The following speech was given at the Association of Online Publishers conference in London on October 7. Chris Cramer is Reuters Global Editor, Multimedia.

In the spirit of a real debate I’d like to talk today about some trends in the so-called traditional media.

But I can see you sitting out there and thinking: “Here we have a traditional mainstream media guy.” And I’m happy to own up to 40 years or so working for mainstream companies:

The BBC for 26 years - always in news.

CNN for 11 years - always in news and channel management.

And now at Reuters — this time head of multimedia in a business which primarily serves the financial professional.

All three organizations have a lot of history. Reuters has been around since 1851. So a career in pretty traditional news organizations, though in the case of all three they have each managed to reinvent themselves several times down the years to stay ahead of the competition.

In the case of Reuters we are still doing it.  More of that later.

I also want to talk about the trends in social media and social networking. What does the news and information business mean in the era of Facebook and Flickr? Is accurate information threatened by Twitter and the twittering classes,  or does social media offer a fabulous opportunity to open up the entire world to a different type of journalism and transparency?

Are the existing business models for the media completely broken or is there a new opportunity for news and information flow? What shape will the reinvention and respositioning need to take over the next few years?

I’d also like to offer some views on what we all need to do to respond to some of the new consumer demands and some of the fabulous new technologies and trends we have at our disposal.

When I started as a journalist back in the sixties — first in newspapers — the profession didn’t need to face any of the challenges it now faces. Fast-forward forty years or so and you could argue that disruptive technologies threaten the entire industry.

Old theories busted, many media businesses closed in the face of competition and rising costs, tens of thousands of jobs in the media lost in the last few years — and it’s not over yet. The old paradigms, the old rules and theories, are really in disarray.

And what about so-called citizen journalism?

Is everyone an active newsgatherer these days?  Journalists and non-journalists, with more than a billion high-definition cellphone cameras out there in the world.

Let me also say a word today about integrity and trust and whether that still plays any part in media coverage - and also where does opinion and spin fit with the notion of impartial journalism?

So, let’s start with the blindingly obvious.

The media world is changing so rapidly and so quickly that many of us who work in it are almost overwhelmed by what’s going on, frequently frightened at the speed of change and frightened as well that we may be left behind. Recent research in the United States says only about 20 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 even look at a daily newspaper.

More than 30,000 media jobs in the States have disappeared over the last two years. And that pace is accelerating in the past few months. A similarly horrible picture exists here in the UK. More journalists are being laid off this year than ever before — print, TV, radio, and online.  No part of the industry seems to be immune from this downturn.  Major newspapers are in trouble. Some are contemplating going from daily to weekly or out of print and into online only.

At the same time, we are living a fragmented and confusing world, a world of so many information options that our level of trust in conventional media providers is at an all-time low. A Pew study in the States a few weeks ago showed the level of trust in the media generally, is down lower than in the last 20 years of surveys.

Hardly surprising then, that many people believe that the traditional media has had its day.

You can take it from me that much of the media, certainly in the U.S., is thrashing about in an identity crisis trying to rediscover its connection point with the consumer, the audience, the end user, frequently experimenting with reality TV, raucous news delivery and opinionated ranting.

You know what I’m talking about.

Those news programmes that are delivered with a fake and breathless hysteria.  Some people call it “run for your life TV.” Everything is presented to create fear and conflict, with news which draws no distinction between the real and the imaginary.

So what do we do as publishers? How do we react when, it seems, many parts of the media are apparently letting our customers down??

My view: It’s time for a reset moment.

At the same time it’s useful to remind ourselves that mostly everything has changed. For a start, we are no longer the gatekeepers of information. These days it seems that the whole world is a newsgatherer. Everywhere you look someone is holding a camera and shooting what’s around them.

You can upload all that stuff to Facebook or to YouTube, add some commentary, and you have potential access to millions of people overnight. You can become the brand.

You know how unusual it is these days for a professional journalist to be first on the scene of a news story.  It’s becoming rare for us to break news these days. There are plenty of recent examples like the civil unrest in Iran after the election results.  Very few journalists were there, most of the foreign media was expelled or banned from covering the story, and much of the realtime information came via Twitter and Facebook and Flickr.

The same at the G20 riots in London, hurricanes in the US, and earthquakes in Mexico.  A plane went down on the Hudson River in New York City, right outside my office window I should report — though I ended up gawking like all the rest and forgot to take a picture.

