In these pages a year ago I argued that it was high time that the media got personal. Consumers had demanded and technology was allowing media companies to broadcast multiple streams of desired content not just a single feed. Consumers were now editors making decisions about what news they received and when and how they received it.
Twelve months on the picture has changed again. 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. After all we had just experienced the first US presidential race in which blogging had played a big part in shaping and leading opinion. Since then we have seen an explosion of creativity. Conservative estimates suggest 80000 new blogging sites are launched every week. David Miliband will soon be the first British cabinet minister to have his own blog site.

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. In fact Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of MySpace.com one of the most popular of the online forums is probably the best indication yet that home-made content has made it to the boardroom decision-makers.

So what has changed and what action should we take?

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. Because of this we in the media industry face a profound challenge as significant and transformational as Internet 1.0. So how should we respond to and control content fragmentation in this era of two-way flow?

First media companies need to be "seeders of clouds". To have access to high-value new content we need to attract a community around us. To achieve that we have to produce high-quality content ourselves then display it and let people interact with it. If you attract an audience to your content and build a brand people will want to join your community. This is as true for traditional "letters to the editor" as for MySpace.com.

Second we need to be "the provider of tools". This means promoting open standards and interoperability which will allow a diverse set of consumer-creators to combine disparate types of content.

Third we must improve on our skills as the "filter and editor". Media have always had these functions. The world will always need editing: consumers place value in others making decisions about what is good and what is not.

After all just because everyone now has the ability to publish their own work does not make them the next Salam Pax the pseudonymous blogger at the time of the invasion of Iraq. It is our job as media companies to find that new content gold in the pan of dust and dirt and give it a mass audience.

Pro-Am Co-operation

In the news industry professional and "amateur" content combined creates a better product. It tells the story at a deeper level. Take the tragic Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. For the first 24 hours the best and only photos and video came from tourists. By day two professional news organisations got to the scene and captured the horror of the aftermath influencing the international response by capturing the sheer scale of the disaster. A pro-am co-operation meant telling the story at another level – the horror of the wave strike and the tragedy of the aftermath.

You have to be open to both amateur and professional content to tell the story completely. I believe that professional articles and photographs if available will generally be authoritative. But in the first instance they can be complemented by content created by amateurs.

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.

There is no doubt that our businesses will be stronger if we employ a more collective and open-minded approach to content. The media world is changing again. It is becoming far more exciting for the consumer but posing challenges for media businesses. We all now have access to a rich world of new content creators. The trick is how we use that opportunity.

Published in Financial Times 8 March 2006

If the 19th century was the age of the newspaper and the 20th century the age of radio and television this century will be defined as the age of media personalisation. The news you want when you want it. The concept is simple – forget the old media that decided what was news and when and how you would consume it. Personalisation is all about supplying news to the individual.

Technology is changing the economics of the industry. The traditional television broadcast model involved towers or satellites or the payment of carriage charges. Huge costs meant you had to have broad appeal. That is why societies get the media that best represent the majority. The audience of Fox television has grown as CNN’s has declined. But technology now allows content companies to offer personalised news products. Audiences not big enough to be commercially viable in one country will be so once technology brings them together across the globe.

Personalisation of news will cut through the clutter opening up the newsroom and letting consumers play editor. If we know what stocks you hold what line of work you are in where you live and what you do during the weekend we will be able to match the news you need to your profile. Eighty per cent of personalised news will follow this matching approach.
But personalisation will need to leave space for human expression. Customised content needs to be flexible enough to provide quirky and strange items as well – and to avoid users feeling uncomfortable about media companies making news that exactly matches customer profiles. Twenty per cent of personalisation will have to be content you might not otherwise stumble across – stories you might read over someone’s shoulder on a train the "and finally" items that end traditional news bulletins.

This structural change means content companies will have to develop new skills. The accuracy and timely delivery of breaking news will be critical; so will deep analysis. Content providers will need to have global reach and a more detailed picture of their customers. Five key factors will prove to be the difference between success or failure.

