Harvesting the wisdom of the crowd

Some interesting comments from Mark Little about his decision to leave one of the plum jobs in Irish television journalism?

Mark,after seven years of presenting Prime Time appears disillusioned with television and other traditional media,

“More and more, as the media tries to survive financially, it is trying to seek out the lowest common denominator and find what people’s biases are and then appeal to them, and I found that distressing.”

But perhaps even more interesting is hsi thoughts for the future which came to frition as he saw the impact on social media during the Iranian elections and found that

I was getting information quicker on my couch in south Dublin than the reporter in her hotel room.”

from which came

the idea of starting a news organisation that extracts the “useful news” from the “useless noise” on the internet, as he puts it. “With the development of social platforms like You Tube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, people are talking and they’re having a conversation that is about current events. There’s a huge cloud of information on every single subject and a lot of it is generated much quicker than traditional news.”

Ht-Richard Sambrook