In fact most compelling pictures and stories these days come from local citizens or tourists,  eyewitness on the spot, producing news and photos that are much more than anything a journalist could have produced arriving on the scene a few hours or days later.

Realtime information and video is much faster and sometimes more accurate than conventional news exchange. What we have now is millions of newsgatherers the world over. I look at them as millions of electronic canaries in the online mineshaft, all of them alerting us to what is happening around them in real time.

And we should see it for what it is: The democratization of news and information flow. One of the most historical events of the decade - the execution of Saddam Hussein - was filmed not by the Iraqi authorities or the Americans but by one of Saddam’s prison guards.  on his cellphone camera.

Take any day, take any week, take a major event or a relatively minor event and more often than not the traditional media can be left flatfooted.

So is this a passing fad which gets our attention for a while and will then morph into something else, or does it add real value to the information chain?

Of course it’s not a fad — it is newsgathering of first resort.

And here I part company with many of my senior colleagues in the industry who somehow think it is an intriguing addition to what real news organizations do, among them the same people that still debate how important 24 hour news is on TV and radio — that somehow continuous news is not real journalism.

The same folk, maybe, who figured that electricity never really had the same ambience as gaslight and candles. Colleagues who really are still in the dark.

Social media trades in information of first resort — raw, unfiltered and there for the taking.   This new electronic dialogue, the online conversation, is here to stay and it has enormous power, as a much more targeted approach than anything we have been exposed to.

So maybe the mainstream media has had its day. Who needs it when we have this disruptive technology to bypass it?

Just hang on.

It’s easy to get carried out with the excitement. Of course there are some downsides to all this. The downsides are about trust  and credibility, and the occasional abuse and misuse of social media.

The Internet is a great spawning ground for rumour and rant, a perfect place to pursue a fixed agenda or  perpetuate a myth or a conspiracy theory.

Social media is perfectly constructed for those who want  to dispel or debunk the apparent truth, whether it’s the real cause of Lady Diana’s death or the known facts behind Michael Jackson’s death, or, more recently, to question whether the 1969 moon landing happened or was a giant con trick.

Much of the social media reports and pictures coming out of Iran during and after the election was totally accurate and a real insight into the truth. Other reports were fanciful, with some designed to distort what was really going on there and spin the outcome.

For me that’s a reminder that journalism does have a purpose. You already know I consider myself lucky enough to work for the last 40 years for the finest news organizations: BBC, CNN and Reuters. What they have in common, each would argue, is something called editorial integrity.

All three believe that news and information have no value unless they come with integrity: a simple set of values, a moral compass if you like. All three organizations have never rested on their laurels. Each has repositioned, reinvented everything apart from their special brand of integrity.

Reuters  defines its journalism in a number of ways, through its history and its breadth of its journalism. But it also defines its journalism by something called the Reuters Trust Principles.

We believe that trust is everything. We believe that everything done commercially enhances our reputation rather than undermining the principles that have taken a century and a half to build up, that integrity, independence and freedom from bias define the organization.

And we’re a business. We make profit, and we’re currently repositioning ourselves again to ensure that everything we do is completely focused on our users, our clients, and our customers.

We’re investing million of dollars in what we describe as connecting the dots, majoring on information that is completely relevant to those who pay for our services. We’re shortly launching a new broadband financial news service for our global clients — absolutely not broadcasting.

We are talking narrowcasting here — targeted information and interactivity delivered to paying clients at the workplace and, via their PDAs, while they’re on the move.

At Reuters we also firmly believe in the link economy, where stories that Reuters journalists write are automatically linked to other, equally relevant stories and sites.

We believe a two-way link economy adds value to our content and to that of others. We have made it clear that we are up for discussion with any content provider to determine how we work together to monetise this new content landscape.

One of my senior colleagues, the president of Reuters media, Chris Ahearn, has dubbed it Journalism 3.0, with business models that can be all-inclusive. Underpinning al of this is our firm belief that trust and integrity make us a much stronger business.

We think that customers, end users, place a true value against these qualities, which is why when we make mistakes  — and we do - we are quick to own up to those. to explain how they happened, to put guidelines in place to ensure they don’t happen again.

So we are very excited by social media becoming the newsgathering of first resort - but also wary that everything we find there needs to be validated, checked and checked again before it goes out in our name.

Far from being despondent about ceding our status as a major information provider, we believe that new and stronger business models will come from curating global information, filtering it, editing  and placing it in context.