Five factors to success or failure

First if you are not supplying news for many different technology platforms you are dead. It might be TV over the internet or a third-generation mobile phone; it might look something like a smart music playlist – "pod-casting" for news. But I do not think it matters. The consumer will decide and technology will provide.

Second whatever the platform it will need to support high-quality pictures and videos. One of the results of globalisation is that what happens anywhere in the world may have a bearing on our lives. The chaos theory impact of news if you like. The further you are from the news the more you need pictures and videos to understand what is going on. Just think about how people needed images of last year’s tsunamis before they understood their power.

Third content-providers must accept that customers are promiscuous – they get content from a variety of sources – and that that is all right. We all need to embrace interoperability and exchange. One look at the music industry shows what will happen if we do not have the courage to open up and try instead to fence consumers in.

Fourth in the age of information overload a premium will be placed on personalisation but no single revenue stream will predominate. Just as the early internet companies discovered they needed more than one revenue model media companies will need to have multiple sources of revenue from news personalisation. As content moves from desktops and on to mobile devices a lot of opportunities to generate revenue will open up. Subscription will be important but will be part of a broader mix that will include advertising and in some cases a transaction model with customers paying for specific information.

The real legacy problem of the internet is that people expect to get content for free. Gradually this perception can and must be changed. People are not getting free news on their 3G mobiles – they are paying for it. The success of the mobile operators is a good model for charging for content.

Finally success is all about brands. Strong brands will win. In a crowded market you need a recognisable name and a strong track record. Just as trust in government and institutions is declining across the industrialised world trust in media is also on the wane. Recent controversies surrounding respected institutions such as the New York Times and the BBC underline the fact that trust and reputation can be lost quickly. Equally with the rise of bloggers adding to confusion about the reliability of online information greater value will be placed on trust and good judgment.

What is to be gained?

What is the opportunity for companies such as mine? I believe Reuters has a reputation for supplying a product that consumers can trust. Our values of speed accuracy and freedom from bias mean that people trust what we are telling them to be the truth. We are determined not to miss the personalisation wave. With modest investment we are marshalling our under-exploited media assets and strong brand to offer personalised news services direct to consumers.

The opportunity for content companies is large but there are risks as well. Today’s media giants who have the advantage of brand and content need to act quickly otherwise smaller companies will seize the opportunity from them.

Published in Financial Times 7 March 2005.

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

OPA Key Note Speech

The two-way pipe – facing the challenge of the new content creators .

TOM GLOCER CEO REUTERS

About this time last year I stood up in front of a room like this at a Financial Times media conference. I talked then about the personalization of news – how technology was allowing consumers to filter exactly the news they wanted to receive. And how it was allowing content organizations like Reuters to multicast individual streams of desired content not just broadcast a single feed.

In a nutshell it was 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.

Well 12 months on media companies are catching up with this demand but you guessed it our audiences have already moved on – now they are consuming creating sharing and publishing.

The consumer wants not only to run the printing press but to set the linotype as well.
My message today in this opening session of the OPA’s “Forum for the Future” is simple –our industry faces a profound challenge from home-created content – everything from blogging and citizen journalism to video mash-ups.

Over the next twenty minutes or so I want to talk about how companies like ours can meet this new challenge –

How if we create the right ”Crossroads” provide consumers with the appropriate tools and use “old” media skills like writing and editing we can harness the upside in what at the outset looks and feels very much like a punk revolution.

It is becoming clear that our media world is fundamentally changing again only a decade after the internet attracted the first wave of online publishers.

As media historians look back on this period they’ll probably identify News Corp’s recent acquisition of Intermix Media parent company of MySpace.com as a turning point.

Looking at the numbers cold $580 million was a lot of money to pay for a company with barely $20 million in revenues.
But sites like MySpace are redefining our world and providing an online forum for kids music groups their promoters and basically anyone with anything he wants to share.

