The first and only panel of Journalism That Matters: D.C. was organized chaos in the most positive sense.

JTM, several of us decided over dinner, is a “conference-unconference” because chunks of the day are built around loosely structured conversations, and the interests of those participating largely drive the agenda. Other parts are more formally organized. Similarly, the panel was more of an “unpanel.”

There were no PowerPoint presentations, and the questions went in multiple directions – not just audience to panelist via moderator.

Those sitting on stage were Jay Rosen of NewAssignment.net, citizen journalist Faye Anderson, Cody Howard of 6News in Lawrence, Kan., Jan Schaffer of J-Lab, University of Montana Professor Peggy Kuhr (who was at the University of Kansas until this summer), Merrill Brown of NowPublic and Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media.

Those sitting in the audience included a handful of citizen journalists, slightly more professional journalists, several more journalism educators and even more who placed themselves into the “other” category.

The audience formulated questions by brainstorming in small groups, and audience members posed the questions to the panel. A panelist answered a question that jumped out at him or her, and then in turn asked another panelist a question (that may or may not have come from that original list). And so it went. It seemed like we ended with more questions than answers, but in a good way.

Here’s a sampling of the paraphrased questions:

• Where does the fulcrum on the pro-am beam need to be to ensure we have journalism, not just chatter?
• Do journalists need new skill sets?
• What do journalism educators teach upcoming journalists?
• How do we ensure fairness and balance in citizen journalism?
• Do we really want to allow a community to vote a journalist off the island? (A reference to Chris Peck’s working draft; see last post.)

The answers to some of these questions centered of the need for balance in the areas of give vs. get and pro vs. am.

Balance in give vs. get means modern newsrooms interested in working with the community it serves need to make it both easy and effective for citizens to contribute. The newspaper has to give some incentive (and that can be as simple as actually using the citizen contributions in print or online) if they want to continue to get citizen-contributions.

Balance in pro vs. am means finding opportunities for citizens to contribute without, perhaps, turning over the keys to the newsroom completely. There was some debate on this point, of course, as to where that balance lies.

As a side note, there was some discussion about the term “am” (or “amateur”). The thesaurus includes “rookie”, “novice” and “beginner” – some citizen journalists are unhappy with the baggage and negative, untrustworthy connotations those words carry.)

Later in the day, we did a headlines exercise where we all wrote headlines for what we hoped to achieve either at the conference or beyond. Mine was something along the lines of “Change-Averse Newspapers Embrace Change in Digital Era”. One of the ones that got a few laughs was “Journalists Surprised: Audience Smart, Helpful”.

I couldn’t really blog today from the conference – the Wi-Fi was there, I just didn’t have time. So, check back here late tomorrow night for more from JTM: D.C.

For more on the intent and purpose of Journalism That Matters, see this August 6 Digital Edge blog entry.