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nonprofit organization Journalism that Matters (JTM) has been bringing together journalism professionals, student journalists, and anyone else invested in the future of news to both ask and answer the questions that are central to practicing journalism in the twenty-first century.
    One month after 9/11, JTM convened its first gathering within the Associated Press Managing Editor’s board conference to discuss “Journalism that Matters in a World Gone Mad.” The reaction among participants was powerful; more than one said they got more ideas out of the experience than out of the rest of the conference.
    While most conferences set clear agendas and designate certain people as panelists, moderators, and attendees, JTM instead uses “Open-Space Technology,” an approach for hosting conferences and other types of meetings that was “discovered” in the mid-1980s by Harrison
    Owen, after he grew tired of planning and preparing for his annual organizational management conference and had an epiphany at the bar:
    The following year, he sent out a simple, one-paragraph invitation, and more than 100 people showed up to discuss Organization Transformation. In his main meeting room he set the chairs in one large circle and proceeded to explain that what participants could see in the room was the extent of his organizing work. If they had an issue or opportunity that they felt passionate about and wanted to discuss with other participants, they should come to the center of the circle, get a marker and paper, write their issue and their name, read that out, and post it on the wall. It took about 90 minutes for the 100+ people to organize a 3-day agenda of conference sessions, each one titled, hosted, and scheduled by somebody in the group. 3
    Over the past twelve years, JTM has hosted more than fifteen gatherings with well over 1,000 journalists participating in the process of crafting the agenda and igniting the future for news. In 2008, I attended my first JTM conference at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, California.
    The topic for this gathering was NewsTools, and one of the tools that came out of the conference was Spot.Us, an online crowdfunding platform developed a year before Kickstarter was launched. David Cohn, the founder of the innovative nonprofit, described it as Kiva for journalism, in reference to the Kiva microfinance lending website. Cohn went on to receive a $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, and in 2011 his organization was acquired by American Public Media after successfully financing hundreds of stories.
    The next month, JTM hosted another event in Minneapolis in conjunction with the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), a semiannual event organized by the group Free Press. While my entire experience in the Twin Cities that week was amazing, I found the traditional conference structure of the media reform conference jarring and alienating in comparison to the JTM unconference that had immediately preceded it.
    While the JTM gathering had been about discussing new solutions, my experience at the NCMR centered on listening to peopletalk about old problems. In fact, the only speech I can remember from the conference was an incendiary keynote delivered by Van Jones less than a year before he was appointed by President Barack Obama as Special Advisor for Green Jobs. Mysteriously, the complete version of Jones’s speech was taken down from the Free Press YouTube channel shortly after it was posted and is no longer available, though the rest of the keynotes appear to remain online.
    Just as Owen had discovered before creating Open-Space Technology, the best part of the NCMR were the coffee breaks, the sole opportunity to actually engage people in a dialogue. These coffee breaks quickly crept further and further into the lectures and I soon felt like a grad student cutting class.
    A few years later, when the NCMR hosted their 2013 conference in Denver, I had decided that I would