Good news for old media like newspapers and television networks: Internet content won’t drive them out of business just yet.

But the clock is ticking, said new media entrepreneurs at the Supernova 2005 technology conference, which ended late Wednesday in San Francisco.

San Francisco

“People who are not part of the established media seem to do it best,” said Dan Gillmor, moderator of the “Reinventing Media” panel and founder of Grassroots Media, a company devoted to developing citizen-based media.

The panelists see increasingly better quality of video content by amateurs and more citizen journalists offering alternative views on mainstream news through blogs and other tools, among other changes.

But at least one panelist cautioned that change will be slow. Many consumers will not be as quick to embrace new technologies as the mostly technophile audience attending the conference.

“It’s important we don’t believe our own bull,” said Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove, which distributes video content on the Internet. “It will take five to 10 years” for the majority of consumers to adopt broadband and other technology.

In the meantime, traditional media still will have its place.

“If anything, the picture gets rosier,” said Suranga Chandratillake of Blinkx, when asked about the role of local, non-network-affiliated TV in the new age. “There’s a lot more space for” local and niche stories. Blinkx makes an audio/video search engine that uses speech recognition.

There’s an audience for stories with “a deeper focus on what happened today locally, and [local stories] that aren’t time sensitive,” Mr. Allaire added.

Still, Internet and citizen journalists are playing an increasingly important role, said panelist Lawrence Gelburd of the WhartonSchool. They provide local news and information, but they can also play watchdog to traditional media.

WhartonSchool

“It’s a race” to get information out there, said Mr. Gelburd. “When there’s abuse by the police, there’ll be other views… besides the mainstream media.”

The panelists said they hope differing views won’t be censored. All of them said they do not actively ban material considered offensive or obscene on their programs and blogs, but rather let their viewers and readers make that decision.

“We have viewers rank [content],” said Mike Homer of Open Media Network, a content provider focused on public service programming à la PBS. “If enough people vote [against something], it will be removed.”

It’s perhaps this strong sense of community that forms among amateurs making their own web photo albums or videos, and among bloggers and their readers that may eventually draw the public away from traditional media.