Content More Important Than Its Container

Jay Rosen comments on AP chief Tom Curley's speech to the Online News Association in which he preaches the gospel of media agnosticism, that is, that content will be freed of any one vessel (newspaper, radio broadcast, television, etc.) by which it is distributed. "That's a big shift for old media to come to grips with," Curley adds. "Killer apps, such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as Tivo -- to name just a few -- have begun to unlock content from any vessel we try to put it in." Rosen adds:

Those vessels are the big media brands themselves, including the flagships of the press fleet. Here's Admiral Curley telling them that news content is becoming unhinged from "brand," and so we who make content have to re-locate where we brand it, and think about adding our voice at every step. . . . Curley spoke of "legacy technology, silo-ed bureaucracies and entrenched workflows" as barriers to progress. But an even deeper barrier is the intellectual legacy of defining journalism by the platform it runs on.