Last week I was told that Reuters has lost its ethical bearings. You’ve sacrificed the sacred tenet of accuracy by rushing to publish information without checking if it is true. Your credibility has suffered, the value of your brand will wither and the service you offer to clients has been devalued, I heard.

It was a meaty accusation, especially as it came in the midst of a debate on ethics in journalism held at the London home of ThomsonReuters, the parent of the Reuters news organisation. The charge came from former Reuters journalists and a senior member of the trustees body that monitors Reuters compliance with its core ethical principles.

So what specifically were we being accused of and what defence did I offer?

On the 8th anniversary of the Sept 11th attacks, a day of more than normal sensitivity to security matters, CNN in the United States reported that the U.S. Coast Guard had fired on a boat in the Potomac River in Washington D.C. President Obama was visiting the nearby Pentagon at the time. Reuters rushed out a story on the reports of gunfire, citing CNN as the source for the information, while urgently checking with law enforcement officials. It transpired that CNN had been monitoring radio traffic on an unencrypted Marine frequency and had overheard a training exercise in which crew members shouted ‘bang bang’. Quickly we put out an update to our story making clear it was a false alarm.

I had played a part in crafting our policy on handling such stories and from my place on the debate panel I offered another example for the audience to chew on.  On Oct. 21 Britain’s Sky News reported that the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi had died in Libya. We put out a story, sourced to Sky News and repeating how it said it had the information of the death, while checking with officials and al-Megrahi’s legal team in Scotland. We quickly established that Sky had it wrong and updated our story to say so.

It is grating for any journalist to publish information that turns out to be incorrect. Even if we can say that the original error was made elsewhere some of the flak hits those who replicate the mistake. After all, those who republish a libel are as liable for it as its originator. 

So why did we not check first and publish later? 

The answer goes to the heart of how the news business has changed, how the notion of authoritativeness has altered and how Reuters journalists interpret the values they live by.

But first let’s scotch one myth. Embarrassing publicity notwithstanding, it is relatively rare for Reuters to publish what turns out to be an erroneous report by another news organisation. Since we instituted our current policy on ‘pick-ups,’ as they are known in the trade, the level of ’echoed mistakes,’ has neither grown nor fallen.  

To provide a complete service to our customers our policy is to pick up stories of significance that are being carried by normally reliable media that are in a position to know what they are reporting.   Hence the decision to quote CNN, which has a good record on reporting its own home turf, or Sky, which has broken news on the Lockerbie bomber story and follows it closely.  We protect our reputation by carefully acknowledging the source of the information and speedily checking its veracity. And hundreds of times every day Reuters journalists decline to go with a story running on local media because it ’smells’ wrong, is trivial, or both. Mostly that decision is vindicated. The old school would have it that our policy is a failure of journalism. Yet walking the right line between publishing everything and publishing nothing actually requires a finer exercise of judgment. Better journalism, in other words. 

The counter-argument is that we should only publish when we have 100 percent certainty from our own sources.  That may be possible for a news organisation with a longer publishing timescale, such as a newspaper, or a periodical magazine. Yet even they, with online arms that are increasingly as ‘real-time’ as Reuters, the Associated Press or Bloomberg, face the same challenges of dealing with fast-breaking stories as the news agencies.  With the advent of the Internet has come a cacophony of online voices that amplify and accelerate information, frequently dropping reference to where it originated or how it first became known. In that environment readers look to news services like Reuters to tell them what is known, and how it is known, with clarity and speed, regardless of whether we originated the story or not. In a complex, fast-moving world, no news organisation, no matter how well-resourced, can be first to report everything. All of us target the news we want to break and rely on others, who are sometimes allies and sometimes competitors, to paint their part of the picture.   

Has our approach destroyed the relationship of trust that our clients and readers have with us?    

The question supposes there was once a golden age of authoritative journalism where sourcing was always rigorous and the pursuit of truth always relentless. History suggests otherwise. Current anxiety over journalistic values is often a proxy for broader worry over the health of the media industry. Declining revenues have driven cost cutting that has threatened, many feel, the standards of journalism. Reuters is stressing speed for fear of losing its audience, critics say, and will do so at the expense of its reputation for accuracy.  

