Reuters President: Journalism Golden Age Coming
Jemima Kiss covering Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media, at last week’s WeMedia conference in Miami, writes that Ahearn’s future:
… is one which will be regarded as a golden age of journalism, where reporters work with specialised communities of reliable and trusted sources and stringers, and where technology provides new tools and information that paper-based journalists could only dream about.
Ahearn said it takes place one person at a time, encouraging interaction with the community, promoting positive ethics and dealing with problems forthrightly.
He adds:
While Reuters has 2400 professional journalists, it could have a network of 24 million sources.
“As a journalist, there’s nothing better than being witness to an event and Reuters specialises in that, but is it not better that if you can’t be there, you have reliable people that are?”
I think he is getting close here. However, it seems, at least from this short read, that their aim is built too much on a building freelance model. I think the future, perhaps not for a giant like Reuters, but certainly for smaller papers is to have journalists who are embedded into their communities.
A living part of the community with each journalism being the trainer, link, conduit and interpreter of getting the complexities of each community told and understood. No easy task. But today journalism is paid for by advertising. In the future, journalism will have to create its own value. The way to give it value is to build an audience that values what is produced and feels a part of that production. My golden age of journalism is a community of journalists and citizens telling the stories of their everyday lives and puttting that storytelling into a greater context.
I mentioned earlier that I would was reading Robert Picard’s Journalism, Value Creation
and the Future of News Organizations , well I have finished it and am developing some ideas that the paper helped be formulate. More on that later.
