The 5th Innovation Journalism conference was an impressive gathering of the leading mainstream and emerging journalists from around the world. The three day conference brought together people from Venturebeat, GigaOm, AlwaysOn, Bloomberg, New York Times, and dozens of other media publications to discuss prevalent issues in the state of media.

Issues discussed ranged from media as a business, ethical boundaries in accepting advertising as an independent journalist, objectivity, authenticity and accuracy of new media, hype-creation and its need for innovation growth, identifying weak-signals, attention economics, emerging information visualization and consumption research, and some fantastic new-media regional case studies.

What interests me in healthy discourse are perspectives – you get to see and learn from someone else’s point of view and also offer and teach others from your own. Within the conference it was interesting to see how people from backgrounds in different types of media (TV, newspapers etc) approached or thought about innovation within their own work or field.

Other amazing things to find out and learn was just how far ahead South East Asia is on new media and community-centric activities. We got see sites with thousands of very active citizen contributors, whole news-papers running entirely on citizen entries (and professional entries, not just rants).

In the panel I participated, we discussed ways in which communities online can help do fact-checking, and the types of new web2.0 tools that can emerge to solve these issues.

PK overall had a decent presence at the conference – we had a good number of people and some strong speakers as well. More than the speeches our participants ended up making a number of interesting deals there (many of them I cant disclose).

Thanks David and Johanna for putting together an impressive and yet comfortable conference, and Arthur and Amir for the opportunity. It was certainly a good chance to share ideas.