Yet our business has always put a premium on speed, and given that we are one of very few global news organisations that is expanding its staff during the downturn we feel we are doing the right things to maintain our audience.

The nature of authority in the news business has also changed. Real-time readers understand breaking news is contingent, uncertain and provisional. Exclusivity evaporates fast as aggregators, citers and plagiarists disseminate the fruits of others’ reporting toil. Respect is won by breaking news and by operating with clear rules and standards. But it also come from guiding readers carefully to the reports of others, binding the audience in with compelling packages of conversation, illumination and curated content.

When the first plane hit the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, Reuters did not put out a story instantly. We were so mesmerised by the unbelievability of the event, and so uncertain over how to handle what we saw on CNN, that we froze. How many readers were lost that day and how many on the day of the Potomac gun battle that never was?

For years journalists have sought to tell stories that go beyond the conflict in Afghanistan. We've tried to portray this country - the crossroads of central Asia, the summer home of Moghul emperors, the cockpit of clashing empires - as more than a place of blood, deprivation and extremism. Amid the dust and the heat it has its oases of tranquility, its laughter and its charms. From the market stalls of sweet pomengranates that line the road in autumn to the rose gardens newly planted in central Kabul, Afghanistan is a place of thorny history, cultural complexity and spartan beauty.

Alas, we cannot ignore the warfare. Great journalistic energy has to go into counting the casualties, explaining the violence and charting the shifting strategies of the combatants. It's a conflict whose outcome is uncertain. The bullets and bombs tear through the flesh of ordinary Afghans, fanatical insurgents and Western soldiers with equal awfulness. A blast takes the life of a child, deprives a wife of a husband and faintly furthers some cause. The impact is immediate and local, but it reverberates harshly in Washington, Delhi, London or Paris.

Can we weave together the warp of war and the weft of daily life in Afghanistan? Yes, in this blog, we hope is the answer. In the tradition of the region's richly patterned carpets, it will be both intricate and stoutly structured, minutely detailed and expansive in scale.

It will gather the impressions, observations and thoughts of our correspondents, video journalists and photographers in Afghanistan, whether they be in Kabul, on embedded assignments with different military units or travelling independently. Infrequent visitors like myself, just returned from Kabul, will contribute. I went to assess the mood, interview officials and see how our large journalistic operation is run. The blog will link our teams in Washington, London, Brussels, Delhi and Islamabad, bringing to bear a unique array of perspectives on the Afghan story.

It should be an intelligent, lively and useful addition to the words, images and video that Reuters already produces to illustrate this dynamic, significant and absorbing story. The blog won't be complete without your views. Please contribute your comments and become part of the debate on the future of Afghanistan. Be partisan if you wish, but kindly remain pleasant.

Welcome to 'The Afghan Journal.'

[Reuters pictures of diving boards at an empty Kabul swimming pool,a girl on a street and soldiers passing by another ]

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is my great honour to address this gathering here today in Beijing.

Reuters association with China began in the 19th century, when the agency began supplying financial and commodities information to clients here.

By the 1930’s, Shanghai was our Asian headquarters.

Today, our offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong provide vibrant newsgathering for our global clients who demand information about this vital economy and provide centres for Chinese clients whose need for reliable and instant information about the world’s finances is intense.

From the beginning, Reuters Chinese name was important. 路透社 – the 透 that is the key second character is part of several important words, each of which is central to our mission

“Penetrating”, “thorough” and “transparent” – these are the concepts that we bring to our reporting; these are the concepts that media in China as elsewhere in the world must strive for.

The financial crisis of the beginning of the 21st century has proven again that the Media’s role in providing the transparency necessary for a healthy market economy is vital.

While this concept has been part of Reuters name and our mission for more than a century and a half, the world of course is much different from when we moved reports using carrier pigeons and the telegraph.

The old world of national markets, operating within limited and largely ring- fenced pools of capital is dead. In the 21st century, financial markets are global and integrated– but still fiercely competitive.

