Presentation to WAN-IFRA Newsroom Summit, London, September 2010

1. WAN-IFRA 9th International Newsroom SummitFast food news? George Brock Professor and Head of Journalism City University London London September 2010

2. “Finger food news” Sounds unappetising, no? But it’s based on old assumption… …about two-dimensional space “Fast” = 2 issues Small screens, not many words Speed of news cycle Second of these is the larger issue for journalism “Mobile” is now wireless tablets

4. What’s the context? At the start of overlapping waves of change Mobile adoption rate x8 broadband Google: do mobile apps first Info explosion: 5 exabytes every 2 days Windows into a single info cloud? Journalism decoupled from distribution Where are you on the books-to-instantaneous scale?

5. Content, not hardware But hardware does influence content Finding new grammar online Connections and “mutualisation” Downward in text but through links Information being processed in news ways e.g. GaonKiAwaaz, Uttar Pradesh

7. Things to hold on to Data, information, journalism are not the same In connected, media-rich world, journalism has 4 core tasks: Verification Sense-making Witness Investigation Challenge is finding business model for these

8. Things I haven’t talked about Will people pay? (Increasingly, yes) Is the web dead, killed by apps? (Unlikely) What’s technical definition of mobile? (It’ll work itself out) Geolocation (transformative in local)

9. Enriching the “finger food” Are we going to see…re-intermediation? Rewiring newsrooms e.g. Weigel + Wise Filters (a.k.a. “editors”) still matter Importance of words Links: journalism as a encyclopaedia on the move Assembling jigsaws

10. Takeaways Hardware does shape content…to a degree Mobile is not bite-sized anymore Switch on your inner anthropologist In the end, it will be content that counts Most important dimension is trust

11. www.georgebrock.net @georgeprof www.city.ac.uk/journalism/