21st Century Journalist & Consulting

Job description of a 21st century journalist
a. Highly intelligent filter of information
We consultants also have to be sharp at sifting useful information from noise.
b. Expert in reputation and reliability systems, able to know who the reliable sources are since there are so many sources.
We consultants also have to use discretion and link to only selected few reputed, reliable and quality sources of information. Seriously there are too many sources!
c. Community manager, managing a community of people who have knowledge and interacting with them, not only networking with the right people but also working efficiently with large groups of people to synthesize information.
We consultants also have to tap into the knowledge and experience of highly resourceful community of colleagues and networks. The future is in collaborative problem solving!
d. Demand manager, able on taking knowledge coming from how people use internet, what they are doing, understand the clues to demand and produce into that demand.
We consultants also have to look for clues of demand from the change forces impacting our customers’ businesses and create the right products and solutions for them to efficiently respond to the change forces.
e. Accepting that their audience knows more than they do and treat them not just as a readership but as participants in the creation of journalism. Treating the collective knowledge of the readers as an important asset and be able to get some of that coming in, filter and synthesize it into something worth putting out. This is going to be hard to accept!
We consultants also encounter situations where some of our customers know more than us. This can make us nervous and hard to accept! We will probably see these situations more often in the future, We will have to accept this as a natural thing but show our value by taking what our customers have, add our own knowledge and experience and give them a product that is of worth and value.
We will see knowledge becoming more and more accessible to everyone. Knowledge by itself will gradually cease to be of competitive advantage. The key differentiator will come from quality of knowledge and integration of knowledge from various sources to create products of value addressing the real needs of the customer.
We consultants will have to be adept as facilitators, integrators, knowledge brokers and innovators.
Future winners will own a problem space and productively build and orchestrate an ecosystem of resources to address that problem space!
For those interested in the interview, the full video is available at http://video.economist.com/?fr_chl=1257fd4a3f457735719f845205531ed840915d9c