The organizer introduced Richard Gizbert, who was going to chair the first day's events, as the host of the best program about media in English anywhere. Can't argue with that.
Then Micheal Rosenblum was unleashed. He described journalism as "the child of technology" - referring to the printing press, radio and TV - therefore we'd to deal with these new technologies. But pointed out that we - journalists I suppose - don't respond well to new technologies; we accept them partially like the introduction of small camera which rejected by the TV stations at first.
Rosenblum went even further: any business that doesn't accept technological change will be dead and he give the grim example of the ice business which had died after the introduction of the fridge. Another example he give was Kodak who the best maker of film cameras but then refused to go into digital camera because they "thought" they were in the film business: they were wrong and look at what happened to them, Rosenblum says. The same for journalists, we're in the business of finding and telling stories (journalism he meant, close enough), regardless of what technologies we use.
Rosenblum named telcom, internet and the video camera as the technologies behind this change.
The keynote was entertaining and perhaps useful for those executives who needed a wake up call and would then rush out and hire a consultant. But others were not conviced: there business was grounded in solid, good, old journalism.
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