Look behind the weirdness of some of MySpace’s inhabitants and Murdoch has now gained access to 54 million users (including one called Tom Glocer) – all potential customers for News Corp’s content.

More importantly he has the kind of market data that would make consumer industry bosses giddy – an early warning system of future trends and brand choices for the world’s youth market.

Mainstream media companies are now catching on to why 170000 new members are signing up each day and using this community to launch new albums like ones by the Black Eyed Peas or the Arctic Monkeys.

They’re also searching the community for mass-market talent.

Last fall Interscope joined forces with MySpace to launch its own record label – and it’s no surprise that Fox now plans to harvest potential talent via a MySpace film imprint.
What we are seeing on-line now is almost a continuous talent show with media-savvy consumers using digital technology to express themselves and stand out as individuals in their virtual communities as well as appeal to the Harvey Weinsteins and Simon Cowells of the world.

Click onto Stupidvideos.com and you see just that. There are thousands of videos – which are as the site accurately proclaims pretty stupid.

A mix between Candid Camera You’ve Been Framed and Jackass Stupidvideo gives all of us the opportunity to be a star – if only for our allotted Warhol 15 minutes.

And just like TV producers comb MySpace for talent traditional media companies advertise on Stupidvideos tempting users with the opportunity to “make it in Hollywood”.

The technology now available is also creating a kind of weird hybrid media where music and videos are being “mashed” together to create something new and original.

Go to Ourmedia.org (another of the sharing sites) and you’ll find things like “Weird Al” Goes to the Moon – a guy called Joshua Brock took a Weird Al Yankovic song and put it together with a NASA moon video.

Warner Music has recognised that there is a demand for exactly this new type of creativity – where “ordinary” people express themselves through music video mash-ups – and other labels I am sure will join suit.

MySpace Stupidvideos Ourmedia represent exactly the kind of grey area between homemade content mass audiences and traditional media disciplines.

But there is a difference between the currently small-scale new hybrid media and the mass popularity of MySpace blogs.

Through Pepys and Boswell to F. Scott Fitzgerald Woolf and Bridget Jones – the diarist has always been a common thread through literary history.

But in the same way if we want to best understand the plague years in London we read Defoe future generations will turn to our bloggers to decipher current events.

The 2004 U.S. Presidential Election was the first White House race in which blogging played an influential role. According to a Pew report released after the election 9% of Internet users said they read political blogs “frequently” or “sometimes” during the campaign.

And by breaking stories or pushing issues – like the Swiftboat veterans – blog sites extended their influence beyond their readership base to the national media. In effect bloggers became the story.

But let’s be really clear about what’s changed. It’s of course the nature of publishing. A Gutenbergian transformation has resulted in wooden and metal letters being replaced by the laptop computer and the Internet.

It’s only taken over five hundred years.

But of course just because anyone can now publish their own diary of views (and it is estimated that there are more than 80000 new sites each week) it doesn’t mean that there’s a ready market of consumers.

Not everyone has the potential to be a Salam Pax .

The difference between now and the 1990s is the scale of distribution and the ability to search.

Like diaries and blogs citizen journalism also has a long history. Were the on-line accounts of survivors from the deadly wave that struck Asia on Boxing Day 2004 really so different to Elizabeth Shutes’ experience in 1912:

“Suddenly a *** quivering ran under me apparently the whole length of the ship… Someone knocked at my door and the voice of a friend said: ‘Come quickly to my cabin; an iceberg has just passed our window; I know we have just struck one’.”

Give Shutes a digital camera and a YouTube account and you’d get what we are experiencing today.

But let’s get to the nub of the issue that confronts us.
If users want to be both author and editor and technology is enabling this what will be the role of the media company in the second decade of this century?

I would argue that there are three distinct attributes:

1. First the ‘seeder of clouds’.

What do I mean by that?

Well if you want to attract a community around you you must offer them something original and of a quality that they can react to and incorporate in their creative work – just like Warner’s music to enable video mash-ups. Being authentic in what you create and deliver to your audience is essential for success.