Investments shift, at the touch of a trading keyboard, from one market to another, and from one asset class to another. No national government any longer has complete control of economic policy, and no company, person or organisation has unchallenged access to available capital. Financial markets are global.

Commenting on the challenges this environment creates for China’s financial sector, Premier Wen Jiabao has said:

“It is a long-term task to build a capital market that is transparent, efficient, rational in structure, perfect in function and safe in operation.”

Efficiently informed and transparent financial markets are also healthy, sound, orderly and internationally competitive financial markets. These were the lessons of the 1997 Asian crisis, and are once again the lessons of the current global crisis.

The role of financial media is central to delivering the objectives of informed and transparent financial markets, as well as the social stability that depends upon economic success.

For China, the increasing internationalisation of financial markets has at least two dimensions relevant to financial information.

First, Chinese markets participants and investors need to be efficiently informed about foreign markets, while second, their non-Chinese counterparts overseas need to be efficiently informed about China.

Mutual benefit and success depend upon this reciprocal relationship.

It is noteworthy, for example, that China has permitted more Chinese funds to invest in international equities than it has permitted foreign investors to invest in the Chinese stock market.
Accurate and comprehensive information about foreign financial markets is therefore particularly critical for markets professionals in China.

To provide some examples about the increasing global linkage of financial markets news:

US consumption data has become a reliable proxy indicator of the volume of China’s exports, with direct relevance to stock market prices in China.

Likewise, the announcement by China last November that it was to launch a 4 trillion yuan stimulus package caused sharp rises on stock markets not only in China, but all around the world.

Recent news that China has been taking action against polluting metals smelters caused prices on the London Metals Exchange to soar.

Even a seemingly low-key announcement such as China offering subsidies to producers of solar power equipment can cause major stock market rises for shares in non-Chinese companies active in this field.

The integration of China into global financial markets presents numerous challenges for financial media, on which the financial markets depend. But it also presents some challenges for Chinese policy makers to create the optimal conditions in which financial media can operate to respond efficiently to the needs of both Chinese and non-Chinese markets professionals and investors.

Let me respectfully suggest a few areas where China could take steps to facilitate the quality of financial information and reinforce the contribution of financial media:

• Greater discipline around the public release of official statistics:

Economic statistics are, of course, of critical relevance to financial markets. Still too frequently in China, rumours about statistics circulate for several days before their official release. Often the rumours later turn out to have been correct. Those “insiders” with access to the rumours enjoy unfair trading advantages over those who do not.

The correct policy response is not to punish the media for reporting the rumours, but instead to ensure that the processes and safeguards around the release of statistics are tightened. Indeed, where rumours are influencing the market, the financial media has a duty to report them –as rumours– so that the market as a whole, and not just a section of insiders, is informed, understands why the market is moving in a particular direction, and can take appropriate action to safeguard their investments.

It might, for example, be advisable to shorten the time span between the production of the statistics, and/or limit still further those with privileged access to the data before it is released.

• Enhancing the information disclosure policies of government ministries and official agencies that originate information relevant to financial markets.

There has already been some good progress here, with many more high-level news briefings and press conferences by ministerial agencies than there used to be.

I also welcome the initiatives of those government departments that have adopted web release of their information.

I applaud those that have gone one step further to alert reporters to news announcements with helpful text messages. But there is still further to go in extending these examples of best more widely until they become the norm across government.

• Aligning the treatment of Chinese and Foreign Journalists

It is important to gain greater recognition and acceptance of the important role of foreign financial journalists in China. There continues to be insufficient recognition and understanding of the important role that they have in underpinning China’s own economic goals of maximising foreign investment in China.

Journalists working for foreign media are still too often excluded or granted a lower level of access at key meetings.

As Chinese financial journalism professionalises further, I look forward to mutually beneficial competition. I also look forward to Chinese nationals having full careers within foreign media organisations in China. My fervent wish is that one day soon Reuters financial news editor in China will be a Chinese national – one step on that person’s path to be global editor in chief!

