I go to a lot of conferences that explore issues in the news industry and a common reaction is one of déjà vu. The topics - and the participants - seem maddeningly familiar:

- Mainstream media need to appreciate the value of the blogosphere. Hmm, that sounds familiar.

- Citizen journalists will make professionals obsolete. Not again.

- Newspaper circulation and advertising are in trouble and we have to do something about it. This just in.

So it was refreshing to participate in Broadcasts recent conference on The Future of News in London, where top broadcast journalists I hadnt met discussed issues that havent been talked to death.

Among the highlights for me:

- A debate over whether journalists who are being kidnapped, assaulted and killed at a record pace– deserve special protection under laws and treaties. A panel, led by Rodney Pinder of the International News Safety Institute, grappled with such questions as this: Do journalists deserve special protection any more than, say, medical aid workers?

- Nigel Parsons, managing director of Al-Jazeera English, describing in gripping detail the technical and political issues involved in getting his network off the ground. And this interesting bit: Sixty percent of the traffic to the networks website comes from the United States.

And, of course, there was the panel I sat on that explored how news organizations are - and should be - responding to changes in news consumption by focusing more on multimedia.

Multimedia is one of those words that mean everything and nothing. And Im convinced our users dont think of it all. What they want is a good story, told in the most appropriate way, using the most appropriate media: words, pictures, video, graphics, interactivity. For them, multimedia is the air they breathe.

To respond to this breaking down of walls among different forms of media, we in the news business need to be creating fusion newsrooms, where television journalists, picture journalists, text journalists and interactive journalists mesh together to create true multimedia products. My panel agreed that the skills needed to create these different forms of media are not interchangeable and that we will always need specialists.

But the new generation of journalists is like our new generation of users: They grew up in a multimedia world and are more comfortable crossing lines. In fact, like our users, many dont even see the lines.

Dean Wright is Editor, Reuters Media