metadata

It seems that nearly each week, there is yet another panel convened on the future of journalism and how to save the news business.  Much of this centers on asking the question on 'how on earth will we monetize this?'

I attended one of these discussions earlier this year under the auspices of JTM at the Poynter Institute, 'The New News Ecology.'

And I came away profoundly changed, and convinced that applying some structure and metadata to every single piece of content, indeed, everything we do, be it an article, a photo, a blog post or a video - is going to transform the business.

This was after hearing Jim Kennedy, AP Strategic Planner, speak about how the AP was changing, after a century, how it reported, classified - via a new taxonomy - and distributed the news(on mobile platforms)

Here's why: as one of my fellow attendees from the tech sector said: you don't have to decide at the moment of creation what the end product could be.  It could be located by searching by region, by keyword, by format type.  It could be aggregated by outlets by topic or format for as many content types as possible as well as the topics.