We were all there. The geeks, the journalists, the communication and new media consultants and the Internet entrepreneurs. Copenhagen Twestival was my first experience of meeting the Twitter community, and my guess is it was probably also the largest gathering of Danish Twitter users to date – we were around 120 people. Turns out that the Danish tweet-crowd consists of many well known faces from gatherings such as Copenhagen Ruby Brigade, Barcamp Copenhagen and Reboot.
Copenhagen Twestival was, along with many other similar meetings around the world, a charity event with the purpose of raising money for charity:water – an organization that argues that clean drinking water is the essential foundation upon which developing countries can evolve into something better. I can’t claim that I suffer from any great social conscience, but when Maame Agyeben – a former intern with the organization – told about charity:water, I was truly impressed. Their administration costs is sponsored separately, which makes them able to say that 100% of the general donations goes to building wells.
Red Cross and other global help organizations are doing a great job, but I like the prospects of charity organizations with a more narrow and dedicated purpose being able to pursue their cause globally by innovative use of Internet services. That night, we generated DKK 5,000 from the sale of 500 lottery tickets to win donated gifts, and probably a similar amount from buying overpriced, donated drinks.
The twestival was not just about water and charity. Members of the Danish Twitter community had prepared presentations, and one of them was Mikkel Malmberg a.k.a. mikker with a talk about Twitter – for people who know Twitter. Mikkel was introduced as “the craziest guy on Twitter”, and he showed himself worthy of the title with an entertaining and energetic show. I wouldn’t do his talk any justice by repeating it in text – you will have to see him in person some other time.
The culmination of the evening was the Twitter panel, consisting of Henrik Fohns, journalist from DR, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, entrepreneur and organizer of Reboot, and Troels Jørgensen, director of Berlingske Online. The format was a number of predefined questions – ideally in 140 characters or less – which each panel member got a chance to reply to. Fohns is a well-known voice from a long-running Danish radio series on technology – Harddisken – and it was good to see him in the flesh. It was also clear that this was a man with great experience in voicing his opinion on media and technology in comfortable, well-phrased sentences, and I for one felt compelled to believe in everything he said just from the familiarity of the voice.
Another familiar voice was that of Mygdal. I know him from his Reboot opening speeches and from some of the many technology projects he is involved with, but I didn’t know how opinionated and loud-mouthed he could be once someone gave him a microphone and asked him to voice his opinions. He reminded me of the hero in the Ruby on Rails community – David Heinemeier Hansson – but where David’s battle is with “enterprise” software development, Thomas’ seems to be with established media and journalism.
The first question was about the future news outlook. Mygdal said that journalists does a poor job, because it is impossible to do what they do. Also that the business model for news papers hasn’t changed in 250 years, which why they are they are now in so much trouble. “It’s pure biology”, he said, “nobody tries anything [..] We are really fucked, but we have to try something and fail.” Fohns compared the volunteer news papers run by all kinds of unemployed people in the 80′s to today’s blogging. It is journalism by the unestablished, he said, and he called it “New Cultural Press”.
Another question was: Do we even need the traditional media? Troels Jørgensen was of the opinion that journalists has far too high wages in Denmark, compared to Sweden, for instance, and that was one reason it is so hard and expensive to run a media house in 2009. Mygdal pointed out that we use the term “new media” every time something new comes along that we doesn’t quite understand. In the mid-90′s, the Internet was called “new media”. He said that we need to reinvent media in a way that really brings the new opportunities together, instead of just trying to coerce “new media” into “old media”.
One final question worth mentioning was on the issue of media subsidy. As Mygdal put it: “We spend 6 billion on media subsidy – the government could finance 2,000 micro medias at 3 million each a year for that money.” However, as Fohns objected, working in small units, you don’t always have the required impact. As an example he mentioned the case of IT Factory, where the freelancer Dorte Toft, who spearheaded the whole uncovering process, were under a lot of pressure from the lawyers of Stein Bagger. That kind of pressure is easier too handle when you are part of something bigger, and have lawyers and other support of your own to back you up.
I also remember that Mygdal mentioned at some point that Twitter really isn’t something new, that it is simply derived from blogging as a format better suited for people like himself, who might not be that good at formulating long articles. What do you think, perhaps I’d also be better off just keeping to 140 character outbursts? 