Atomic science for corporate infopros
Jinfo Blog

16th February 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Not for the first time recently, a major financial newspaper has decided to dispense with the services of its in-house library. Last December it was the Financial Times; now the Wall Street Journal has gone the same way. Then as now, the journalists were very supportive of their information professionals. Nearly 200 at the FT signed a petition opposing the cuts (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e14595) and, in an internal memo leaked to the trade journal Editor & Publisher (http://digbig.com/4ygmp) the WSJ’s soon to be ex-librarian talks of the ‘supportive and compassionate’ response she’s had from reporters. Instead of a librarian, WSJ journos will apparently be offered the Lexis Due Diligence Dashboard (http://digbig.com/4ygmq); designed for procurement and supply chain professionals, it seems a somewhat limited substitute for a warm-bodied infopro equipped with lateral thinking and intuition between the ears. And the FT journalists actually said that losing their library research centre would mean highly paid writers working less efficiently and incurring higher costs. It’s all part of a pattern gloomily traced by the Association of UK Media Librarians at their AGM last year (http://www.aukml.org.uk/) – but in truth, these vital support staff members are simply sharing in the same pain as the journalists they’ve clearly been serving so effectively. The WSJ is also shedding writing staff (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e16216), and writers at both the FT and the Independent are currently threatening strike action over their job cuts (http://digbig.com/4ygmr). But despite all this, there’s more news available than ever, and the diminishing corps of staff journalists is apparently being plugged by the news agencies. A recent Economist article (http://digbig.com/4ygmt) worried about more and more news media simply regurgitating agency copy instead of using their own specialists to investigate the implications behind the stories – and it also cited a report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University (http://digbig.com/4ygms) which fears the eventual disintermediation of newspapers altogether. It has serious implications for corporate information professionals. At its most basic, there’s the deduplication effort associated with finding any value-add in a plethora of stories all based on the same agency feed. But much more important is knowing which commentators you can trust. A new survey of the Washington press corps, for example, from the Pew Research Center (http://digbig.com/4ygmw), reveals that a shrinking in mainstream media representation has been more than compensated for by niche media – all with their own axe to grind. What’s happening in political lobbying will happen in business news analysis too. With mainstream investigative journalism risking emaciation through both lack of journalists and research support, and with available analysis atomised, the risks for research staff of backing the wrong sources are serious – but the rewards for getting it right could be high too.

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