A version of the speech by Reuters head Tom Glocer that I lauded is now online at the FT.
While media companies are catching up with this demand for “personalisation”, our audiences have moved on dramatically. Now they are consuming, creating, sharing and publishing their own content online.
There were indications last year that a significant shift in the balance of power between professional content companies and home-based creators lay ahead….
But it is not just bloggers – it is citizen journalists armed with their 1.3 megapixel camera phones, people “mashing” together music and images to create new music videos, kids making their own movies and posting them on sites such as Stupidvideos.com or MySpace.com….
It is important to understand what has changed. Bloggers, after all, have always been a part of history – read Daniel Defoe, Samuel Pepys or James Boswell. The same is true for citizen journalists: just check out first-hand accounts of any big historical event. The difference now is the scale of distribution and the ability to search….
In the news industry, professional and “amateur” content combined creates a better product. It tells the story at a deeper level….
We are now at our crossroads. Old media – and I now would include the first wave of online publishing – have a choice: integrate the new world or risk becoming less relevant. Our industry must not fall into the old protectionist strategies that defined the first phase of the internet. The internet was not invented just to show a replica of yesterday’s newspaper with a few banner advertisements. We cannot be the choke-hold, blocking the new creators in a bid to protect our legacy businesses…
[via Lance Knobel]
