From Reuters.com

How will journalism survive the Internet Age?

Chris Ahearn is President, Media at Thomson Reuters. The following is the text of remarks prepared for the Federal Trade Commission’s workshop on how the Internet has affected journalism.

Good afternoon. As I only have a couple of minutes, let me get straight to the point.

First, journalism is not synonymous with newspapers and today the discussion has focused too much on newspapers alone. Second, journalism will do more than survive the Internet Age, it will thrive. It will thrive as creators and publishers embrace the collaborative power of new technologies, retool production and distribution strategies and we stop trying to do everything ourselves.

I agree with Mr. Murdoch that the bold will survive and the timid will fail. However, the newfangled aggregators/curators and the dominant search engines are certainly not the enemy of journalism. Nor are they the salvation. They do not always refrain from doing evil in their pursuit of profit and audience. And they do fail to “do unto others” at times -– some do steal and use complete or near-complete copies of our and other work and use ad networks such as AdSense to unlawfully monetize without sharing.

That said, most are a constructive and competitive part of the news ecosystem, I welcome them and I continue to believe and support the link economy.

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. Thus, I see the challenges and opportunities from both sides of the aisle. Many of you in this room are clients of ours (or should be) and some of you are our competitors. Perhaps different from those who wish they could roll back the clock, we prefer to lean into the winds of change.

Like many we grapple with the coverage, cost and value issues of content scarcity vs. abundance as well as content uniqueness vs. utility. We choose to maximize the value of each of these four quadrants and have adaptive business models and markets which allow us to. For example, we focus principally on the importance of vertical and niche markets that have subscription-oriented models — this where our firm derives the vast majority of its revenues. We focus obsessively on the needs of professionals in those markets we serve. We don’t want to be all things to all people. We want to create journalism that has unique value to our clients, and partner with creators as warranted and needed. Most importantly, we focus on creating and providing valuable services — not just content.