April 14, 2005, 8.20am • 41 comments » • 891 Views

Murdoch joins participatory news debate

Rupert Murdoch’s slow awakening to online media continues apace, with a speech to the American Society of Newspapers Editors yesterday
calling for a close relationship through tech with the readers of his newspapers:-

For some, [our papers] may have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers.

We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.

Without coming over all citizen journalism on you, I think Rupert, whilst taking a relatively conservative approach, is absolutely right. He’s plainly been read the “my reporters know more than me” adage.

we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy — chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve. So long as our readers understand the distinction between bloggers and our journalists, and so long as proper safeguards are utilized, this might be an idea worth exploring.

The news organisations think they’ve figured out pretty well by now how to publish news online (they haven’t, by the way - not many have figured out that a bottomless newshole offers tremendous ways to provide context and historical linkages).

Now it’s time for the web to do the other thing it’s great at - being a socialising technology. This phase is all about connecting readers with reporters and readers with readers (interestingly, it also emanates from efforts to rectify a chronic sales downturn in the US newspaper market, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out elsewhere, where the decline is less pronounced).

On connecting readers with readers, something BBC News is working on could be a big embodiment of that on an international scale. BBC Global News director Richard Sambrook tells Hypergene:-

[Global Conversation] will change the way we report the news and how we find and develop news stories. New technologies now allow our audiences to become part of our production teams, generating and adding their content to conventional sources.

The Global Conversation is also about bringing together our audiences, and allowing people to connect with each other, to open up a dialogue and to allow them to contribute to our output.

That means the international audience happily married to each other and to the BBC newsdesk. At the very least, it sounds like the interesting occasional transatlantic link-ups they have in programmes like Panorama.

Interesting times.

(via Suw)
(and it wouldn’t be the web if I didn’t link to the full speech)