I have to say – it’s a funny feeling giving an external speech here in Reuters office for once – the upside I am just four floors away from my desk the downside…..…I am just four floors away from my desk.

As many of you know the issues that you’ve been chewing over yesterday at the BBC and will debate today are ones that have fascinated me for a long time now. As the Chief Executive of the world’s largest information business it’s my job to really understand these trends. And as Geert said for some 150 years we’ve been adapting and evolving to big changes just like these.

I believe that these are the big structural questions for our industry these are the greatest challenges we all face. And the dialogue and debate that we are having today will help shape how we all respond to what is – I personally think – a really pivotal moment in the history of media.

The Democratization of Media

Let’s get on the table what we’re talking about here today. All the people we used to broadcast to are broadcasting right back at us. There has been a democratization of media. There’s still a government running the infrastructure – but the citizens are making and implementing policy of their own.

I share with you the belief that something significant has occurred in our world – something that’ll have a long lasting impact on our media product and the way we go about doing business. It’s almost like the meteor struck as long as four years ago and it’s only now that we are feeling the shockwave. That said this change though hasn’t just crept up on us totally unawares. Over a year ago now I talked at a similar conference about the personalization of news – how technology was allowing consumers to filter exactly the news they wanted to receive. That content organizations like Reuters were multicasting individual streams of desired content not just broadcasting a single feed.

In a nutshell for me it was all about the consumer as editor – you get the news you want when you want it either pulled by something like an RSS feed or a Tivo box or pushed by the media company – in this instance filtered by your profile.

Up to now choice meant what paper you bought or what TV station you watched – the growth of personalisation meant for the first time consumers were making far more sophisticated decisions. It had the effect – as Rupert Murdoch has commented – of ending the omnipotence of the “great editors”.

Well more than 12 months on from the first speech I gave on this issue media companies are catching up with this demand. But as you all know our audiences have already moved on – now they are consuming creating sharing and publishing. And traditional media companies like the BBC and Reuters are taking their first baby steps in this new world – a world where everyone is a potential news source.

It’s a pretty unique position to be in – it’s uncharted territory. After all for the last two hundred years – let’s be honest – we’ve been in charge. And that has made things simple. But now our readers our viewers our listeners are grabbing the mic the printing press the camera. The couch potatoes have grown legs got off the sofa and want a slice of the action. Maybe it’s because of the ubiquity of mass media maybe it’s the rise of celebrity maybe it’s a result of mature political societies – but people now want to make their views heard.
Just as a sidebar – it fascinates me but as political participation declines in the UK the US and across Europe participation in media has grown. There must be a connection here. And I don’t just mean the fact that more 18 years olds voted in the finals of X Factor than at last year’s General Election – although that is interesting.

No people – citizens – are using the media to air their views on all kinds of public policy questions. Perhaps it is that they don’t feel their voice is being heard at government levels or perhaps it is that standards of living are so good that politics no longer matters?

But what I see is people participating and sharing their opinion aired in a really exciting way – this is where political debate and argument is now at. It seems that media is more real to people than politics.

As a result of this dialogue campaigns that bubble away on the blogosphere are breaking through to the national media and becoming issues in their own right. The calls for President Bush to replace *** Cheney with Condie Rice had a significant blogging dimension. And of course many of you will remember the Eason Jordan affair at Davos last year – one comment in a session picked up by a blog and then a dramatic resignation.

Blogging then wasn’t as widespread as it is today. At that point – in early 2005 – there were just over half a million bloggers. By the middle of the year there were 25 million. A relatively small activity has grown extraordinary momentum. Now the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 months.

The opening up of media has given a voice and an audience to everyone with an internet connection. It has levelled the world. In real terms the movement is still quite small but I feel that the new participants – the new media outriders – will hammer a fundamental change to how we all do business. We are at the beginning of a new media crucible. A crunching together of cultures. And so because of this companies are adapting the way they look at the world and recognizing that there is an opportunity in allowing this to happen.

Three Steps to Pro-Am Success

A few weeks ago I addressed the Online Publishers Association in London – and actually what I spoke about already feels a bit old now the debate has moved on again!

Back then in March I made the point that media businesses should work in three broad areas to effectively commingle their content with outside contributors. First companies need to create the right environment for contributors – I said that they needed to be ‘the seeders of clouds’. Second they need to make it technically easy to contribute. I believe that Bloggers will not link to articles that require logins and subscriptions. And finally traditional media firms should focus on the most important skills those of filtering and editing.

Add to all that I said that companies needed to put up appropriate hoarding so that people who want to play who want to take part know where you are and how they can make their voice heard within your community.

So where has this debate gone now? Well the ensuing online discussion after my speech was pretty supportive – it’s nice to read (once in a while) the words “Reuters Gets it”. The debate continued when Rupert Murdoch gave a speech a week or so later arguing that the media revolution had the power to destroy not just media companies….but “whole countries” too. I personally don’t share such a doomsday vision. I do though agree with Murdoch that the new world has the potential to strengthen our companies – but only if we respond in the right way.

The bloggers have reached out of the screen and made media participation a strategic priority for our businesses. But here’s the thing – there are three key areas that haven’t really been properly explored yet:

The first is this – we need to re-think the key jobs in the media because they require new types of skills.

