Major figure, not a major speech

The morning keynote address was offered by Tina Brown, who formerly ran The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and is now an online entrepeneur, with a new editor-driven web aggregator called The Daily Beast she's developing under Barry Diller's IAC.

Not much new in this. This gifted editor's basic message is that the cacaphony of news sources available online has renewed the need for editors to serve as curators of the news world, that people can obviously do better than algorythms in helping readers understand the world, that original thinking and quality editing matter more than ever.

Questioners tried to draw her out on what The Daily Beast would be, how it would work, what the business model would be. She declined to offer many details. It was clear she was still just learning about how online sites work, noting they are much more immediate than magazines and that their design is more limited than in print, not as easy to do radical design changes on the fly.

The funniest moment was when a student asked her how to get into journalism, saying she'd take any job in print or online. "Well you're an easy lay," Brown quipped.

(Here is the ONA's story on her presentation, if you want more.)