Gannett, Crowdsourcing = Information Centers

guydm — Sat, 4 Nov 2006 10:39:07 -0700

These comments are cross-posted in dotguy

Gannett, one of the world's largest news organizations, is restructuring their newsrooms across the country to incorporate 'new media' approaches that maximize on the positive sum gains achieved through collective intelligence. This new strategy is built around the notion of crowdsourcing. Gannett terms this new organizational approach as "Information Centers" and the new structure includes a series of redefined departments: Public Service, Digital, Data, Community Conversation, Local, Custom Content, and Multimedia. The transformation reflects a reversal in the top-down, one-to-many approach of traditional media, shifting to a many-to-many model in both the gathering and distribution of new and information. The announcement was made earlier this week in a memo from Gannett CEO, Craig Dubow:

What is it? The Information Center is a way to gather and disseminate news and information across all platforms, 24/7. The Information Center will let us gather the very local news and information that customers want, then distribute it when, where and how our customers seek it. It is the essence of our Vision and Mission and a key element of our Strategic Plan. The Information Center, frankly, is the newsroom of the future. It will fulfill today's needs for a more flexible, broader-based approach to the information gathering process. And it will be platform agnostic: News and information will be delivered to the right media - be it newspapers, online, mobile, video or ones not yet invented - at the right time. Our customers will decide which they prefer.

More information and detail is available at Wired News and at a copy of the original memo is posted on Crowdsourcing.com

ASU, (alt^I) - Term

Gannett, Crowdsourcing = Information Centers