Spent two days this past week at Duke University participating in the "Next Newsroom" conference, part of a series of conferences around the country on designing the next generation of journalistic newsrooms to take advantage of both the technology and the 24/7 news environment that now dominates our lives.
This panel at the conference took advantage of Twitter to bring questions and additional points of view into the discussion. It worked pretty well until Twitter’s server went down and we had to revert to the old fashioned way of taking questions from the floor.
But in dealing with all the questions about designing the newsroom of the future and talking about how technology frees us from our desks, the obvious question was soon posed:
In this age of wireless, wi-fi and laptops, do we really need a newsroom?
Good question.