Here is the summary of points I have picked out from the stream, which I think are relevant for journalists and content producers.

I’ve broken it down by speaker (not all speakers are included) and used one tweeter per speaker to avoid confusion (each point is an individual tweet from the stream). Thanks to all the tweeters for keeping everyone updated!

First off, some overview points that seem to be coming back a lot from the #Med2020 twitter stream:

1) Experiment, cheaply, quickly, if you fail do it fast and learn from it
2) Mobile is going to be massive
3) Revenue models are not clear yet

By speaker:

Maeve Donovan, Former Managing Director, The Irish Times
Tweeter: Niamh Smith (@niamhsmith)

-Can newspapers make the necessary changes? Maeve believes they can based on her 30 yrs experience in the industry

-Roles of newspapers to make the most of the immense opportunities offered by emerging technologies

-Digital revolution has much broader implications than its effect on newspapers or tv

-Hardest words to say are ‘I don’t know’ – and she doesn’t know for sure the future of newspapers

Jonathon Moore, Guardian News & Media
Tweeter: Hugh Linehan (@hlinehan)

-Guardian Eyewitness iPad app: very simple app publishing one photo a day. Video: Jobs sings its praises

-You live or die by user recommendations on the app store

-Big traffic spike on Guardian app at 10.30pm. Technology changing how and when people consume content

-Moore: We expected migration to our app would cause fall-off in use of web browser. Hasn’t been the case

Mark Little, Storyful
Tweeter: Gareth O’Connor (@garethoconnor)

-#Med202 hears from @marklittlenews that basic reporting skills still needed by curators and super-users in new age

-New business opportunities for storytelling @marklittlenews tells #med2020

-@marklittlenews tells #med2020 that 2010 marks turning point in journalism

Ronan Higgins, Local, mobile social software start-up
Tweeter: Niamh Smith (@niamhsmith)

-Apps store – a new walled garden. iTunes-simplicity, quality, speed-applied this ethos to iPhone

Matt Locke – C4 Commissioning Editor, New Media & Education
Tweeter: Hugh Linehan (@hlinehan)

-Facebook picks up tiny snippets of attention and rolls them up into something gargantuan

-Very intelligent stuff – but a bit depressing that the experimental groundbreaker cited is Embarrassing Bodies. Blecchh

-Bingeing on cult content – four or five episodes at a time (I think I recognise myself in this presentation)

-Cult content. The Wire first TV series passed around like a 1970s rock album from friend to friend. User content around Lost

-Events-driven initiatives like ITV’s election debate worm – broadcasters comfortable with that

-What broadcast does well is events. So we’re seeing the eventisation of TV, from talent shows to Lambing Live (!)

-Locke: broadcasters used to own the audience. But with new technology, old platforms have to learn what it is they really do well

Múirne Laffan – Executive Director, RTÉ Publishing
Tweeter: Eoin Purcell (@eoinpurcell)

-Laffan: 3.5 million uniques a month for rte.ie and 1 million of those are overseas!

-Laffan: RTE has a hub and spoke model. Create content in hub and reuse as much as possible

-Laffan: Boundaries to entry are very low. Global opportunities. But getting to market quickly is important. Mobile is huge

-Laffan see every tv connected to the internet in Ireland in 10 yrs!

-Laffan: Consumer expectations are through the roof

Note: Compiling this post this evening has reinforced my feeling that Twitter streams are much easier to follow live and are hard work to use as an archive – looking forward to some journalists’ and bloggers’ analysis of the conference.

**Update – Two good pieces about yesterday’s conference: The Irish Times’ Hugh Linehan (including video of Minister Eamon Ryan) and Fin O’Reilly.**

-B

The series of profiles looks at the lives of six Irish people living abroad. Through the medium of video, the men and women featured tell their individual stories.

Beijing: Aidan Duffy (Director: Dan Cheung)
Cape Town: Fr Dick O’Riordan (Director: Jamie Macken)
New York: Alexei Kondratiev (Director: Mary Catherine Brouder)
London: Celestine Cooney (Director: Michelle ‘Shelby’ Sadlier)
Toronto: Tara Lyons (Director: Lauren Crothers)
Buenos Aires: Mick Connery (Directors: Paul Byrne & Jeff Farrell)

Watch the videos and vote for your favourite here.

The series is the first piece of content from Mark Little’s new venture.

B

Deputy Managing Director Liam Kavanagh has been tipped as a front runner to succeed Ms Donovan in the role, according to the Irish Independent and the Irish Examiner.

Ms Donovan, who worked at the organisation for more than three decades, said now was a good time for a successor to lead the organisation through the next ‘inevitable wave of change’, according to a story in The Irish Times, which added that she had not envisaged staying in the role past 2010.