But it’s no good hoping that new content creators will magically be drawn to us – we need to attract them. That means making the most of the content we already produce and setting out our electronic stall.

If you attract an audience to your content and build a brand people will want to join your community and interact. They’ll be inside your tent.

This is as true for traditional “letters to the editor” on the op-ed page as it is for MySpace.com.

2. The second role media companies need to adopt to maximise the opportunity from new content is that of ‘the provider of tools’.

Maybe the French will create a better Google or a CNN a la Francaise but I don’t see a lot of private money lined up behind this lot.

We need to promote open standards and interoperability to allow a diverse set of consumer-creators to combine disparate content types. We must enable our content to be at the Crossroads of our audiences’ consumption – and realize that no one fully “owns” audience anymore.

Let’s not make the same mistake that newspapers did with the protectionist online strategies that characterised Internet One: The Web was not created to merely display a replica of yesterday’s newspaper with a few banner ads.

3. Third the final role that media firms will play in the emergence of the two-way content pipe is that of ‘Filter and Editor’.

In my mind media has always had these two functions – to allow and to filter – one without the other is death.

I believe that the world will always need editing just as consumers place value in others making decisions about what is good and what is not.

Just because everyone now has the potential to publish their own blog doesn’t mean they’re all worth reading.

And just because Warner Music could let me mix Bjork and Lil’Kim with Elmer Phudd doesn’t mean a new Wagner is born – although I wouldn’t want to write it off.

So the role of companies like ours is to edit and filter – to provide open tools and to seed the clouds with content that encourages contributions. And then the skill to spot the gold in the pan of water and dirt. Because what looks niche now has the potential to gain mass appeal and eventually go mainstream.

The good stuff will float to the on-line surface.

Here in Britain in the 1980s the rise of the fanzine was seen as a threat to magazine publishing. But what happened to the successful fanzine editors who went on to edit men’s magazines like GQ will inevitably happen to the successful new content creators – in fact it’s already happening take my earlier example of Salam Pax whose work is now available in deep breath…paperback.

It’s exactly what happened to the underground club DJs whose re-mixes of established songs emerged as mainstream classics themselves.

Now at Reuters we are working hard to incorporate all this thinking into our services.

For many years Reuters has encouraged professional and non-professional journalists to contribute their pictures and video.

And it’s worked very well indeed – take this photograph – it captures the sheer horror of the doomed Air France Concorde on take-off. You feel like you are actually there on the ground watching with all the shakiness adrenaline and blurred terror of it.

It was the image burned in our collective memories of that terrible crash. Reuters had it because two Bulgarian plane spotters knew who we were and how to get in contact – in essence we’d successfully put up the open for business sign.

It was that mix of the on-the-scene amateur backed up by the professional capturing the aftermath that knitted the story together in a way that brought our customers closer to the event.

This pro-am cooperation reached new heights in the coverage of the Asian Tsunami.

On the day the Tsunami struck Reuters had 2300 journalists positioned around the world mercifully none were on those beaches. On that fateful day we also had 1000 stringers around the globe – but none of them were there either.

So for the first 24 hours the best and the only photos and video came from tourists armed with 1.3 megapixel portable telephones digital cameras and camcorders. And if you didn’t have those pictures you weren’t on the story.

However by day 2 our journalists got to the affected areas and it was a Reuters professional cameraman Arko Datta who took the iconic images which made the covers of the Economist Time and Newsweek that week and which won us the World Press Photo Award.

So in the end you have to be open to both amateur and professional to tell the story completely. There is no monopoly on being in the right place at the right time.

Professional content if available will generally be the authoritative article or photo if there is time but it can be complemented by audience created content in the first instance.

So… we are now at our Crossroads. Old media (and ironically enough) that now means on-line publishing as well has a choice – adopt these three roles to prosper or risk becoming less relevant.

1) To be the seeder of clouds;
2) To provide the tools for creation and;
3) To filter and edit.

