The Media Standards Trust has begun a lecture series on 'Why Journalism Matters'. It is disconcerting that it feels we have to ask the question. The argument put forward by the British group's director Martin Moore is that news organisations are so preoccupied with business survival that discussion of the broader social, political and cultural function of journalism gets forgotten. It is a pertinent review then, given the icy economic blasts hitting most Anglo-Saxon media groups, and notwithstanding the recent examples of self-evidently broader journalistic 'value' produced by London's Daily Telegraph in its politican-shaming investigations into parliamentarians' expenses.

First up in the series was Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, who cantered through the justifications for a vibrant, independent press. Watchdog, informer, explainer, campaigner, community builder and debater - those are the roles that journalism plays. The value that it brings is most evident by comparison with the unhealthiness of states where the press is not free, noted Barber, citing the struggles of the citizenry in China and Russia to hold their leaders to account.

The FT's USP as a media group, according to Barber, is as an explainer and analyser of complicated events that play out across a global stage. But analytical reporting of global stories costs serious cash, he noted, in a question-begging aside. That you get the quality of journalism you are prepared to pay for, ultimately, is his response to the challenge posed to mainstream media by Internet-enabled communicators. For free you can have the rawness of a blog. For crafted journalism that is properly sourced, reviewed for taste and style and checked for accuracy, you must find ways to charge. At your peril do you blur the edges between the crafted and the raw world of easy comment, hasty opinion and rumour billed as fact, argues the FT editor.  (There was a hat tip, however, to the bloggers that have broken news, such as Guido Fawkes who forced the resignation of an advisor to Gordon Brown by revealing his plans for a smear email campaign.)

So a sharp distinction was drawn between the value proposition of professional journalism and its unruly blogging and twittering cousin. No such clarity yet, though, on the funding model for the former when the Internet has made audiences expect to read most general interest news and a lot of specialised niche content for free.  No secret that each and every news group is daunted by this obstacle, even the FT, which has not been immune to the downturn in advertising revenue.

We were left with a couple of clues on the way forward.  Barber predicted that within a year all news organisations will be charging for online content in some way. (The FT's model is to allow readers access to a few articles for free and then charge for further use.)  Will Google ever pay for content - unlikely says Barber. But at least they might be prepared to talk about linking via searches to articles requiring subscription, which they do not do currently.

And his flippant response to the demographic challenge posed to a print-based news organisation by the emergence of a generation of youngsters who get all their information from screens? People are living longer - they will still buy newspapers.

Thomson Reuters hosted a speech by the British Prime Minister in London on Monday and we opened up the event to the Web with the help of two advisors  — documentary maker Christian Payne and social media guru Mike Atherton.

These two have helped politicians, business people and even a Hollywood studio to connect with online audiences. Our event perhaps lacked a bit of Hollywood glamour but we had business people and politics in spades and we gave Christian and Mike full access to cover the event as they saw fit.

Christian created an alternative video feed of the proceedings using a Nokia mobile phone, and a wireless connection to the Qik social video platform.

This prompted a conversation in the Qik comments.

And somomething similar happened on Christian’s own site — OurManInside — which also carried a streaming feed and acted as a catalyst for another set of comments.

Meanwhile Mike Atherton ‘tweeted’ the proceedings throughout the event (for the uninitiated you ‘tweet’ when you use twitter , which is like blogging via SMS text message). He attracted hundreds of new ‘followers’ as the buzz about what was going on spread.

Meanwhile I had the more straightforward (but quite compulsive) task of monitoring what others were saying in reaction to Gordon Brown’s comments, picking out what I thought were the most interesting and featuring them on the Reuters website alongside our live coverage.

So, what did we learn from all this?

1. Interestingly, our two social media experts were able to create a ‘buzz’ around the event by keeping quiet about it. Dropping hints that they were involved in something big over the weekend served to raise the interest of their many followers in the social media world. Then going very quiet reinforced the idea that something was up. I’m not a PR expert but I think this is roughly the reverse of our standard approach.

2. It’s a lot easier to get a live video feed from a mobile phone out onto the Web than it is to take a professional video feed and stream it onto a website.

3. We can’t confine our attention to people who come to our sites to discuss our content –  conversations will happen wherever people gather online and we’ll have to learn how to find the nuggets.

4. Finding out what people are saying online is getting easier. But monitoring multiple conversation threads isn’t easy. As I watched Mike Atherton flicking between screens and tapping away at his keyboard it struck me that this is a particular skill that not all of us have.

5. Measuring the success of such coverage isn’t easy. One of my colleagues asked what the impact on site traffic had been. Answer: negligible. But mentions in social media shot up. Is that enough to justify the effort?

6. The technology is still  flaky. Bloggers complained they couldn’t hear the audio from our very own Thomson Reuters video widget.  They were referred to the Qik video stream being provided by Documentally — but this broke down at one point due to connectivity problems.

7. Downing Street is actively embracing social media. It has a very personable ‘twitterer’ in the Communications Office who is using this to communicate with journalists and bloggers and indeed did this in advance of the Reuters event.

8. What social media participants really wanted was to be able to interact with the Prime Minister himself  — that’s not something we’d negotiated with no. 10. But next time…

Mark Jones is Reuters News Global Community Editor