Old media must embrace the amateur

[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR:Tom Glocer, Reuters]
[Commentary] While media companies are catching up with the demand for “personalisation”-- receiving the news they want when and where they want it -- our audiences have moved on dramatically. Now they are consuming, creating, sharing and publishing their own content online. 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.
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/e2bba176-ae0a-11da-8ffb-0000779e2340.html
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