Rise Of The Cyborg Journalist

Reporters, prepare to "augment" yourselves, or get marginalized.

One can expect to see an explosion in social media metrics tools that are purpose-built for the publishing industry, for content-centric businesses. The existent technologies, which are designed for radically different businesses that sell goods or services, typically catering to the B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) business models.

For instance, they do not tell publishers, "What exactly caused an article to go viral? Was it timely content that created a new trend? The guest author and her accompanying network? A particularly influential commenter? A confluence of factors?"

The arrival of these tech offerings will allow publishers to embrace a data-driven approach to editorial decision-making. And the growing reliance on data in newsrooms, in turn, will give birth to a completely new breed of journalists.

The cyborg journalist.

A cyborg journalist is one who has a keen nose for news and a sharp eye for raw data. He or she arrives at editorial decisions upon taking into consideration a combination of predictive analytics (which will tell them how a story will perform), real-time metrics (which will tell them how a story performed)—and old school intuition.

(Via Media Shift)