The moral of New Thinking for Old Publishing is this: If you host a panel to get feedback from your audience, and not really impart any new wisdom to them, make that damn clear in your description and introduction. And maybe don’t just include a popular author like Clay Shirky for no apparent reason (other than to maybe draw a crowd).

To be fair, the audience did provide quite a bit of feedback in the 30 minutes they were given to do so. And, for the most part, they handled quite a bit of negativity pretty well. But I think most of the audience was there to see Clay.