Transparency & TrustÂ
Add to the growing list of CEOs who blog Tom Glocer, the top dog at Reuters. The British wire service assigned a reporter to or in the online Second Life environment last month, and more recently agreed with Yahoo to use crowdsourced photos via Yahoo’s Flickr, so Reuters is proving nimble in new media.
The Glocer post I am interested in here is actually an article he wrote, “Trust in the Age of Citizen Journalism.” And the article is actually the text of his speech to the Globes Media Conference in Tel Aviv, Israel on Dec. 11.
He asks important questions, to which I think all of us in journalism are seeking meaningful answers. One of Glocer’s questions: Is trust the victim in a world of millions of news sources, or will we live in a world where truth is passed through a sieve of opinion and commentary? The question hints at the cost of crowdsourcing, but Glocer welcomes the benefits. Among them: the return of the conversation, “something we lost with the advent of mass broadcast communication,” he writes (and said).
Perhaps the most compelling segment of his speech is where he trumpets “transparency and trust” as cornerstones of the “new” Reuters. Now trust is something old media has always traded on; without credibility, mainstream media have nothing. But their credibility has been unders such sustained, withering attack, with a lot of damage self-inflicted. Think of Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley, Memogate and Judith Miller.
A big tool in the rebuilding? Transparency, which is what blogs do best, and not something for which old media traditionally has been known. The imperative has been filter, then publish. The imperative in the blogosphere is publish, then filter. This beg’s Glocer’s question about how to make sense in a sea of opinion and not-yet-corroborated citizen reporting.
Transparency is possible when the voice is an individual’s rather than a huge media company. It is helped when mistakes are acknowledged, corrected and even expected. This is the postmodern reality: stuff happens. So we (bloggers) rely on each other to help, to find error, to perceive imbalance or identify what is missing from the frame or conversation. Transparency + immediacy.
Dialogue and conversation. Trust and transparency. Interactivity and connectivity. These are a part of the new paradigm for journalism.
