New York Times are fairly advanced in the US journalism field. I use their iPhone Application regularly, and enjoy their well produced videos.

But their new application won’t change a thing.

Unlike Serege Jespers, who in his post announced that this application is the future of journalism, it is still based on the idea that people will subscribe to NYT content, and pay for it. And this is yet to be seen. Ok, I am way too kind – IT DOESN’T WORK.

Why should I pay for their content if so much of it is free? And does the NYT really believe that a well developed application change the fundamental flaw in their industry?

I hope, for them, that this isn’t the case.

Well, I might be a bit too dramatic. But the conversion of analog dollars to digital cents is still a major challenge to the industry.

Jeff Zucker, besides bashing Jon Stuart, expressed his concern of lack of effective multi-platform audience measurement, and said that media companies must experiment, as traditional models didn’t work anymore:

Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff, AP’s Michael Oreskes, Kevin Young from YouTube and Ellen Weiss from NPR discussed the way that technology effects the media business – and basically killing the newspaper industry. Clay Shirky’s words were in many aspects the underlying theme, even if not intended:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

Jeff Jarvis, who attended the event, was given as an example of the future journalist, as well as contributed a lot to the discussion itself.

In another panel, I asked Richard Jalichandra, the CEO of Technorati, how do advertisers utilize social media in their activities, as there are no social media campaigns, only slow relationship building and got the following answer:

Well, they ask for the whole social media stuff, but at the end, when they realize that it doesn’t have an immediate impact, they go back to the usual media buying behavior.

Janet Eden-Harris, VP Marketing of Umbria, was a ray of hope in the room, when she described some best practices of social media analysis for marketers.

As the world of media is changing, it seems that there are still more questions than answers.