We think the future of successful journalism is to produce information, intelligent information that matters to people and has context — news that enhances their lives, news that has a point and a relevance, and news that remains a good business model.

Let me end.

I’ve always taken great comfort from believing that audiences and customers do gravitate towards the editorial brands that they trust, that it’s worth staying true to the values you believe in.  They used to say that content was king; what’s equally obvious now is that convergence is king

And if you want to run a successful business in the digital space then best to always remember that the consumer is king (and queen). Passive audiences are gone. The digital conversation is the future.

The follow is the text of a speech by David Schlesinger, Editor-in-Chief Reuters News, to the International Olympics Committee Press Commission on June 23.

On May 29th, James Coleman of Bristol smacked his skull on a tree branch while filing updates to the Twitter service (or tweeting) from his Blackberry during a run. His accident spawned a new word: a “Twinjury”.

Just think about it: Jogging, Blackberrying, tweeting simultaneously – what more 21st century manifestation of the spirit of amateur sportsmanship could there be?

That same day, St. Petersburg Times sports journalist Rick Stroud tweeted on his Twitter page about US Football developments: “Hearing reports that Bucs might be interested in Marvin Harrison,” he wrote to anyone following his feed.

His reader/followers read it and believed what he wrote.

Turned out, though, Stroud had different standards for his Twitter account than for his newspaper.

“People, if I tweet something…it’s … speculation,” he said. “If there’s news, I’ll post it on Tampabay.com.”

What better manifestation of the fact that in the 21st century the concept of “gatekeeping” is history?

A few months earlier, in Davos, I myself tweeted real-time updates from a lunch with George Soros and beat my own correspondent resoundingly in getting news from the lunch out to the world. My new media work beat his efforts which followed our traditional Reuters standards of sending items to an editor before transmission.

What better manifestation of the fact that in the 21st century, rules and standards and procedures drafted in the previous century are being put under severe strain?

Twitter – the service where people send out 140-character updates on everything from important real news to narcissistic details of their personal lives – is no mere fad for several million people around the world, most of them in the key demographic important to IOC rights holders and sponsors.

Facebook – the social networking service – has 200 million active users. That’s a user base the size of the population of Indonesia or of Brazil, and again, nearly all in the key demographic important to the IOC and its friends.

Video of Scottish singer Susan Boyle recently went viral on youtube, garnering 100 million downloads in little over a week – totally out of the control of the show, Britain’s Got Talent, that first gave her a stage or of its production company, which in years past would have held all the reins.

China, around the time of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, turned off access to Twitter and Facebook for its people, but that very act became a story and a subject of angry conversation inside its borders.

In the past weeks, news, pictures and video have come out of Iran using the tools of citizen journalism and social networking – defying attempts of the government to control the story.

I could go on to talk about MySpace or even more importantly the things that we know will be invented and that will become wildly popular by the time the next Olympics rolls around and then the Olympics after that.

But the point, I hope, is clear.
The old means of control don’t work.
The old categories don’t work.
The old ways of thinking won’t work.
We all need to come to terms with that.

Fundamentally, the old media won’t control news dissemination in the future. And organisations can’t control access using old forms of accreditation any more.

Those statements mean what they say and not necessarily more.

I am not arguing that newspapers and magazines and news services will die.
No, just that they must change.

I am not arguing that organisations that define themselves by issuing formal accreditations to professional journalists will disappear from the face of the earth.
No, just that they must change their definition of what they are and what they do.

And speaking of definitions, here’s just one, personal example.
I spend my days at Reuters preaching the multimedia gospel to my 2,700 journalists.

I want people to think holistically. I need them to. More and more, we’re issuing a multimedia report to multimedia-savvy consumers who no longer make a distinction between information they receive from text and information they receive from images. They demand words and pictures to be blended because… well, because that’s the way the world is! That’s the way the internet is. That’s the way schools work. That’s the way businesses work.

So that’s my gospel – to bring multimedia to life at Reuters.

And when I was in Beijing, at the marvellous Olympics there, I was working as well as supervising…and sometimes I did the two simultaneously. So one day when I visited our crew at the swimming cube, I shot a couple of images with a long lens and then blogged on the experience.

Well, you’d have thought I’d mixed the water with the wine, or served beef at a vegetarian banquet! The full weight of the disapproval of the IOC came down upon us. We were pressured to remove my blog post! For, yes, I’d been issued with an “E” writing/editing accreditation and not an “EP” photographic one.

