Thursday, May 3, 2012

Technies seek journalism's re-invention

At a media executives conference in Madrid in April, a few leaders of tech companies conceded they were looking for a marriage between news and their various platforms, but they do not see themselves as news organizations. “Most newsgathering is still done in a very traditional way,” Facebook journalism manager Vadim Lavrusik told reporter Robert Andrews. "In too many places, it’s still ‘this is what’s happening’, not contextualising what’s happening. There’s a lack of discovering why this is happening, the context. “People want analysis from journalists,” he said. "Posts with journalists’ analysis receive 20 percent more referral clicks [than others]. Content isn’t scarce – it’s the contextualization and making sense of that content that’s becoming scarce.” Richard Gingras, head of Google's news products and Google+ programming simply stated, "We're not a news company. We're a platform."