Reuters ready to evolve into journalism 3.0

Ronny Kerr · August 6, 2009 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/9cd

Chris Ahearn promises "golden age of journalism" for news companies who work with new technology

Press With the emergence of any new technology, the old technologies, the old methods, and particularly, the old companies struggle to keep their heads above water in an environment they’ve never faced before.

The music industry, for example, first took a keenly strict approach towards the Internet, bringing in big-names, like Metallica, to shut down the most popular p2p file-sharing software, Napster, while slapping thousands of lawsuits onto its very customers.

Eventually, the industry realized that these methods didn’t help CD sales. These days, though the record companies have found new enemies in the form of torrent sites which speed up p2p tremendously, they are also attempting to embrace the Internet by working with online content providers. The best example of this is Apple’s iTunes Music Store.

Well, just as the future of music has been exaggeratedly foretold as doomed by the big industry, so too are the old giants in news warning the world about the impending death of news, at the hands of blogs and news aggregators like Google News.

Chris Ahearn, President, Media at Thomson Reuters, has something to say about that: “Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.”

In a guest column entry posted on the Reuters “MediaFile” blo Reuters g this week, Ahearn tackled sensationalist claims that sites like blogs, news aggregators, and social media networks that merely link back to the full story on Reuters or AP are killing good and solid journalism.

“But the Internet isn’t killing the news business any more than TV killed radio or radio killed the newspaper,” says Ahearn, professing the age-old wisdom that the smart companies will advance with new technology, not fight hopelessly against it. “Incumbent business leaders in news haven’t been keeping up.”

Starting to sound like a real revolutionary near the end of his entry, Ahearn says, “with all the new tools and capabilities we should be entering a new golden age of journalism – call it journalism 3.0.”

We’ve seen it already. Iranian protestors in Iran, starting in June after the presidential election, worked tirelessly to employ the Internet tools available (despite the government’s ban on them) to spread information about up-to-the-minute events on the ground. People setup meeting places on Twitter, horrific videos were uploaded to YouTube, and so on.

This is just one small example of the tremendous potential of “journalism 3.0” and it is probably what Ahearn envisions when he optimistically writes, “Let’s stop whining and start having real conversations across party lines. Let’s get online publishers, search engines, aggregators, ad networks, and self-publishers (bloggers) in a virtual room…and have a conversation about how we can work together to fuel a vibrant, productive and trusted digital news industry.”

Ahearn seems deftly aware and maybe even fearful that the traditional news industry could hurt itself the same way the music industry did, by fighting against the best new technology. We’ll have to wait to see whether his dream of some massive virtual meeting between everybody involved in news ever manifests itself.

(image source: The 412 by ShowClix)

Ronny Kerr

All author posts

Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

Twitter

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on April 9, 2008

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.