The BBC's Peter Horrocks on how the world of journalism is changing.

His thoughts are contained in a chapter of a book by the BBC College of Journalism entitled The Future of Journalism (available online for free):

An excerpt from the book: (go to page 6; seen first on Twitter)

Most of the major news organisations had the assumption that their news product provided the complete set of news requirements for their sers. But in an internet world, users see the total nfomation set available on the web as their 'news universe'. I might like BBC for video news, the Telegraph or Daily Mail for sports results and the New York Times for international news. I can penetrate the barriers of the fortresses with ease.

The ability of audiences to pull together their preferred news is bringing the walls of the fortresses tumbling down. In effect, the users see a single unified news universe and use technology (e.g.Google, Digg etc) to get that content to come together. So if the users require collaborative content, what of the competitively minded news organisation? Clearly competition will still generate originality, enterprise journalism and can help to lower costs. But as a business, each organisation will need to choose very carefully where it has a comparative advantage. If agency news is available, there will be no advantage in creating it yourself. In each specialised area of news, organisations need to assess their unique advantages and reduce effort where they don’t have such advantages.

Reducing effort in any journalistic section is anathema to the old fortress mindset. Even more disturbingly, it might also mean co-operating explicitly. If the BBC is best in news video and the Telegraph best in text sports reports, why shouldn’t they syndicate that content to each other and save effort? Jeff Jarvis, Professor of Interactive Journalism at the City University of New York, has coined the neatest way of describing this: “Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.”

That linked approach requires a new kind of journalism, the opposite of fortress journalism. It is well described as “networked journalism”, a coinage popularised by Charlie Beckett at the
LSE/Polis. And it requires organisations to be much better connected, both internally and externally. That kind of networking can be unnatural for the journalist or executive brought up in the fortress mentality. What changes might be required? It means moving from a culture which is identified by the news unit you are in towards a culture based on audience understanding. ...

... Moving towards this networked world will be hard for journalists trained in the fortress mindset. For editors and decision makers it requires balancing the interests of their programme or website with a wider view of audiences. It means a far higher level of collaboration with colleagues than has traditionally been the case. It also means 'inheriting' more shared content from elsewhere in the organisation. Editors can no longer commission and publish content exactly to their own specifications. For many, this is profoundly unsettling. And it may go further and entail more external collaboration – for instance, agreeing shared news coverage with partners who are also competitors and partnering non-media organisations such as NGOs. This will be tough stuff.

But new news journalists will need the flexibility to cope. They will need to network with the audience as much as they do with their colleagues. The audience is becoming a vast but still untapped news source. The most go-ahead journalists are using social networking tools to help find information and interviewees.

Responding on blogs and using those to promote a dialogue with informed members of the audience is leading to improved journalism. It can be time-consuming but it can yield real benefits.

So journalists will need changed culture, changed organisation and an improved understanding of the modern tools of journalism – audience insights, blogging, Twitter, multimedia production. It sounds like being pretty challenging. It’s certainly more complex than the old fortress world – of riding out to fight the enemy to the death every day. But I suspect that the public may well appreciate a journalism that puts serving their information needs at its heart, rather than one which is about organising the world in the way that journalists prefer.