize and explain this abundance of information.

Bernard Poulet, Editor of L'Expansion in France and Chair of MDLF's Board of Directors, warned that we are entering a difficult period of transition as the media moves from the traditional business model, which is proving to be unsustainable as advertising collapses, to a future model that is as yet unknown. One possible future was outlined by James O'Shea, Co-founder and Editor of Chicago News Coop, USA. His organization brings together a large number of members who are dedicated to building communities through quality journalism.

Mixed with crystal-ball visions were practical sessions on how to make use of the most important trends impacting on news businesses, such as creating a network of citizen journalists, attracting a younger generation of readers and developing mobile platforms for news delivery.

There were also discussions about the massive importance of video, including the reflections of two clients - one which had provided training (Video Journalism Movement) to another (Krestyanin) - and the importance of media businesses improving their environmental performance.

The final session was the most poignant of all, with journalists from Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Burma, Nepal, Guatemala and China describing the difficulties of operating a media business there. They talked of beatings, jailing, censorship and murder. But the audience also heard how independent information can have a positive impact on society, such as how the broadcasting of a shocking two-minute video clip showing a young woman being beaten in the street by the Taliban led to an outpouring of support for social and religious tolerance in Pakistan.