Best thing was meeting each other.
For Standingup, Bronxdem, and Luaptifer  who have worked together for 2 and half years, since the early days of Gannon/Guckert, it was their first ever real time meeting.  None of us had ever met Carol, and only Ilona had met BarbaraS.   For some of us, it was the first time we had had a chance to reconnect since the Amherst Media Giraffe in June of 2006.  BarbaraS said it perfectly for me:  

ePluribus is amazing, the organization, the people behind it and the support of everyone involved.  

The talent of the people behind ePluribus (all of the people) is humbling to me and made me realize how fortunate I am to be part of if, and also making me realize that I want to get ACTIVE with ePluribus and see 'it' and 'us' become known as THE place to come to on the 'net'.

 It wasn't just the collegiality, though, that made the air crackle, it was in Bronxdem's words: we "would have liked more time to talk to the ePluribusMedia group about stories."  And Luaptifer added to that by saying:

I also really liked to be able to run that 'gist of the Enron story' by folks, it was quite useful to be forced to vocalize it as I did.  Though it may have seemed simple, it probably was only possible after I've done a serious sifting of some of the 50,000 files accumulated along the way.  It really helped me to get the feedback I did from the several of you guys which, last night, helped me to iron out roughly a thousand words of what I forsee is the bulk of the prefacing context-setter piece.  (It also kind of helped that Bush labelled Iran's Revolutionary National Guard as terrrrrist by citing the same Executive Order I'm going to use for labelling the White House.)

Meeting some other great people too
Actually this point wasn't on anyone's list, but I met some cool folks who are as dedicated to restoring some integrity to the fourth estate as we are -- geekheads, individual journalists, folks from the Center for Public Integrity, the Poynter Institute, and the Knight Foundation.

Realizing that a lot of J-school folks still don't get "it"
It took us a while to realize that many of the strides we'd felt we'd made bridging the gap between citizen journalists and the traditional media seemed to evaporate.  As Bronxdem put it:  

Really learned that the MSM is really very far from having any clue about what is really happening in terms of changes in how people are using new media and what is going on outside their newsrooms and classrooms. It really was surprising to me how little the journalism educators knew about anything. They seemed unwilling to think about ways in which they might be failing at doing their jobs.

 Carol had many good points about the motives of the various attendees, and coming from having reviewed Aaron Barlow's book The Rise of the Blogosphere, her take was intriguing: "To my mind citizen journalist means engaging in a political discourse by creating an open forum for serious political debate and investigation," and she saw many of the conference attendees focused on "having a market for their journalistic skills, as print media is severely cut back."

Our savvy newspaper/broadcast working journalist colleagues in the Sulzberger program have also spoiled us, so all seven of us were a bit unprepared for the patronizing attitudes and occasional hostility.  Still, Standingup summarized it best:

The concept of what a citizen journalist is, what they should do and where they fit in with traditional media is all over the map. I went to the conference hoping some of the gap between CJ and traditional media had been bridged.  I left the conference feeling that while traditional media is aware of citizen journalism, most are interested in how they can use citizen journalists where they can't cover community events or believe this trendy component somehow needs to be included in their online model.  The faculty from journalism schools that attended were mixed in their knowledge of citizen journalism and online media.  They ranged from very informed to not even being familiar with blogs.

No one has figured out a funding model yet
Some of the participants from other organizations felt that profit dollars immediately made "truth seeking" impossible; others were eagerly pursuing ways to monetize their offerings.  As Standingup said: "have the impression there is a great deal of competition for any source of funding" and Luaptifer brought it home as a take-away "Focus on funding and those networkable folks should be high on the list."

Don't Do Again

• Do two conferences back-to-back.


• Don't forget marketing materials


• Be shy


• Let high expectations detract from what is

Take-Aways

• The pre conference calls were definitely helpful, and so it was great that Carol arranged them.
• Susie's work on the badges and the business cards once again was awesome and the materials were something to be most proud to wear and use.
• Have meals together, stay on "campus" so that we can, in Luaptifer's words, "tire each other out" trying to tell our stories.


• Take ePluribus Media marketing materials to leave on tables.


• Have our own ePluribus Media Meet Up or Conference (maybe in the middle of the country?) so we can all meet each other.


• Figure out what we did to net the 1000.00 donation and replicate it.


• Be sure to tell our story --  Ilona's idea of making sure we get some of the stories of watershed moments for ePluribus Media on the About Us page on the Journal.


• Make Bill Densmore, Director of Media Giraffe, an honorary ePluribus Media-er.

ePluribus Media folk and friends -- photos by Ilona Meagher (ilona, hope you don't mind my borrowing a couple) and Cho