Second – as businesses we should think carefully about where we sit on the value chain. Remember companies like Google are using sophisticated algorhythmic programmes to leverage the editing decisions of thousands of newspapers.

Third – what’s going to be the effect of all this change in an era of declining trust in media?
Points one and two I want to talk about briefly. Then the issue of trust I want to address and hopefully frame the Q&A.

So let’s take the issue of new skills first.

So here it is – the job of reporter and the job of editor will have to change. The skills that we need to blend – traditional skills with the skills of navigating the blogosphere – are not ones that we currently have. We continue to train our journalists for a time in history now long gone.

The reporter now needs to interact in his or her world differently. Let’s go back to the example of politics. If you are a traditional “lobby” reporter here in the UK you attend the twice daily Downing Street briefing you might have lunch with an MP or a special adviser and you keep in close contact with the think tanks.

That’s going to have to change. Now your potential sources of news can be found in other areas too. You need to know the people at Make My Vote Count The Sharpener or The Policeman’s Blog (which provides a rather untraditional view of the challenges that face Britain’s law enforcers as they pound the streets).

And in the same way the reporter’s world has opened up the editor’s world and their role has changed too. Our editors now need to be able to accommodate contributions and comments from the general public – and at Reuters we’ve had good experience of doing just that. For many years we’ve encouraged professional and non-professional journalists to contribute their pictures and video.

The pro-am response to the Asian Tsunami was the most intensive experience we’ve had as yet in this area. On the day the wave struck we had 2300 journalists and 1000 stringers positioned around the world thankfully none were on those beaches.

The best and only images came from tourists. So for news organisations that didn’t have those pictures you weren’t on the story. By day 2 we got to the affected areas with photographers whose pictures captured the true horror of the aftermath for the rest of the world.

My point here is: our editors needed to mix the amateur and the professional to tell the story. Increasingly these skills are going to move beyond just verifying whether a picture really shows what it does – and let’s not forget that even that job can be hard.

Some of you will remember last month when both the Guardian and Sky News had to apologize over the use of a dramatic picture sent in by a “viewer” that showed the silhouette of a deer caught in a forest fire in Dorset. Great picture – it did show a forest fire but a few miles away from the South Coast of England. In fact it was a fire in the Yellowstone National Park in 1988. Actually it was such a great picture it featured on the front cover of Cass R Sunstein’s Laws of Fear Cambridge University Press 2005.

Imagine then if as an editor you have to deal with not just verifying photographs and video but stories too as your trawl the blog sites. This does lead to the issue of trust – and one that I will address in a second. But before I do that let me touch upon what I would describe as the news value chain.

As programming software gets smarter and the use of algorhythmic systems more popular it will have a pronounced effect on our businesses. Take Google News for example. Log onto the home page and if you look at the World or UK news sections they bear an uncanny resemblance to the news priority that the same stories would be given in a paper or on say BBC.co.uk.

But hang-on – Google doesn’t employ one journalist or editor so how do they do it? In fact they have a sophisticated algorhythmic programme that fishes for stories and prioritises them. That programme is in effect leveraging the work done further up the chain by human beings – our journalists.

In this respect news gathering is not a commodity service any more – it’s really a high value asset. The decisions our editors make about the priority of stories how much space they are given are actually highly valuable decisions.

These decisions made by journalists are feeding commodity news at the other end of the exhaust. Maybe we feel ok about this? I am not sure; it certainly should make us think about how we charge for news.

The Elephant in the Room

So let me wrap up by talking a little about the elephant in the room – keeping the trust of our audience. If there are multiple news sources multiple opinions multiple voices how do you know where to go for the truth particularly when the megaphone model has been replaced by the conversation.

There really are two issues here we need to untangle. First is the trust we place in individual “homemade” Blogsites – how can we trust that the doctor behind the Doctor’s Blog isn’t in fact an unemployed truck driver? Second and related to that how can we protect ourselves (that is the media companies of today) so that our news remains trusted and is accurate?

And really that’s the biggest challenge – we need to accommodate the new media participants but we also need to protect our reputations. I hope some of you guys in the audience have some suggestions. For me it’s really a combination of a few things.

First it’s about training – as I’ve already mentioned new skills for a new era of media. These skills are honed so they are adept at spotting the hoax pictures of forest fires and interrogating contributions from outside the garden wall.

Second I think that there will be a natural process that occurs. Blog sites will build track records in the same way traditional media companies have. Sites that prove overtime that they can be trusted that they do get it right consistently will be magnets. Maybe a rating system similar to eBay sellers will emerge? If bloggers are paid for their contribution maybe such a system might emerge? Who knows?

But what I hope will happen is that the market will naturally begin to regulate itself. Because and this is my third and final point consumers will gravitate to sites and news providers that they trust.

That’s great news for companies like Reuters and the BBC. It’s also a challenge. We’ve got to remain relevant we’ve got to reflect what’s going on in the rest of the world we’ve got to change the way we cover news. But we’ve also got to protect our reputation and that’s a difficult balance to get right. It’s a cliché – but reputation is hard won and quickly lost. Many companies have found that out the hard way. Trust really is the big issue that we have to grapple with. And it’s one that I really want to frame the Q&A session now.
Published Wednesday October 11 2006 10:55 AM by tom