Live Coverage

Lukasiewicz was named vice president of NBC News Specials and Digital Media in 2009, and is responsible for all special news productions on MSNBC and NBC News, including live election coverage, major planned news events and breaking news specials. He also oversees all of NBC News' digital programming, including the joint venture with MSNBC.com.

Introducing the speaker and providing some broadcast background is Mark Starowicz, executive director of documentary programming for CBC Television.

The full bio: www.journalism.columbia.edu

Power point slide quotes: technology is "anything that wasn't around when you were born" - alan kay

"The microwave oven was a fantastic idea — manufacturers sold a vision that the microwave would replace everything in the kitchen. The smart people at the time were not the engineers, not the ones that understood how the device worked, but understood how the kitchen worked. At the end of the day, the microwave is for popcorn and leftovers. The people who focussed on the technology, ended up losing. So what do we bring to the table as journalists? It's when we take them into the lives of people, into history, making a policy human — that's where we do our jobs best. that's where television, particularly when portraying indivduals and community, is so powerful. "

He doesn't agree with Rishad Tobaccowala -- "if you aren't posting, you don't exist" There's a lot of people who never post -- most of them in fact. How are we serving them?

Amazon: 200,000 reviews, but a retired librarian has written 23,000 of them. She claims she reads fast. If you only focus on the people posting, you're missing the other part of the conversation. You shouldn't do that any more than an assignment editor should run the newspaper based on letters to the editor.

35 million people watched the midterm election coverage of various tv networks

Social media will reconnect fragmented media landscape: it captures conversation among viewers, who share content to their friends and add their spin on it.

Traditional media outlets shouldn't focus on being the dominant news source. Today, people value having a variety of sources. The brand that matters most to them are their friends. The MSM has to pay attention to social media -- they need to have a social media presence and make themselves available to that sharing.

However, not everyone uses social media aggressively. 90 per cent of people are lurkers, ten percent contribute occasionally and only one per cent dominate. Wikipedia has 190 million users, less than 19 per cent contribute, one quarter of those are women.

Where do young people go to get their news? Nowhere -- they think if the news is important enough, it will come to them.

Need to start thinking of new ways to tell story using social media. Create second experience, a social viewing experience. Capturing this conversation means sedan retain control and this will keep us relevant.

Young people don't hunt out information anymore -- they expect it to find them if it's important enough. Media needs to accommodate this expectation.

To produce his content you have to learn how to use it. Not how engineers use it, but how people use it.

Here's an impressive number: 1.2 billion. It's the number of times someone clicks something on MSNBC. That's 1.2 billion conscious acts of content consumption.

On "free" information: It robs the producer and weakens the business. We need to make our consumers understand that journalistic work has value, and that the people that make it ought to be compensated for it, not just the people that invented the widget that delivers it to your iphone. News business needs to be aggressive.