Fast Food News?

WAN-IFRA 9th International Newsroom SummitFast food news?
George Brock
Professor and Head of Journalism
City University London
London September 2010

“Finger food news”
Sounds unappetising, no?
But it’s based on old assumption…
…about two-dimensional space
“Fast” = 2 issues
Small screens, not many words
Speed of news cycle
Second of these is the larger issue for journalism
“Mobile” is now wireless tablets

What’s the context?
At the start of overlapping waves of change
Mobile adoption rate x8 broadband
Google: do mobile apps first
Info explosion: 5 exabytes every 2 days
Windows into a single info cloud?
Journalism decoupled from distribution
Where are you on the books-to-instantaneous scale?

Content, not hardware
But hardware does influence content
Finding new grammar online
Connections and “mutualisation”
Downward in text but through links
Information being processed in news ways
e.g. GaonKiAwaaz, Uttar Pradesh

Things to hold on to
Data, information, journalism are not the same
In connected, media-rich world, journalism has 4 core tasks:
Verification
Sense-making
Witness
Investigation
Challenge is finding business model for these

Things I haven’t talked about
Will people pay? (Increasingly, yes)
Is the web dead, killed by apps? (Unlikely)
What’s technical definition of mobile? (It’ll work itself out)
Geolocation (transformative in local)

Enriching the “finger food”
Are we going to see…re-intermediation?
Rewiring newsrooms
e.g. Weigel + Wise
Filters (a.k.a. “editors”) still matter
Importance of words
Links: journalism as a encyclopaedia on the move
Assembling jigsaws

Takeaways
Hardware does shape content…to a degree
Mobile is not bite-sized anymore
Switch on your inner anthropologist
In the end, it will be content that counts
Most important dimension is trust

www.georgebrock.net
@georgeprof
www.city.ac.uk/journalism/

Fast Food News?

by City University London on Sep 09, 2010

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Fast Food News? — Presentation Transcript

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