Why the future of news is software

Newsrooms and journalists are not in the content business. Rather, they are in the information business and the sooner we embrace that fact, the better.

Last week I was having a beer in Dublin with Gerard Ryle, the head of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Over the past two years they have broken enormous global stories: Offshore Leaks and China Leaks.

Gerard had just given a speech, talking about how journalism - and by extension investigative journalism - was in fact in its infancy. The future, he predicted, would be far better than the past. It was refreshing to hear someone from the news industry to be so positive about the future.

One thing we discussed in detail afterwards (as is often the case among hacks) was the future of the news industry, and how it might be financed. Philanthropy gets you so far we agreed, but funds and momentum can often run out. So I turned the conversation to “products”.

Information, I argued, was the raw material of journalism. All functions of journalism relate to three core principles — information gathering, information analysis, and the distribution of the results of that process.

Today, the primary focus of journalism conferences and newsrooms is often on the last bit — how do we get more people reading our fabulous and expensive content, and how do we sell more ads against that content? (Where content is defined as one result of the first two stages, distributed through any…