The horror! I’m somewhat surprised you even let me address you today as I’m an unchastened accreditation felon!

(My only plea for mitigation, your honours, is that the AP’s Tom Curley went around Beijing snapping pictures constantly with an “E” accreditation, and you’ve let him address you now twice!)

But seriously – this isn’t a distinction that made sense anymore in 2008 and it makes less sense by the day as media organisations radically reshape newsrooms and roles to deal with both the audience and business realities of the 21st century.

Frankly, your issues are much more serious than the rigid distinction between E and EP.

You need to deal with the almost impossible question of who is a journalist, and what does it mean to report.

Remember my introduction about Twitter and Facebook and youtube and now cast your minds to the next Olympics.

Chances are, a lot of compelling video will be shot on mobile phones and uploaded on sharing sites on the internet within minutes.

Chances are, the first report of a result out of a stadium won’t be Reuters, AP, or Afp. Chances are the first report of a result will be one of 1,572 (to pick a number at random) Twitterers sitting in the stadium banging the result out in a Tweet from their mobile phone.

And since tweets can aggregated and can be searched by keyword – who is the journalist? What is the media organisation? Who has control?

I’m willing to bet that 90% of the athletes participating all have Facebook pages and blogs and Twitter accounts and video-enabled mobiles themselves.

While I know you’ve tried to put some rules and structure around what athletes can and can’t do, frankly I think you’re whistling in the wind.

To say they can blog as long as it isn’t journalistic, misses the point.

To a 23 year-old athlete, used to putting out a “news feed” of every detail of her personal life and training on various social media platforms, there simply isn’t a distinction.

Her life IS a news feed. Her blog IS a publishing platform. Her Facebook page IS the daily newspaper of her life.

And none of these things is really private. They can get indexed by Google; they get searched; they can be public to the world with a potential circulation of every single user of the internet.

Take this scenario: I will easily aggregate my imaginary athlete’s comments and thoughts on winning or losing or on the standard of judging with tweets giving the audience perspective from various parts of the stadium. I’ll then add that in with mobile phone camera pictures and video posted on Flickr and youtube.

Well, my friends, who really needs the rightsholders, AP or Reuters if you can do that?

Some may be frightened of the picture I paint. Some may think I exaggerate.
I actually get energised.

The only question I ask is: So what can we do to survive, or more fundamentally, to stay relevant?

I think the only path is to embrace the change and embrace the new. Longing for the ways of the past will not work.

We in the traditional media and you in the IOC must concentrate our efforts on defining and developing that which really adds value.

That means understanding what really can be exclusive and what really is insightful.
It means truly exploiting real expertise.

It means, to my earlier point, using all the multimedia tools available and all the smart multimedia journalists to provide a package so much stronger than any one individual strand.

It means working with the mobile phone and digital camera and social media-enabled public and not against them.

Working against them would be crazy. Could you imagine gun toting guards trying to confiscate every phone off every spectator? That would become the story of the Games and it would ultimately fail, anyhow.
No, working with them is the answer.

Inspire them, and encourage them to do things that will enhance the Olympic spirit and actually improve the bottom line.

How about a programme to allow link-backs to images from rights holders, creating a partnership?
How about citizen journalism entrees into the rights holders’ reports?
How about competitions with prizes that encourage the best work and best behaviours?
We have spent countless decades enveloping our activities in the cloak of professional mystery.
That era is over.

We must devote the time now to demystifying what we do, and working in concert with those who would seem to be a threat to the old order.

Remember that the world ultimately is a reciprocal place.

Treat people with respect and as partners, and they will partner with you.
Treat people as a threat or as criminals, and they will threaten your institution and ultimately bring it down.
This path doesn’t have to be scary.

It actually is a path we’ve been walking on for some years now.

Even staid old IBM, inventor of the US buttoned-down culture, embraced blogging instead of smothering it. Sure it put some structure around it, and some rules. But now it has some 25,000 internal blogs contributing to innovation.

Each of the new media tools I’ve mentioned, like Twitter or Facebook, is on a hugely innovative and evolutionary path of its own, developing and changing before our eyes.

Let’s embrace the change too, in the way we operate, in the way we organise, in the way we run the Games.
I’d certainly never claim that either the media or the IOC has stood still.

