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Newsroom of the future : Coordinate the voices of your community

February 4, 2012

Newsroom of futureDave Winer (@davewiner), software developer and editor of Scripting News, has an interesting piece this morning on the New York Times going the wrong way.

Winer’s point is that there needs to be another path to success for the Times, whose digital subscription base continues to rise, while revenues continue to slide.

Per Winer, the path to success is to curate content from the community it serves and to provide a blogging platform to those not already blogging.

The function of a newsroom in the future is to coordinate the voices of the world to produce a coherent news product. That job will be done in very much the model that Tumblr is doing it. [The New York Times] could have started with a blogging community or you could have started with a news organization, but they’re both heading to the same place.

Brian Stelter (@brianstelter), ironically working for the New York Times, reported last week that Tumblr is hiring writers and editors to cover the world of Tumblr.

From Jessica Bennett (@jess7bennett), a senior writer and editor at Newsweek and the Daily Beast, who will become Tumblr’s executive editor:

…[If] Tumblr were a city of 42 million (referring to the number of Tumblr blogs that exist), I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.

Tap into all of the free content that users upload, surface compelling stories, and demonstrate the potential of a nascent creative population rather than push a corporate top down approach. All good stuff.

In addition to online social networks like Tumblr, and potentially mainstream newspapers like the Times, you can expect this open source publishing and resulting curation to be the future of legal publishing and networking.

For networks like LexBlog’s LXBN, the key is to have an innovative editorial team, connect members of the community, and to empower those legal professionals not already blogging and publishing.

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