Addressing this gathering just a few days after China’s 60th National Day, it’s important to reflect not only on the challenges but on the progress China has made.

When I was Reuters China bureau chief from 1991 to 1994, there was almost no transparency; statistics could not be relied on; interviews were rare; the state of the economy was a mystery.

Today we report on China’s economy with the same intensity and professionalism as we report on any G7 economy. Our clients demand that, and, increasingly, we are able to provide that.

It is important to note as well that transparency must be a reciprocal virtue.

The news media must also be transparent about its standards and its methods.

This has been particularly true during the current financial turmoil – the media industry was in its own crisis at the same time as it was reporting on the financial downturn; our sources and our readers were in crisis, too, and this meant that our stories were watched extremely carefully and people were quick to complain about anything they didn’t like.

I am proud that most of our reporting was excellent, but those times when we didn’t get it right it was vital to correct our errors swiftly and publicly.

Maintaining our trust with our audience is fundamental to our mission as a news service. Reporting truthfully, reporting accurately, correcting errors, obeying our standards are all vital and can’t be compromised, especially not in the heat of a major and complex story.

We’ve learned important lessons from this period.

One lesson was that our standards needed to be constantly examined and sometimes strengthened.

Another is that transparency is rewarded by trust.

This year we put our entire 500+ page Handbook of Journalism free online for anyone and everyone to read and comment on – we welcome that scrutiny from around the world.

Where our standards are good and we live up to them, we want the attendant praise.

Where we need to improve, or where we fail to live up to our ideals, we want the criticism.

That should be the attitude that we in the media should strive for.

I believe Journalism at its best is a mirror, exposing back to society a true and brutally honest picture of what is going on.

When we fail at that, when our picture is not clear or at all distorted, we deserve to be criticised. We must strive to be that perfect mirror.
But for societies and economies to truly work, to be effective and to be healthy, they need to look into that mirror unflinchingly and honestly.

That is where the virtue of transparency comes in.

That is why companies and government departments and government officials need to be ready to be open. That is why they need to take interviews and to reveal figures. That is why the instinct for secrecy needs to be resisted.

That is why all involved need to help the media help society, by accepting that while openness, transparency and accountability may lead to momentary discomfort and sometimes embarrassment, they are ultimately worthwhile and, in fact, are a precondition to a truly healthy, stable and successful system.

Similarly, a commitment to these practices is also a precondition for China’s development of healthy, sound and internationally competitive financial markets that protect domestic investors and encourage foreign investors to place their capital.

Thank you.

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.

As early as the 12th century, the image of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants came into discourse to mean that all knowledge advances based on the discoveries of the past.

In academia and in journalism that notion has been coupled with the doctrine of attribution – you need to acknowledge the shoulders you’re standing on, to give due credit but also to allow others to search out that perch and see if their view from it is any different.

To me, the current debate about the “Link Economy” in content terms is about:

Are you part of the conversation?
Are you adding to the debate or just playing postman and passing others’ views on?
Are you adding value and …
Are you getting rewarded for adding the value you do?

As head of a journalistic army of 2,700 professionals I obviously have an intense vested interest in ensuring that their work is valuable to readers and valued by them.

Part of that involves ensuring that they are in the centre of the action and that they fill their reports with their expertise and experience. Part of that involves ensuring that they are part of the debate, that their reports inform the debate and that the debate, in turn, informs their future reporting.

Our standards on sourcing have always emphasized the importance of giving proper credit, even when quoting from competitors. And, of course, we expect the same in return.

In the writing we do specifically for the web we’re as open to outbound linking as we are to the inbound (see Felix Salmon for some good examples). Much of our other writing doesn’t currently use outbound links because of the particular ecosystem of our professional products, for which a lot of it is specifically written. But that, I am sure, will change over time.

The real danger in not being extremely open to linking, it seems to me, is that by moving yourself out of the mainstream debate you risk irrelevancy.

There will be other shoulders to stand on.

Those shoulders will be the ones that provide the lift.

Those shoulders will be the ones that will help advance knowledge and debate.

