“At Thomson Reuters, I am lucky to oversee the business of both the world’s most indispensible news agency as well as our innovative publishing arm, Reuters.com.”

How about the journalistic sourcing for such over-blown adjectives as “indispensable” and “innovative?”

Can this be a honest journalist when he has such a big head and such a swelled opinion of his and his company’s position in the world?

Indispensable for whom or what? Innovative? Maybe for
1996, but not for today.

Take off the rose-colored glasses, Chris Ahearn, and see the scary truth about your inadequate news report with its gaping holes in coverage.

Our current problems stem from the fact that Google values the publication location of content over the authority of the author themselves. In the real-world we filter information though topical experts (NYT writers, trusted personal referrals, employees of top companies) and we have established systems for discovering and evaluating these authorities.

PageRank was an early attempt to replicate this RW social filtering through the medium of web links, but PageRank has hit the limits of its effectiveness and we now find ourselves in need of a new standard for social filtering on the web.

One solution I’ve been evangelizing recently is to track reputation against authors rather than URLs – a ‘PageRank for People’. Think of it as a portable reputation system for the web – a way of using the authority of content creators (instead of URLs) to collectively filter content.

Here’s a couple of write-ups for more info:

‘Social Search and Distributed Reputation Systems’ (Presented at SES Chicago 2009): http://bit.ly/4YhXq4

‘Docs are Old-School, We Need PageRank for People’: http://www.bit.ly/128U9V

‘Meme-Tracking & the Dynamics of the News Cycle”(Cornell University – PDF): http://bit.ly/WA1tS

Maybe that’s why in addition to my paying for wsj.com, now he wants to charge for my reading it as a mobile edition. Hopefully, people (and companies) will start to charge Murdoch for reporting news about them. This from a “news” organization that repeats the same story ad nauseam.

There is no shortage of news outlets and aggregators that would be happy to report news. Murdoch needs to stop gazing at his navel and look out into the world and drive looking through the windshield and not the rear view mirror

Many of us are weary of what we see as news in the U.S. today – entertainment and political-based stories with too much flash and not enough substance.

Reuters/BBC 24-hour Network News is long overdue and needs to happen.

1) Audiences overlap, and the same story may have to be tailored in minor ways to appeal to different audiences, based on local issues, the “tone” or expertise of the publication, and other factors. Two stories that may appear “undifferentiated” to you actually have different angles, emphasis, or additional facts that actually make them more suitable or the audiences they are aimed at. Publications want to be differentiated in some way, and using the same outsourced copy does not help them achieve that goal.

2) There needs to be a system of trust and baseline quality in place, but also great flexibility considering the types of content providers and multitude of publications using it.

3) Making Reuters and a few other specialist players the powerbrokers will lead to news oligopolies — kind of like we had before the advent of the Internet, execept on global scale. That doesn’t sound like progress to me.

Ian Lamont
Managing Editor
The Industry Standard