The University of Washington’s Foster School of Business sponsored a great event the other day: A lunch April 7 at the Columbia Tower Club featuring Mike Davidson, founding president and CEO of Newsvine, Inc.

I’ve been following his site for awhile, but had never met him. Sharp guy; great site.

The topic was “News in the Internet Era” – something Davidson knows a lot about. He runs daily operations of Newsvine.com, now a wholly-owned subsidiary of MSNBC. Before starting Newsvine in 2005, he was at ESPN and the Walt Disney Internet Group.

Mike was interviewed by Christine Chen, a former anchor at KCPQ13 and KCTS who now has her own consulting firm, Chen Communications. Sharp gal; good questions.

With the “democratization” of online media, Chen asked Davidson, how do we filter all these stories? How do we know who has credibility? Who can we trust?

There’s no easy answer, Davidson said. “No news source is infallible,” he noted, He recommended that, as Ronald Reagan once put it, we should: “Trust but verify.”

Many people “don’t always know what they want or what they need” online, he said, and some people “want dessert all the time” – i.e., they’d rather be entertained than informed. Many also tend to visit the sites they agree with to have their opinions validated, he said.

Chen noted: “I argue that objectivity never really existed, because we’re humans before we’re journalists and our perspectives are shaped by our backgrounds.”

Davidson added: “There are some people who don’t even think it’s important anymore.”

Still, they both agreed that many people are looking for news sources they can trust. Davidson said some efforts have been made to verify sources, such as Google’s PageRank algorithm, in which pages with the most links get a higher ranking, and Technorati’s Authority system that ranks the top 100 blogs.

However, “We’re not there yet” in terms of a credible verification system, Davidson said.

Discussing younger news consumers, Davidson said that “Generation Y” represented a “turning point.” They “want it raw” and not filtered by a traditional media source such as a newspaper or broadcast station. “News finds me” is their attitude, he said.

Chen asked: “Is there future for newspapers?”

“No, there isn’t even a present,” Davidson said.

Seattle “may be a zero-newspaper town quicker than any other city,” he said. “If any city was prepared to have its entire news operation moved online, it would be Seattle.”

He noted that the news business is “not a growth industry anymore” and suggested that maybe newspapers should get into the “events business” to make some money.

Chen asked how to maintain a high-quality flow of news and information on the Web.

Davidson said: “The word ‘filter’ is a very relevant term for what’s happening today,” noting that new companies such as Newsvine could help people find good information.

“Instead of reading 10 stories a day [in a newspaper] you’re skimming 200 stories a day [online],” Davidson said.

As for the future, Davidson said: “Journalism has always been subsidized. Maybe we’re moving toward a time when it’s subsidized by us.”

All in all, a good discussion of a timely topic, although the future of the news business is still up in the air. Literally.