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Rory Cellan-Jones reports back on some multimedia initiatives and journalists pioneering new technologies for newsgathering and reporting, in particular Damien Van Achter, who works for Belgian TV station RTBF.
“[H]is card describes him as community manager, editor developer and journalist. But his role seems to be to act as a kind of new media agent provocateur inside quite a traditional organisation, encouraging older broadcasters to try all the new tools that are now available.
“(…)His blog, ‘Blogging the News’, is where he brings a lot of his journalist experiments together but it seems most of it is his own rather than RTBF’s material – he’s really a backroom boy at the station rather than a mainstream correspondent. All the more interesting then that the US State Department, which had spotted his blog, contacted him before Hillary Clinton’s visit to Brussels and offered him exclusive access to the secretary of state during her tour.”
According to one executive at the event, magazine and newspaper publisher Lagadère is on the brink of reporting Google to the EU Commission for ‘predatory practices’.
One quote that grabbed my attention, however, was newspapers reported remark: “You are accepting the end of news as we know it.”
Google, secrecy about its algorithms and dominance of the online ad market aside, is looking forward; newspapers are trying to protect and control what they perceive as news and the news business. The problems they are facing, some related to Google and others not, should show them that this self-interested attitude can’t be maintained and their perception of ‘news as we know it’ is out-dated.
“This anti-Google attitude comes from an apparent sense of entitlement that we see clearly in France but also elsewhere: Google owes us (…) They – like other publishers and journalists – think a market should be built around what they need and that there is a fair share that belongs to them even though they did not innovate and change so those who did should rescue them. But as Scott Karp has said, no one guarantees them a business model.”