Unfortunately, Mount Pleasant, Mich., is thousands of miles away from San Francisco and Online News Association 2009 at the Hilton.
But I did take some time today to check out two keynotes from today, via ONA 09’s Livestream. Here are some of the quotes that caught my ear, and they should for any journalist/media entrepreneur … some of these also were pulled from Twitter feeds, following #ONA09:
Evan Williams, Founder/CEO of Twitter (also started Blogger)
On the dips Blogger and Twitter went through at one point: “There was something I just knew in my gut in both cases, and my team knew, that this was worth doing. … As embarrassing as it is to go through those times, the alternative is worse. … That didn’t seem as painful as stopping. Giving up. That would be more painful longer term because there’d be this question and potential regret.”
“I get motivated somewhat by the world telling me I’m going to fail.” (Words I would live by.)
On managing uncertainty in what you’re doing: “It’s sort of the nature of the game that you don’t know where you’re going. It doesn’t bother me a great deal. That’s not an excuse for not having a vision where you want to go. But you don’t know what it’s going to look like. You know your vision is wrong in some ways. If I wasn’t comfortable with that, then I wouldn’t done most of the things I’ve done.”
Leo Laporte, host of syndicated tech talk show “The Tech Guy Labs”
(I didn’t catch a lot of this quite yet, but here are some quotes I found on Twitter that stood out to me)
“We’ve trained our audience to sit down and shut up. Now we have to train them to stand up and be heard.”
“Twitter is the first iteration of the Internet’s nervous system.”
“Podcasting is essentially dead. It’s just too darn hard.” (Couldn’t agree more.)
“Advertisers have tasted the crack of Google and Facebook; no longer like that shake weed that the networks are offering.”
“The bad news is that there’s no money in gathering facts. You journalists are the monks of the online world.” (He also said we do it for a passion with low pay and we sleep on rocks.) “But we need you.”
Posted by Brian Manzullo at October 2, 2009
Journalism, Social Media