The fact that today the crediting can be done with a hyperlink is to me intellectually no different than the use of an academic footnote or a traditional journalistic “…according to XYZ in an interview”. It’s just better, because it’s fast, direct and creates an instant chain of knowledge.

What’s more interesting to me is what one does with the link, not the link itself.

I have a passing interest in the link or retweet that simply passes a nugget along.

I have a bit more interest when the linker or retweeter extracts real gold that was hidden in the original and gives it more prominence.

I have a lot more interest when the link or retweet uses the original as a jumping off point for argument, debate, or development.

That’s when it gets interesting.

And that’s when we, too, stand on that tower of giant shoulders people started visualising in the 12th century.

The Media Standards Trust has begun a lecture series on 'Why Journalism Matters'. It is disconcerting that it feels we have to ask the question. The argument put forward by the British group's director Martin Moore is that news organisations are so preoccupied with business survival that discussion of the broader social, political and cultural function of journalism gets forgotten. It is a pertinent review then, given the icy economic blasts hitting most Anglo-Saxon media groups, and notwithstanding the recent examples of self-evidently broader journalistic 'value' produced by London's Daily Telegraph in its politican-shaming investigations into parliamentarians' expenses.

First up in the series was Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, who cantered through the justifications for a vibrant, independent press. Watchdog, informer, explainer, campaigner, community builder and debater - those are the roles that journalism plays. The value that it brings is most evident by comparison with the unhealthiness of states where the press is not free, noted Barber, citing the struggles of the citizenry in China and Russia to hold their leaders to account.

The FT's USP as a media group, according to Barber, is as an explainer and analyser of complicated events that play out across a global stage. But analytical reporting of global stories costs serious cash, he noted, in a question-begging aside. That you get the quality of journalism you are prepared to pay for, ultimately, is his response to the challenge posed to mainstream media by Internet-enabled communicators. For free you can have the rawness of a blog. For crafted journalism that is properly sourced, reviewed for taste and style and checked for accuracy, you must find ways to charge. At your peril do you blur the edges between the crafted and the raw world of easy comment, hasty opinion and rumour billed as fact, argues the FT editor.  (There was a hat tip, however, to the bloggers that have broken news, such as Guido Fawkes who forced the resignation of an advisor to Gordon Brown by revealing his plans for a smear email campaign.)

So a sharp distinction was drawn between the value proposition of professional journalism and its unruly blogging and twittering cousin. No such clarity yet, though, on the funding model for the former when the Internet has made audiences expect to read most general interest news and a lot of specialised niche content for free.  No secret that each and every news group is daunted by this obstacle, even the FT, which has not been immune to the downturn in advertising revenue.

We were left with a couple of clues on the way forward.  Barber predicted that within a year all news organisations will be charging for online content in some way. (The FT's model is to allow readers access to a few articles for free and then charge for further use.)  Will Google ever pay for content - unlikely says Barber. But at least they might be prepared to talk about linking via searches to articles requiring subscription, which they do not do currently.

And his flippant response to the demographic challenge posed to a print-based news organisation by the emergence of a generation of youngsters who get all their information from screens? People are living longer - they will still buy newspapers.

The 'known unknown' concept is a more useful tool in journalism than you would think from the derision heaped on Rumsfeld by reporters. As journalists we spend our time uncovering facts, reporting data, breaking news and offering insights into the meaning of events. We rarely stop to contemplate what we do not know, what we cannot know and what impact that ignorance has in shaping perceptions.

No place is more opaque, more secretive and more fiendishly difficult to intepret than North Korea. It is inaccessible, its leader does not give interviews and it rattles the nuclear sabre to a timetable and for a purpose we can only guess at. As we tremble with fear at the thought of Pyongyang developing an atomic arms capability, it is instructive to remind ourselves how thoroughly our interpretation of the North's behaviour is overlaid with our own projections and assumptions. We build our framework of expectations on the shaky soil of past experience, historical parallels and a paucity of real, contemporary detail on how North Koreans think and how they live.