And while I’ve joked about my code “E” run-in with the accrediting authorities, in truth the IOC and the press commission have been hugely helpful to Reuters and to a succession of sports editors and of editors-in-chief over many years; I recognise that and acknowledge it happily and gratefully.

I know that the rules we have evolved for many and varied good, sound and logical reasons.
I know, too, that there are significant and perilous risks involved in any transformation.
The problem, though, is that old media and old institutions change incrementally. The world is changing fundamentally.

We’re changing on an arithmetic scale; the world is changing exponentially.

The four years between summer Olympics can see several generations of change in new media.

And they can see several generations of change in the attitudes and audiences for all media.

In just those four years, the differences between a fresh graduate and a new university student in terms of expectations, demands and experiences with technology, media and information are immense.

We ignore that at our peril.

The athletes who will participate in the next Games will carry in their one telephone handset more computing power than I had in an entire 800 square foot room when I had my first programming job as a teenager.

And so too will the viewers and the consumers upon whom both you and we depend.

Old distinctions and old definitions are falling all around us.

Our goal has to be to preserve the institutions and not the rules or definitions.

And the way to do that is to evolve and morph and develop faster than the changes all around us.

By being swifter in change, by aiming higher than we could have thought feasible, we can make the coverage of the Games stronger for all concerned – from the media to the International Olympic Committee itself to the most important ones of all - the members of the huge global audience.

Thank you.

I spent last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos producing content for reuters.com, running some experiments in new ways to cover a conference, and observing the growing integration of social media into a major mainstream event.

We had great success with giving our correspondents ‘Flip cameras’ with which to grab short comments from delegates on the key issues of the Forum. You can see some of these on our ‘Davos debates’ on the economy, financial regulation, environment, and ethics. The major learning point was that these were much, much easier to use than the mobile phones we used last year in Davos.

Less successful was our attempt to make the Forum more participatory by turning the tables and getting delegates prepared to admit they didn’t have all the answers to 'ask the audience' via Reuters. This was a good idea in theory, and one that we'll try again, but it was a struggle to find delegates comfortable with the notion that the Davos brainpower might not be enough to solve the world’s problems.

Nevertheless, World Economic Forum President Klaus Schwab set an excellent example (and got a very healthy response):

Elsewhere, we did use mobiles and the qik video-streaming service to go live ‘behind the scenes’ of the forum and the Reuters News operation.

I was co-sited with the team that produced the WEF-sponsored 'Davos Today' programme -- a high-end TV show with a professional team of Reuters broadcast journalists behind it.

Comparing the two kinds of video output is a bit like putting a garage band up against a symphony orchestra, but we think they'll prove complementary.

Since last year's Forum, the micro-blogging service Twitter has achieved widespread uptake and we encouraged our correspondents to use it to provide short updates on their impressions of the Forum publishing the best of their output, and that of other delegates, journalists and bloggers in our 'Davos Chatter' feature.

Our editor-in-chief, David Schlesinger, even managed to scoop his own news service during one session, prompting a debate about whether micro-blogging services like Twitter might come to form a part of news organisations’ output in the future.

Other highlights of social media at the WEF included a series of vibrant YouTube debates, voting via Facebook during a dozen sessions (including one on the economy that generated 120,000 responses) and a crowd-sourced interview with Kofi Annan via Seesmic – a video version of Twitter.

Via qik, I asked Seesmic founder Loic le Meur for his impressions of social media at Davos and how he’d gone about the social interview with Annan.:

What does this all add up to?

Davos was a good illustration of three forces changing the nature of conferences,

First, the availability of cheap, easy-to-use, highly portable technology makes it easier to capture the ‘third voice’ of conferences – the ‘chatter’ between delegates about the event. (The 1st voice being that of principal speakers, the 2nd the output of professional journalists or analysts.) This is what we attempted to do with our ‘Davos chatter’ feature.

Second, the ubiquity of social networks makes it possible to amplify the impact of an event by projecting it into social media, where there is a bigger and more diverse audience, and then bringing the responses back in to liven up proceedings. This is an aspect of what Klaus Schwab was getting at and what the Facebook voting was doing.

Third, there’s a longer-established trend of ‘humanising’ content – first-person, conversational forms that started with blogging, became video-based via upload services like YouTube, was radically simplified via micro-blogging and now, with services like Seesmic, is supporting conversation via short-form video.

The Annan interview particularly interested me because it brought together all three aspects.