On Tuesday Reuters editor-in-chief, David Schlesinger urged the International Olympics Committee to rethink its accreditation rules and strategy for media/news coverage of forthcoming Games to take into account new forms of newsgathering, publishing and the democratisation of both in the hands of the non-journalist.

Schlesinger (or @daschles) is well placed to comment on such issues – during this year’s World Economics Forum, the Reuters head beat one of his own correspondents to a report by tweeting his own updates from George Soros’ speech.

Last night, he also described to the IOC how he had been pressured to remove a Reuters blog post after he took pictures of the Beijing Games without proper editorial photographer accreditation.

His comments also builds on the debate ahead of last year’s competition over whether athletes should be allowed to blog/report from the Games.

Some key quotes from the speech:

• “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.”
• “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.”
• “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.”

You can read Schlesinger’s full speech on Reuters’ blogs.