Next week, on November 5, I will be speaking on a media panel titled “Is the Media Keeping an Eye on Government: What is the Role of Social Media.” The panel discussion starts at 4pm and takes place at Waller Landsden law firm at 6th & Union in Nashville. The panel features:

• Michael Cass, The Tennessean
• Anita Bugg, WPLN Radio
• Christian Grantham, WKRN-TV
• Dr. Sybril Bennett as Moderator

Some of the things I’ve been thinking about in preparation for the panel is the rise of FOXNews.

I’ve also been reading up on Horace Greeley, who comes across to me as the Roger Ailes of the 1800s and who had the exact same success as the “political organ of the Whig Party” during a time of dramatic political change in our nation.

Yesterday, I read something Jack Lail posted (Living a “Gutenberg Moment”) about the role of journalists as curators. It featured MarketWatch CEO founder Larry Kramer.

He also talks about the role of journalists in curating the Web. “There are new roles we need to learn to take,” he said. “In journalism, one of them is curation.

“We were always curators in that we get 100 press releases at the paper, we’d pick the two to write about. The difference today is everybody gets the hundred press releases. We still have to help our customers, our readers to determine which ones are worth reading.

“We don’t the distribution system anymore. But we do own, what we hopefully own, is an intelligence, and an ability to help our customer or the people that work with us to get what they want out of life.”

Kramer said we’re still in an “Gutenberg moment” with the Internet in which every industry will be changed, much as the media business is already changing.

“The biggest problem we have is people trying to protect their business model,” Kramer said, “not their product. not what they do.”

A lot of the fear I see in newsrooms comes from journalists who don’t understand the emerging tools and channels of distribution at their disposal. News organizations are used to owning and controlling their respective medium and view change more as a challenge to old distribution models rather than opportunities to grow and reach more people.

As Krammer mentioned above, good journalists were always curators of 100s of press releases faxed or emailed to the newsroom. Faxes, emails or voicemails are the last place information finds its way to good journalists these days.

Newspapers, TV newscasts, and radio as legacy channels of distribution for news no longer matches the schedules and mobility of today’s news consumer. Pew research documents the continued decline of audience for these channels as these same audience flees to the web as their source for news and information. This chart is from Pew’s March 2009 State of the News Media report. This audience flight is why newsrooms face cuts and produce lower quality news.

If news organizations want to survive change and reconnect with their fleeing audience, they have to embrace emerging social media tools and prepare to let go of the towers, the trucks, the TVs, the paper, the radios, the printing presses and the entire hemorrhaging industry that is sucking the life out of quality reporting and cannot keep up with how and when we now prefer our news be delivered.