During Ms Donovan’s time as MD, The Irish Times made a number of investments and interesting decisions as highlighted by Laura Noonan in the Irish Independent today:

Ms Donovan’s tenure as managing director began with a substantial re-organisation of the core newspaper business, but she is best known for the “investment and diversification” strategy pursued more recently.

Under that strategy, ‘The Irish Times’ spent €50m on property website myhome.ie at the peak of the boom and also bought substantial stakes in ‘The Gloss’ magazine, Dublin freesheet ‘Metro’ and multi-city radio station 4fm.

Those joint ventures and subsidiaries triggered more than €26m of losses in 2008 and have been slammed by the newspaper’s own journalists, who last year urged their company to “urgently review the flawed investment and diversification strategy”.

Asked if she regretted any of the investments, Ms Donovan replied: “Oh God, no.”

I wonder how the next MD is going to handle the challenges The Irish Times, like all newspapers, faces in relation to digital change. Will it follow the NYT and Murdoch with online pay models or continue like the Guardian and stay free?  It’s a difficult time for anyone to take over when surely the first task is to pull back last year’s estimated cash losses of between €1o to €11m. It’ll be interesting to watch.

B

RTÉ has recently launched the News Now app for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

News Now is an apt description for this. If you click on ‘Top Stories’ it  delivers the latest RTÉ News, Sport and Entertainment stories from RTÉ.ie using a simple and readable layout.

As well as text stories, the app shows the latest live RTÉ News TV bulletins, weather, stocks and currencies through the ‘Watch Live’ function. You can also watch the Morning Ireland webcam (with radio stream) from 7am – a great accompaniament for the commute (not with the iPod touch though!).

You can download the app for free from the iTunes store here

More details from RTÉ about the app here

(DOI: RTÉ is my employer)

Read the full article here

Ireland is at an unprecedented economic and social crossroad. The country appears divided. The road ahead seems unbearably bleak. But here at Newstalk we believe that Ireland has a proud tradition of overcoming, of achieving, of finding a way. We believe this is a country worth fighting for.

Charm, culture, energy and engagement have always been part of who we are, but so too have ambition, determination and achievement. We need to lean on these talents to re-position our country. Old solutions will not solve new problems. We need to be imaginative, decisive.

Every one of us must be prepared to accept the challenges that constrained economic circumstances impose…..

Read or listen to the full Newstalk statement here.

B

The IT’s Hugh Linehan has the details over a Mechanical Turk:

We’ve decided to launch a device-neutral site which will render well on iPhones, BlackBerries, Nokias and everything else. It has breaking news, business and sport stories, and selected content from the newspaper. Some other popular functions, such as Most Read stories and Weather, are also included.

Full post from him here.

B

*Of course you can always use RTE’s mobile news and sports site: m.rte.ie

(DOI: RTE is my employer)

I was lucky enough to be one of the journalists who received funding from the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund for a reporting project this year.

A few weeks ago I traveled to Kenya and Uganda. Going by road from Nairobi to Entebbe I reported on people who keep bees for a series of stories focused on food security.

I traveled alone with a backpack full of equipment: video camera, digital camera and lenses, audio recorder, plenty of tapes and leads and of course paper and pen. The aim was to come back with a multimedia project similar to a series I also did for RTE called Global Classroom.

Today, the first part of the series, The Humble Bee, went live on RTE.ie. It focuses on beekeeping as a means of improving food security on a macro and micro level. It looks at a family who keeps bees to make an income and a farmer who uses bees to improve pollination on his farm. There are videos and photos (more hopefully on the way) and an accompanying radio report, which was broadcast on RTE Radio One on World Report.

The rest of the series will look at other aspects of bee keeping in east Africa including women who keep bees, the environmental impact and the challenges some people face.

This has been a wonderful and challenging series to work on – I hope you enjoy it.

Check it out here
-B

Don’t forget to check out RTE.ie’s election Twitter feed

RTÉ Elections 2009

In the last few weeks quite a bit of my time has been spent coordinating the website for the 5 June elections. It was launched this week and you can visit it here.

Check out the group blog  Campaign Daily – with great contributions this week from Mark Little (who had an excellent blog on RTÉ.ie for the US elections), Miriam O’Callaghan and Cian McCormack.

Visit us at Twitter @RTE_Elections and while you’re there  follow Prime Time’s new Twitter stream @RTE_PrimeTime as well.

There’s lots of great material on the main site including an excellent guide to PR-STV by UCD’s Prof Richard Sinnott (the system of voting used in Ireland), chapters from the just published and widely discussed All Politics is Local, lots of great audio and video highlights from RTÉ’s best news and current affairs programmes and features written by young journalists covering the European Parliament elections.

It’ll be a busy couple of weeks ahead as the website keeps on growing and the elections get closer but I’m looking forward to it particularly the count weekend!

Blathnaid

P.S By the way send us in your election photos!