Davos 07: Digital Futures

I am at a meeting of the WEF Media Leaders Council - editors, publishers and journalists from major news organisations - and blogs - around the world. The UK is well represented with the editors of the FT, the Telegraph, the Guardian and The Times all here as well as me. The discussion is about how media companies can adapt to the internet - the constant subject of debate for such people. It's under Chatham House rules so I cannot report the discussion or attribute comments verbatim. However I can share some observations:
Mathias Dopfner of the German group Axel Springer AG was quoted having written:"We must be careful not to commit suicide for fear of dying". In other words media organisations should not abandon their core values in the face of huge online competition or they will die anyway.
One internet entrepreneur said "The challenge isn't content anymore. It's organising it, the architecture of content is the new challenge." He was referring to sites like Flickr and Facebook.
One long-standing newspaper publisher said "Newspapers used to dominate the national conversation. Now we have to find ways to join the conversations that are going on elsewhere." In other words bloggers and others don't need national media to discuss events anymore - but to stay relevant newspapers have to join those discussions, not just stage their own.
A lot of concern about how companies can make internet services pay when the public expect them for free.
Finally, a neat way of differentiating journalists and bloggers. "Bloggers suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, journalists suffer from Attention deficit disorder." In other words, journalists report and move on and don't always follow up. Bloggers are obsessive, get hold of an issue and won't let go....

Comments

[Alan Dean]

To say that journalists report and move on and don't always follow up, while bloggers are obsessive, getting hold of an issue and not letting go is too simplistic. A good journalist will always follow up, while a bad blogger never knows when to let go.

A good journalist will check the facts, a bad blogger will invent them: by the same token, a bad journalist will fudge the facts, leaving it to a good blogger to tear the story apart -- or a bad blogger to pass the fudge on to others.

Blogging is here to stay, and in time (excuse the cliche) the wheat will be sorted from the chaff. In the meantime, we will continue to be fed blogs that would cause even the National Enquirer to raise an eyebrow: it's a gullible world out there.

The most pithy comment to come out of the Davos media meeting was the suicide warning from Mathias Dopfner of Axel Springer, and it is to be hoped that as far as the media world is concerned, 2007 does not turn out to be The Year of the Lemmings.

The concern about how media companies can make internet services pay when the public expect them for free is a major hurdle, and one that needs to be addressed more urgently. In that respect, it is not a case of committing suicide, but rather one of being assassinated by successful and trusted bloggers who often publish to feed an ego rather than turn an honest buck.

To quote a phrase that Robert F Kennedy once attributed to the Chinese (and he did not check his facts on this one)-- 'we live in interesting times',