Google News founder says news organisations must recruit ‘restless agents of change’
The founder of Google News, Krishna Bharat, has declared that smart news organisations need to change their hiring practices and recruit "restless agents of change" if they are to survive and thrive.
Media website Journalism.co.uk reports that this was the clear message from Bharat in a keynote speech to the News World Summit in Paris.
Bharat said the explosion of online news sources had caused "attention deficit" among users and news groups needed to become "content guides" and not just content producers.
Journalism .co.uk quotes him as saying: "In a world where innovation is key you cannot maintain the status quo - it's not a business model that will work. You need to change your hiring practices and you need to hire people who are restless agents of change who want to invent the next thing.
"The lesson for media companies is it's not enough to just be a content producer, you need to be a content guide. You need to rise to the top of the food chain and say (to readers): I'm here to help you.
"This is a profound change in the way editorial teams operate and I think it's a necessary one in order to survive. You need to make both creation and curation your fundamental activities."
Bharat added: "I am confident that looking back we will find that the smart companies that make it through this bottleneck are going to be smarter and more creative than ever before precisely because they embrace technology strongly.
"It used to be that we had an attention monopoly on which you can build a media business. If you had the monopoly to deliver information to their doorstep or TV set you could make certain assumptions. Now the internet has allowed anyone to be a publisher or a broadcaster.
"You've gone from attention monopoly to attention deficit - there is way too much competition for eyeballs. Users have come to recognise that following one source is not enough."
Bharat continued to claim that the consumer definition of news was changing and that those who "tie together" general public interest news with personal news, would be successful.