Trust in the age of citizen journalism

Tom Glocer's blog: Trust in the Age of Citizen Journalism. Speech given in Tel Aviv by Reuters chief executive Tom Glocer: The world we live in today is one in which everyone is a consumer, everyone a distributor, everyone an aggregator, everyone a producer. News organizations must realize everyone is both a potential partner and competitor. For too long the public has been a face without a voice; the Internet has changed all that. Thanks to MediaBistro for the pointer.

At Reuters we announced last week a groundbreaking agreement with Yahoo, parent of Flickr, to encourage amateur photographers to tag and submit their photographs to Reuters – to put them to work as super stringers.

For me the advantage of the Internet is just that. It’s about the return of the conversation, something we lost with the advent of mass broadcast communication. 

The ancient Greeks regarded dialogue as the most effective means of communication- a two way conversation – a Socratic dialog at its best.   The development of print, and more significantly television, dampened that conversation.  It replaced it with a one-way broadcast model.

The world we live in today is one in which everyone is a consumer, everyone a distributor, everyone an aggregator, everyone a producer.

We live in the era of the two-way pipe.

News organizations must realize everyone is both a potential partner and competitor. A 19-year-old sitting in a dorm room cranking out gossip, a well-established journalist blogging for her news organization, or a respected academic all have equal right to have a voice.  Whether they have an equal voice is another matter.

For too long the public has been a face without a voice, a simple and unheard recipient of media reports, television footage and news pictures. The internet has changed all that, giving access to all voices on all sides of any debate. ...

Good stuff.