(This story was originally published on November 23, 2009 at 9:59 am.)

I spent this weekend redesigning OMC, but I also had an eye on the 1000+ tweets from Saturday's "We Make The Media" conference, which instantly became a microcosm of the tensions between old and new media.

It began with keynote speaker and former Spokesman-Review editor Steven A. Smith, who, according to his prepared remarks, said:

Some of you here today may be interested in or already committed to harnessing the new media to advocate for a cause, to opine on issues of the day, to empower and inform people with like ideas and similar interests, to aggregate or pass-along information gathered from other sources, to give voice to everyday citizens on everyday matters, to open the most intimate details of your life through a blog or a Facebook page or a Tweet.

I wish you well.

But I am here today to make the case for journalism.

You can imagine how that went over in the Twitterverse. Most blog posts afterward have since focused the distinct online and offline dimensions of the conference and the disparity between old-school and new-school journalists in general. Here's more of what's being said, largely focused on that digital divide:

Joe Wilson: My views on WeMakeTheMedia event – after the hangover

civics21: We Make The Media: Initial thoughts

thoughts from the spiral: We Make the Media conference

The Next Journalist: We Make the Media

Reporting 1 Blog: We Make the Media

360 Convos: Building a new model may require listening

It's all very meta. For more of the substance of what was discussed, try Smith's keynote and the Twitter transcript, linked above. The above bloggers and others have also promised additional writeups, which we'll link to as they're posted.

UPDATE (11/23, 8:25 pm): I'll quote a bit more from Smith's keynote, regarding citizen journalism and its financial constraints:

Now I’m a huge fan of citizen journalism [...] But [...] they simply don’t have the financial resources to produce the kind of journalism at the heart of our discussions today.

Could any blogger or unsupported citizen journalist dedicate two years and $500,000 (mostly in legal costs) to the investigation of Spokane’s late mayor, Jim West, as we did at The Spokesman-Review?

[...] In general, we have not seen citizen journalists demonstrate the capacity to produce such important work.

But Smith does wish he had been able to find a more respectful term than "hobby journalist" to define such people.

Ron Buel, the founding editor and publisher of Willamette Week and one of the organizers of the event, was frank about the divisions at the event: "The room was divided, and the action was divided. No one did a lot of listening to the other group, nor was there much effort to try to come together." But he also points out a few of the ideas to come out of the conference.

Freelance journalist Michelle Rafter focuses on one of those ideas, to create a Portland journalism incubator. The idea will be discussed more on December 3 at the next Digital Journalism Social Hour.

Marie at ran dum thots has more on the divide at the conference and what she thinks is behind it: "disrupting longstanding social order and traditional ways of handling information."

Steve Woodward at NozzlMedia suggests that, rather than "the future of journalism," there are "futures — plural — of journalism."

In Electrotainment's Crazy Talk podcast, Strange Love Live's Dr. Normal had a postmortem of the conference with Abraham Hyatt of Digital Journalism Portland and Will Radik, former intern for The Portland Mercury. That then evolved into how they themselves would "make the media." The discussion begins around minute 34.

Hyatt also has his own post about the conference, in which he homes in on both a technological gap and a racial gap. BlueOregon's Carla Axtman talks more about the element of race at the conference toward the end of this post.

There's also a Google Group about the conference, and OurPDX has a great roundup of links, many of which I used here.