Interesting quotes from the Journalism 3G conference in Atlanta

A selection of quotes that caught my ear at the Journalism 3G conference in Atlanta

"We don't want to own content." | Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist at Google and creator of Google News.

Google News doesn't track how long people use Google News as a success goal because it is a search company -- Google wants you to find what you want and leave. Google wants to "amplify the amount of traffic" going to a story or site and that it's up to you, newspaper.com, to "monetize the traffic that comes to you."

"Every minute is a missed deadline on the web." | Michael Skoler, executive director of the Center for Innovation in Journalism at American Public Media.

"Digg is a forum. It's just a technology. Journalism is an actual profession." | Anton Kast, lead scientist, digg.com. If you think Digg is journalism, the lead scientist of Digg would beg to differ. Kast repeatedly said Digg is not reporting. "Digg has nothing to do with this, other than to make it available."

Blogging is "a content management system. It's a cheap one that anyone can use." | Dave Cohn, newassignment.net. Cohn was talking about how some journalists job descriptions are changing to add community management or online organization to their duties. But blogging is not journalism -- it's a medium that can involve journalism. A subtle distinction, but important for people who don't get what blogging really is.

"The change to a meeting is a giant cultural change in a newsroom." | Shawn MacIntosh, director of culture and change at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. MacIntosh told the audience that the AJC took their print-focused front page meeting that talked about web last and flipped it. Editors would pitch what they had for the web first, and after that pitch for 1A. It took *eight months* to make the change. But within two weeks of doing it, AJC.com traffic went up.

"We put stuff on the thing." | Mitch Gelman, senior vice president and executive producer at CNN.com. My colleagues at the conference and I debated if this was the dumbest or the most brilliant thing said in the Friday sessions. I went with brilliant. It's a simple, flexible, future-proof summation of what we do right now. We put stuff on the thing. Stuff being video, stories, audio, photos, etc. The thing being the web, print, mobile devices, iPods, etc. Left unanswered -- are we putting the right stuff on the right thing?

"If you have a really lousy picture and a really great story, people will watch." | Paul Ferguson, Supervising Editor, International News, CNN. Ferguson showed how CNN is using small cameras, laptops and high speed satellite phones to show live pictures from around the world with nothing more than stuff that fits into one suitcase. Someone asked about high def video and high quality cameras -- to get the video over the sat phones, it has to be compressed -- and Ferguson responded that the content of the video matters more than the quality of the image.