On a recent trip to north-east Asia it struck me how challenging it is to peer over the formidable wall that the North has erected around itself. Divining the real distribution of power around Kim Jong-il and extrapolating from it his next steps has been compared to Cold War Kremlinology,  the part-art, part-science process of guessing how the Soviet Union was being run. It is the nature of tightly-knit elites that they are hard to fathom. Nobody credible has been able to claim they spotted in advance that Mikhail Gorbachev would be the successor to Konstantin Chernenko in 1985.  So, add to Soviet-style secrecy North Korea's clan system and dynastic tradition, and you have a recipe for inpenetrability.  Kim Jong-il's third and youngest son, Kim Jong-un, is now 'widely accepted' as the heir presumptive to his ailing father. But might the flimsily-sourced stories on the succession have been solidified into 'fact' by self-reinforcing group-think?

Japanese media reported that the Swiss educated Jong-un, thought to be 25-years-old, visited China earlier in June to introduce himself to the leaders of North Korea's only real ally. The Chinese haven't corroborated that and I got a point blank refusal to confirm it from South Korea's unification minister when I posed the question this week. (The FT had the most recent story on it, adding detail on itinerary and who was chaperoning the youngster, again sourced to unnamed officials.) It's a sensitive issue, since electronic surveillance and espionage, too sensitive to admit to, might actually have confirmed to Seoul and Washington that Jong-un had made that journey. Perhaps that makes it an example of an unknown known.

So how do we get information about the North? Few journalists get visas and when they do their interactions with ordinary Koreans take place via handlers whose first loyalty is to their state, not the truth. A few diplomats report on the realities of life in the desperately poor North. A blurred picture emerges of a socialist state where the populace must fend for themselves; government food distribution has all but been abandoned and an informal structure of markets and suitcase trading of Chinese goods provides most of the nourishment and economic activity.  A few NGOs and tourists trickle through. South Korea monitors everything the North says about itself and meticulously reads between the lines to assess the ebbs and flows of power. Scholars parse the North's internal propaganda to understand how the Kims sustain their leadership. A taste of its appeal to patriotism, disdain of outsiders, selective rendering of history and vilification of the South leaves non-partisans dizzy, but it has served for years to consolidate the ruling class's grip on power.

How useful is the information given by what some call defectors but which others broadly consider economic migrants, fleeing the poverty of the North for the perils of Chinese human trafficking networks in the hope an aid group will lead them to the South via third countries? The South builds a picture by debriefing them, but the insights are not of those close to Pyongyang's decision-making.

Most intriguing now is how the North's story to its own people may have to change as the information cordon around the country frays. The disparity between reality and internal rhetoric cannot grow too far apart, it is suggested, because North Koreans are getting information via DVDs smuggled across their borders, visiting traders, informal networks and other unofficial sources. North Koreans will have heard from abroad the talk of who will rule them next. At home their media has made no mention of the Dear Leader ever being anything but a bachelor, never mind a father.  Can that gap persist without credibility vanishing? Will North Korea's official media have to bring forward their launch campaign for the next Kim? How ironic if the unknowability of the North begins to be undone from the inside thanks to the unknowingness of outsiders.

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.

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.

The president was inaugurated in front of adoring crowds and positive reviews in the media. As the unpopular incumbent sat on the platform with him, the new Democratic chief executive took office as the nation faced a crippling economic crisis. The incoming president was a charismatic figure who had run a brilliant campaign and had handled the press with aplomb. The media were ready to give him a break.

That was 1933, and in Franklin Roosevelt’s case, the media gave him a break.

For Barack Obama, the honeymoon was shorter.

Less than 36 hours after Obama took the oath of office, the White House denied news photographers access to the new president’s do-over swearing in, instead releasing official White House photos of the event. Reuters, The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse protested and refused to distribute the official photos (which nevertheless showed up on the websites of a number of large U.S. newspapers).

This is an important issue for news organisations, the public and for an administration that has promised a new era of transparency in doing the people’s business. How are people to know, for example, that the official photos haven’t been staged?

All U.S. administrations seek to manage the flow of information and the White House and the news media have a complex, interdependent relationship. Each needs the other. But it’s important that media organisations remember who’s most important.