We cannot be the choke-hold in a desperate effort to close the pipe – to block the new creators of content in a bid to protect our businesses.

But we need not be so fearful either. It’s easy to paint a disaster movie of a fragmented media world where millions of bloggers and “citizen journalists” offer an alternative to the BBC CNN and god forbid Reuters.

But I don’t believe this will happen for two compelling reasons:

First too much choice often means no choice at all.

Imagine going into a restaurant and being given a blank piece of paper – “order whatever you want” you are told. What do you eat? How do you know what the chef considers his specialities? While it is important to have the illusion of choice people generally like less choice not more.

The consumer consciously or not focuses on what he knows what is familiar and above all what is trusted. This is why brands really matter.

Look at multi-channel TV or the Internet.
On digital TV in the UK you can access around 500 channels but what are the most popular? It’s not the Dating Channel (although I can’t speak for everyone in the room)- it’s BBC1 BBC2 ITV and Channel 4.

The Internet has millions of websites to choose from but how many do you actually visit regularly? I would argue that it’s probably no more than a handful.

The second reason to suggest content fragmentation does not mean disaster is this – we don’t have unlimited time to spend looking for new content.

Time is a non-renewable resource and one of the major influences in decision-making –- there are only 168 hours in the week and evidence shows that people don’t want to spend extra time searching for new information. Again brands serve a filtering function.

None of us has the time to go searching through hundreds of sources to pull out what is interesting and what is relevant. Choice means letting the professionals do that for us and sometimes letting the wisdom of crowds have a go – I confess I do look at bestseller lists and most frequently emailed stories.

So in summing up I believe that the role that “old” media companies have in the truly “new” media age is that of content facilitator or seeder of clouds tool provider and editor.

We are the go-between – providing the structure and support – the connective tissue between the information supplier and the consumer even if they are often today the same person!

And really is that so different to what Julius Reuter did in 1851 passing market information between creators and consumers of those prices? His pipe wasn’t initially a digital one – but it is now. Banks contribute their prices to Reuters and we aggregate them add value and sell them back to the banks and others.

Finally in all this crazy mash-up of new content bloggers citizen journalists two-way pipes the issue of trust becomes critical.

Since the growth in broadband usage and search fact and fiction have become dangerously blurred.

Consider this: a couple of weeks ago Wikipedia’s 19-page entry for Tony Blair changed 25 times within that week. One new entry claimed that Blair’s middle name was “Whoop-de-Doo” and the Prime Minister had had a poster of Adolf Hitler on his bedroom wall as a teenager.

How many people now believe that man didn’t go to the moon and NASA staged the landing in a Californian movie studio? I bet a lot more today.

With this confusing backdrop the consumer gravitates to the trusted brand – like Reuters I hope.

I believe that increasingly in a media market dominated by multiple sources trust will become a key differentiator and a critical determinant in consumer decision-making.

Now what does that mean for Google and its decision to accommodate the Chinese authorities? I don’t think we really know yet. Reputation is hard won and quickly lost.

Just look at the impact on reputation that the Kelly Affair had on the BBC or Jason Blair on The New York Times.

These institutions recovered through decisive action but if you lose the trust of your audience you lose your audience. Full stop.

In conclusion then while writing a diary publishing photographs and making videos aren’t exactly new phenomena access to the printing press is.

But in an echo of the fears that Hollywood studios had after the success of the Blair Witch Project not all media consumption will be home-created blogs – in the same way not all movies were made on a shoestring budget filmed on a shaky camcorder.

Don’t make the same mistake we made as an industry at the birth of on-line.

Protectionism doesn’t work – but neither does total surrender.

As media companies we have access now to a rich new world of sources of talented writers photographers film-makers would-be journalists political diarists stand-up comics actors musicians.

Let’s not turn away from the potential of all of this. But understand it and unlock it.

User created content has become part of our media world – but it’s part of the overall mix not the sole component.

Understand it. Encourage it.

Recognise that if you act now you might just make it to Web 3.0.