Do old media risk becoming irrelevant?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 March 2006 at 09:44
Tags: BBC, Blogs, Citizen journalism, Financial Times, Journalism, Mashups, Podcasting, Reuters, Wikis

On the essential reading list this week is the speech by Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer at last week’s Online Publishers Association conference. In the speech, which was later published in the Financial Times, Glocer explained why “old media must embrace the amateur“. (Also available from Reuters as a Word document [DOC])
Refering to Daniel Defoe, Samuel Pepys and James Boswell, Glocer argued that people akin to today’s bloggers or “citizen journalists” have always existed: “The difference now is the scale of distribution and the ability to search”.

Glocer advises media organisations to become “seeders of clouds” who produce high-value new content, “providers of tools” that allow news consumers to recombine disparate content as they see fit, and become better “filters and editors” who provide a valuable service by finding the scarce valuable droplets in the information deluge.

Old media, Glocer says, have a choice: “integrate the new world or risk becoming irrelvant”. FT.com will be holding an online Q&A with Glocer about his views next Wednesday and are currently inviting readers to e-mail their questions for Glocer to ask@ft.com.

In a related item on on the must-read list, journalism’s best-known advocate of these participatory media, Dan Gillmor, has begun writing a series of articles for BBC News Online. The former San Jose Mercury News columnist, author of We the Media, and director of the Center for Citizen Media explains the tools whose widespread diffusion he sees as the democratising of media production: blogs, podcasts, wikis, discussions, multiplayer games and mashups. It’s a nice overview of these terms.