This seems to be the week of interesting things in the content distribution space
My friend Yasmin Hamidi posted a link of a story on Journalism School’s “existential crisis” as interpreted by New York Magazine. A few days ago I wrote about the Guardian’s new API, and Stephen Rubel wrote an open letter re: the Amazon Kindle that appealed to publishers to monetize their content before the opportunity passes.
Content clearly is not dead – there are volumes upon volumes of it, and the amount increases exponentially every day. Recently Twitter search surpassed Google blog search, and not surprisingly. During my tenure at Visible Technologies and now at M80 I had the opportunity to work with a number of global brands examining breaking trends, and with Visible’s social media monitoring solutions was able to see significant trends break on Twitter slightly before entering the blogosphere and bleeding into mainstream sites.
The existential crisis reported at Columbia J-school is interesting to note, but the article misses a key point – namely, that social media provides excellent sources. Bloggers and people on Twitter are easily accessible for follow-up, and particularly in Twitter there is a filtration process on the part of the user to fit the most relevant information in 140 characters. The most interesting news on the Mumbai tragedy came through Twitter. Don’t think about whether journalism is about print or online. Think about how to get a good story.
