December 3-5 Summit Seeks to Define and Launch Internet Network for Sharing Users and Content; One Goal to Sustain Journalism

COLUMBIA, Mo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Entrepreneurs, technologists, executives and editors will gather Dec. 3-5 in Missouri to define and launch an Internet-based, non-profit system for sharing users and content that organizers hope offers a way to sustain journalism while giving consumers more control over web privacy and personalization.

“It should be a place where companies compete to provide personalized service to users, yet share those users, and where they make money referring those users to content — and advertising — from almost anywhere.”

“Blueprinting the Information Valet Economy: Building a collaborative, shared-user network” is the title of a three-day summit at the new Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI). The unique, action-planning session is designed to change the business landscape for news and information-service providers, writers, artists, musicians and publishers. (www.ivpblueprint.org)

“If your business or your passion is news, advertising, information commerce, entertainment, health care, financial services, technology, privacy or personalization, don’t miss the chance to help shape and blueprint the next great Internet innovation,” says Bill Densmore, a 2008-2009 Reynolds Journalism Fellow spearheading the Information Valet Project.

“We’ll start creating frameworks in law, governance, marketing, advertising, technology, user identity and transactions for the Information Valet Economy,” says Densmore. “It should be a place where companies compete to provide personalized service to users, yet share those users, and where they make money referring those users to content — and advertising — from almost anywhere.”

“Blueprint” participants will be nestled within the forums, meeting rooms and open spaces of the Reynolds institute, which opened in September as the nation’s first institution dedicated to inventing, researching, shaping, sharing and sustaining the future of journalism. RJI was launched with a $31-million grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Foundation. In September, it opened 50,000 square feet of new and remodeled space including a modern four-story, glass-walled structure inside a preserved, 1892 Victorian gothic building on the University of Missouri campus. RJI has completed or underway more than 60 initiatives to invent and sustain journalism’s future via partnerships with industry and other institutions.