Sparks fly at News:Rewired

The dust has now settled on yesterday’s superb news:rewired event. Luminaries from across the new media firmament were in attendance, including heavyweights such as Greg Hadfield, the ex-Telegraph digital guru and dotcom millionaire; Hadfield protégée Kate Day (tipped by an inside source for a bright future at project Euston); Joanna Geary from TimesOnline; Jessica Reed from Guardian.co.uk and many more straddling regional, national and international media.

The sold-out conference was kicked off by a typically charismatic George Brock, whose “spaghetti throwing” analogy perfectly complemented a day of exchanged ideas, furiously debated opinions and informative speeches. My pick of the morning sessions was “social media for journalists”, which featured presentations from Robin Hamman, head of social media at Headshift; Mark Rock, CEO of AudioBoo and Mariana Bettio, search content producer for TimesOnline.

The session was packed to overflow, with numerous participants kneeling at the sidelines and playing plug tennis over the limited power supplies for their laptops. Jessica Reed was a particular highlight, and gave some insight into the inner workings of the Guardian’s Comment is free.

She said: “With Twitter and with the site, I try to make the whole process conversational between us and the reader. If readers want to say ‘oh that’s bollocks’, then they can.”

The audience came up with incisive and perceptive questions to all the speakers, in particular the one posed to Mariana Bettio, in which the questioner demanded to know the relevance of SEO at News International given the Murdochian stance on search engines and aggregators.

The afternoon was an altogether more tumultuous affair, with one session on crowdsourcing becoming notably heated and resulting in a dramatic walkout by delegates from Southampton Solent. Such passion, however, had an overall positive effect on the day, with journalists from across the media spectrum having perhaps the first opportunity in the UK to have it out with their peers on where the industry is going.

My final interview was with journalism.co.uk founder John Thompson, who declared the conference a resounding success, and even mooted the possibility of conducting a conference in America. The prospect of a similar event with Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and their ilk on the agenda is, I am sure you will agree, mouthwatering…