It's a showdown. Industry heavyweights from across the media spectrum will come together to battle it out over the future of journalism.

Three new media upstarts
vs.
Three old media dinosaurs

>>> SEE THE FULL LINEUP OF SPEAKERS HERE: http://bit.ly/1cAGIfi <<<

More people are on Twitter and Facebook at six pm than watching the nightly news. Newspaper and magazine circulation is plummeting and around 2,500 editorial jobs in the mainstream media have been lost across Australia since 2012. Is this dramatic shift away from the mainstream a good thing?

Historically, news spread through a social network – letters, gossip in the streets and pamphlets passed by hand and horse. But the invention of the rotary printing press in 1843, revolutionised communication and gave birth to mass market newspapers, managed by a powerful and wealthy elite. Just over 170 years later, the people are taking control again. Reporting is no longer the exclusive domain of journalists with millions of niche websites offering diverse analysis without the filter of establishment thinking.

If the mass media isn't putting the money into investigative reporting, then who will scrutinise politicians and the powerful? What happens when people who don't know about media ethics, fact-checking, balance or defamation are writing stories? Is it fair that start-ups often don’t pay people properly for their content? Perhaps the masses don’t care about any of this. Worn of the mass media shaping the news and pushing their own agendas, biases and political views, punters are now able to write, read and access whatever information, from whomever, they want. Do we want trust in the old or diversity of the new?

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