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Flat world competition in journalism doesn’t just mean that an army of citizens with blogs are about to nick all the the attention.

There’s good news for the fleet of foot and strong of content: the internet opens up the market for your content to the entire world that can speak your language. For British media this may be very good news indeed, as a New York Times article from Thursday illustrates neatly.

Reporting on the BBC’s move into rolling news in the US and the Times US edition, the article considers the trend.

You get the sense (from visit to the US, tuning in occasionally to TV news on cable and from reading bloggers like Jeff Jarvis get excited when they visit London and get their mits on UK papers) that a lot of US media is stale, and over-homogenous. Indeed, the poor state of local newspapers in the US is often cited as a reason that consumer generated media such as blogs have taken off so quickly there.

I was interested in the quotes from  The Way Group‘s Nick Shore in the article, which seemed to support this (simplistic) reading:

"This has the feeling of Americans deciding they need something outside the system to get a perspective on what’s going on," said Nick Shore, principal at the Way Group in New York, a strategic consulting company. "It’s a global version of a second opinion."

The interest in world news delivered from someplace outside the United States could be a reaction to "the Wal-Martization of America," Mr. Shore said — that is, responding to perceptions of news that originates here as homogenized or corporatized.

Just as the "cool Britannia" trend has benefited Britain in fields like fashion and music, said Mr. Shore, who is British, "in a knowledge economy, the intellectual version is ‘cool knowledge,’ " learned from British sources of news and information.

Tags: journalism, UK, BBC, TheTimes

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