Chris Ahearn President, Media at Thomson Reuters.
First, journalism is not synonymous with newspapers and today the discussion has focused too much on newspapers alone. Second, journalism will do more than survive the Internet Age, it will thrive. It will thrive as creators and publishers embrace the collaborative power of new technologies, retool production and distribution strategies and we stop trying to do everything ourselves.
I agree with Mr. Murdoch that the bold will survive and the timid will fail. However, the newfangled aggregators/curators and the dominant search engines are certainly not the enemy of journalism. Nor are they the salvation. They do not always refrain from doing evil in their pursuit of profit and audience. And they do fail to “do unto others” at times -– some do steal and use complete or near-complete copies of our and other work and use ad networks such as AdSense to unlawfully monetize without sharing.
That said, most are a constructive and competitive part of the news ecosystem, I welcome them and I continue to believe and support the link economy.
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We fervently believe that value must always be conferred to the original creator – whoever that is, big or small, incumbent or insurgent.
This is an open platform which will allow publishers to save money by specializing and focusing on what they can uniquely do best – and (to paraphrase Jeff Jarvis) outsource the rest.
It will allow publishers to right-size their coverage efforts and stop wasting resources on writing the umpteenth undifferentiated story that is available elsewhere. Let’s be honest, too much resource and money is spent on regurgitation as opposed to unique and differentiated labor. It will allow creators to specialize on meeting the unique needs of their audience and will foster creativity.
Coupled with responsible behavior by all participants in the link economy – and I do mean all, both incumbent and insurgent – we will see the evolution to a new golden age of journalism and much, much more.