The “changing media landscape.”

As a student at Columbia University, the “golden temple” of mainstream media, that’s a phrase I hear a lot. Everyone is trying to come to grips with it.

I wonder — how do you grab something that’s constantly changing?

So yesterday we had a panel discussion with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, among others, aptly titled “The Changing Media Landscape.” (Audio)

Wikipedia is always changing. Maybe they are on to something?

In the middle of the lecture Sree Sreenivasan, the panel moderator, changed the source on a WikiNews article (its somewhat failed attempt at joining journalism) — attributing Jimmy Wales as the author of an AP article.

Within five minutes it was corrected (disclosure: it was someone from the audience). Still, it was an example of what makes Wikipedia reliable—having no editor when it really has countless editors.

Some people think this needs to change. The Citizendium Project is an experimental wikiproject combining public participation with expert supervision that will launch as a “progressive fork” of Wikipedia—a project Wales is skeptical, but also seemingly curious about.

“The best answer to quality problems is more openness—not more control,” said Wales.

Wikipedia is the best example of an open encyclopedia. But the cool thing about the free world of General Public License means that like open source software, Citizendium can take Wikipedia’s articles and fork them in a new direction to try and produce something of a higher quality.

Even Wales had to admit that Citizendium’s change could be heading in the right direction.

“In fact if he comes up with good processes that seem to be working than we will adopt the same processes.”

And that’s the beauty of open source – it’s a collaborative effort even amongst competitors – always changing.

Journalism is changing too, but perhaps not as willingly as Wikipedia or as intelligibly.

What concerns Rex Smith, editor of the Albany Times Union is that people aren’t just turning to the Web and abandoning paper, they are losing their appetite for journalism itself—across the board.

He asked: What is it that people are looking for that traditional journalism seems to be missing? The answer: “The bone marrow inside the community.”

He said what many might not be so comfortable admitting—that one reason for the decline in newspaper readership is “we have failed to deliver that to people. We have become more distant from them.”

But change can be easy. Even during a new media panel addressing old media fears. During the Q&A Sree put his phone number on a large screen and audience members texted him questions for Wales and Smith. Without being aware of it — a room full of journalists had been crowdsourced for their best questions.

That change wasn’t too painful. I wonder what else can change?

— Ahmed Shihab-Eldin was born in California and grew up in Egypt and Austria. He received his Bachelor of Science in Communication from Boston University and is currently completing his Master of Science in Journalism at Columbia. He has worked as a staff writer for The Daily Free Press. He speaks English and Arabic and enough German and French to get by.