Why curation could be at the core of future reporting

"When we look at the world of news in particular or journalism, or content creation in general, the trick is not to look at where we are, because where we are is dead already, but the trick is to look at where we are going to be in the next five years."

So said video producer and journalist Michael Rosenblum, speaking at the Mobile Journalism Conference in Dublin on Friday.

"The biggest journalism business in the future is not going to have one single journalist who works for it", he claimed, as news organisations move towards curation and editing for foreign and local reporting.

We have to restructure this whole thing based on what the technology is telling usMichael Rosenblum, video journalist

"There are three billion smartphones in circulation around the world now," he explained at the conference.

"That is three billion people that will have the capacity to shoot video, to livestream if you like Meerkat and stuff like that, to take photographs, to edit, to upload and participate.

"That's three billion people who have stories to tell. Three billion journalists who live in the countries they report from, who know what they're talking about, who want to participate."

The old model of the media, "we make it, you watch it" needs to change to allow for more participation, he said, as new technologies now enable people from all over the world to tell their own stories – and journalists are playing catch-up.

"The job of 'journalist' is finished," he wrote in the Huffington Post yesterday, as news outlets will follow in the footsteps of successful internet businesses like Uber or Airbnb, acting as hubs for independent providers.

The idea of parachute journalism, where news organisations send a group of journalists to a foreign country for a few days, is "the dumbest thing you can do" as technology makes it easy for people to "start feeding the world with what they think is news", he explained.

As such, the future of journalism businesses is to place themselves "at the nexus" of stories from around the world, moving away from producing content and towards harnessing the plurality of voices that exist.

"We have to restructure this whole thing based on what the technology is telling us," he said.

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