For Howard Goller, Reuters editor for political and general news for the U.S. and Canada, it’s clear who’s most important.

“A news organisation’s first obligation is to its clients," he says. "Our correspondents have a front-row seat at the White House, we ask questions at news conferences and briefings, and we travel with the president wherever he goes. Our photographers work just as hard for our customers. We became concerned when on taking office, the new administration prevented Reuters and other news organisations from taking our own photos. We’ve had several conversations with the new administration since those first days and we expect a more open relationship going forward.”

Most administrations get a bit of a honeymoon. Gallup polls show that every incoming, newly-elected president back to Dwight Eisenhower enjoyed majority approval ratings. Even the lowest-rated incoming presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, had job approval ratings of 51 percent and disapproval ratings of only 13 percent and 6 percent, respectively.

Obama’s approval rating, 68 percent, was exceeded only by that of John F. Kennedy, who had a 72 percent rating. Even a plurality of Republicans—43 percent—give Obama positive marks.

The media have also generally been positive—or at least, not very negative-- about new presidents during their administrations’ first 100 days, one of those round numbers we seem to like so much.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism compared the coverage of the two most recent first-term elected presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In measuring the tone of coverage by network television, newspapers and a major weekly news magazine, the study found that only 28 percent of the coverage of both presidents’ first two months was “negative.”

No president has been more successful at managing the media than Roosevelt. So carefully did the administration control the president’s image that only a few pictures were published in newspapers of the president—disabled by polio-- using his wheelchair. Indeed, in a scene in the movie “Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942),” James Cagney was able with a straight face to portray Roosevelt in a song and dance number, as the “president” wittily told reporters what was on and what was off the record.

Betty Houchin Winfield, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri, argues in “FDR and the News Media” that “FDR’s consummate news management skills served as a major key to his political artistry and leadership legacy” and that “a strong president such as Roosevelt can indeed influence the journalists’ newsgathering, the reporters’ reactions, and the final news stories.”

As Douglas McCollam notes in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, many believe much of the media are already in the tank for Obama.

A Pew Research Center poll during the heat of the campaign in September 2008 found that 36 percent of those questioned believed news organisations were biased in favor of Obama, while only 14 percent said the media were biased in favor of Republican John McCain. Forty percent detected no bias. A Rasmussen poll last summer was even more stark, with 49 percent saying they believed most reporters would “try to help the Democrat with their coverage.” Just 14 percent believed reporters would try to help McCain win and only 24 percent believed that “most reporters will try to offer unbiased coverage.”

Those are depressing numbers for a journalist to read—and the only way to respond is to aggressively cover the issues that matter to your audience.

For Reuters News, that’s a global audience and a financial audience.

Goller says that in response to the change in administrations, “We have made some big changes, especially in the way we work together to cover the big economic stories in the face of the financial crisis as well as the politics of climate change and health care….We’ve put more people on both the White House and the Congressional beats in part because the president…has promised change and both he and the Democratic-led Congress have made a priority of addressing the crisis, no small matter for our core financial clients.”

So how do we balance the need to be close to the newsmakers at the White House with the danger of being in a bubble where news can be managed?

Goller puts it well: “For Reuters, the key is to keep our eye on the issues, and that means to be aware of the impact a president’s words and actions or non-actions have on business, the economy, other countries and Americans as a people. We ask the tough questions in the briefings—and in the stories we write. If we don’t get the answers, our stories say so. This is our job.”

As in coverage of the Middle East, there are partisans who will never, ever be convinced that journalists can report objectively. As in the coverage of the recent Gaza fighting, all we can ask our audience to do is judge us on the journalism we produce—and tell us when we’re wrong.

It’s especially important now, as coverage of the new administration moves out of the warm, feel-good glow of the inauguration. As we saw Wednesday, the stimulus bill passed the House without a single Republican vote, a reminder of the deep divisions that remain and a sign that the story of the Obama administration is just beginning. It will be up to the hard-nosed, experienced journalists in Washington to push beyond the soft, easy, feel-good stories and tell the hard and complete truth.