One of the high­lights of the Trav­el­ing Geeks trip to the United King­dom this week came Tues­day night when the Guardian held its first-ever pod­cast in front of a live audi­ence for its Media Live program.

The panel — tech blog­ger Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, blog­ger at TechCrunch, colum­nist at Busi­ness­Week and co-host of Tech Ticker on Yahoo!, myself, BBC tech cor­re­spon­dent Rory Cellan-Jones, Emily Bell, the Guardian’s direc­tor of dig­i­tal con­tent, and mod­er­a­tor Matt Wells — tack­led a big ques­tion: the future of the news media, the rise of Twit­ter, and whether news­pa­pers will sur­vive. And mem­bers of the 110-member audi­ence took part toward the end.

The pod­cast just went live. Stream or down­load (Time 51:13):

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(You can also lis­ten to it, nat­u­rally, on the Guardian site.)

A few highlights

The entire 51 min­utes is well worth a lis­ten — I think it’s one of the smartest pod­casts I’ve been a part of. A few snippets:

• I returned to the prob­lem of news­pa­per cul­ture that pun­ishes, rather than rewards, exper­i­men­ta­tion, inno­va­tion and fail­ure (with­out which inno­va­tion is impos­si­ble). But harp­ing on news­pa­pers’ fail­ures is like shoot­ing dinosaurs in a barrel.

• Sarah Lacy sug­gested that we may see 10 met­ro­pol­i­tan cities with­out a daily news­pa­per by the end of the year. (I think the time frame is more likely on the order of two to three years.)

• I was sorry we spent almost no time on emerg­ing mod­els for news, which will likely not involve a news­pa­per (but then again, the Guardian draws its rev­enue pri­mar­ily from its print pub­li­ca­tion). I sug­gested that news­pa­pers explore the idea of open­ing up their web­sites to become open-source com­mu­nity platforms.

• Robert Scoble said the news indus­try must learn that busi­ness mod­els are chang­ing. TechCrunch makes the major­ity of its money from charg­ing admis­sion to its conferences.

• With all the changes in the media, I said news con­sumers need to become smarter and more dis­cern­ing. They need a BS detec­tor or, as Hem­ing­way said, a crap detec­tor.

• Jok­ing that on the web you’re never wrong for long, Bell said that exclu­siv­ity was dimin­ish­ing in value with the speed at which sto­ries cir­cu­late now. “Very few news orga­ni­za­tions live in the cen­ter of the story. The rest is about con­text,” she said. I wanted to counter that cor­rect­ing your story doesn’t mean much if the mis­taken ver­sion has been retweeted 10,000 times, but we had moved on to another subject.

• I sug­gested that in 5 years, Kevin Ander­son — the Guardian reporter who’s one of the sharpest minds in jour­nal­ism — could be work­ing for Twit­ter and the Guardian could well be out of business.

• I also sug­gested that news orga­ni­za­tions would have to find a new busi­ness model to pay for inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism, in-depth report­ing, enter­prise jour­nal­ism because it’s hard work — very few peo­ple want to spend their Sat­ur­days dig­ging through cor­po­rate or gov­ern­ment records.

• From the Twit­ter gallery, Tom Forem­ski sug­gested that the panel was stuck on the old media vs. new media col­li­sion when there is more media today than ever before. While that’s true, tra­di­tional news orga­ni­za­tions are not tak­ing up the new tools and open­ing their doors to new approaches with nearly the same speed that star­tups and alter­na­tive news pub­li­ca­tions are.

And that way spells disaster.

(Photo: As fel­low geek Craig New­mark speaks in the back­ground, I took this photo of Trav­el­ing Geeks Susan Brat­ton, Ayelet Noff, Meghan Asha and Renee Blodgett.)

Related cov­er­age:

• Kevin Ander­son in the Guardian: ‘Trav­el­ing Geeks’ dis­cuss jour­nal­ism in the 21st Century.

• Ayelet Noff at TechCrunch Europe: Is jour­nal­ism dead in the 21st Cen­tury? (Also see sec­ond video, with inter­view of Howard Rhein­gold about the teach­ing of 21st cen­tury journalism.)

• Jeff Saper­stein at TravelingGeeks.com: The Guardian Dia­logues.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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