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Jessica Coen, Patrick Phillips, and Jay Rosen on Media Gawking. Jay is moderating. He’s editor of Pressthink, and Jessica edits Gawker, and Patrick edits I Want Media.

Patrick left Hearst corporate public relations to start I Want Media. On his site, he tracks changing media, business models. He covers technology, media, and journalism. Patrick started his site, and now he has people like Sumner Redstone quoted in his work on the site, and he says that Tina Brown knows about his site.

With:
– Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette.com)
– John Gerzema (Young and Rubicam)
– Dominik van Jan (NextNextBig Thing)
– Moderator Farai Chideya (PopandPolitics.com)

Oops … no Ana Marie; she must be wonketting elsewhere today.

John: Self-manifestation by simply typing … creating and presenting your own world. … RSS allows people to create their own applications their own world.

How do your reach young people?

Al Gore Addresses We Media
Originally uploaded by MC We Media.

Al Gore addresses The Media Center’s We Media conference at AP headquarters in NY. To download the 48-minute, 20 MB MP3 of the speech, click here. Photo by Richard Drew – AP

Here is the text of former Vice President Al Gore’s remarks at the We Media conference on Wednesday in New York:

I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.

The next question I hear coming from moderator Jason Calcanis is how do you make citizen media a viable business.

But first, a segue into  what would Andrew Heyward do if he had more choices? He says he’d love new media, but the trade off for working in Big Media is larger audience and impact. New Media, he says, has a lower barrier to entry, but lower impact. Heyward says that he finds content creation on the web to be "primitive."

Back to Craig Forman: he sees this as the next phase of media being "respect my intelligence." That’s what people under age 40 want, he says. Forman also tells a terrific story about the beginnings of the Wall Street Journal, when Dow and Jones (and another guy) ran around and took notes about Wall Street doings on their sleeves and then printed a paper. (Which sounds frighteningly like something a blogger might do.)

Al Gore suggested that the good old days of media were when newspapers ruled. Craig Forman of Yahoo! notes this.Television in the early days, few networks, one-way information transmission, did not require much knowledge on the part of the viewer/consumer. Gore lauds the pre-television glory days of print, and there is some truth in that. [...]

Al is talking about the systemic decay of the public forum; for instance, the rejection and dismissal of science.

All this strikes Gore as "strange."

He wants to recreate a meritocracy of the marketplace of ideas to stimulate more diversity of viewpoints.

Many in the audience, he says, are doing this: a better informed American public.