Richard McManus relays some key points from the keynote at the Online Publishers Association given by Reuter’s CEO, Tom Glocer . Richard seems pretty excited about some of Tom’s ideas but I’m not convinced quite yet…
1) Media companies will be a “seeder of clouds”. I think that means attracting good content and people to its sites and apps.
Yeah, OK. They have access, they have talent, they have means to publish… It’s what they’ve always been doing. It’s what they’re doing now – just look on memeorandum, see how many stories start with big media sources. There’s no reason they wouldn’t go on doing that, although maybe in a slightly different manner.
2) they’ll be a “provider of tools… We need to produce open standards and interoperability to allow” people to create content
Please no! Leave standards to people who know how to write’em. Leave interoperability to people who will have to make system interoperate. Big media was never about inclusion, it’s about scooping the other guy. It was never about technology, it got dragged, kicking and screaming, into whatever technology came next.
3) media companies will be “filter and editor”
Meh. This part is more about balance than anything else. Right now the scales are shifting towards the “wisdom of the crowds” but at some point people will realized that digg is “edited” by a bunch of anti-social, prepubescent geeks and they’ll move on. On the other hand, how can you expect Reuters to scale to Internet levels of information flow?
Filed under: The Net
[...] dia at first found this speech left him breathless, and then came back to earth because of Eran Globen’s post, which said that the old media has always been seeding clouds; we don’t want them [...]