Leonor Ciarlone in EContent muses about how content discovery tools that highlight relationships between widely dispersed unstructured documents may have helped to spare the
New York Times some of the embarassment of the
Jayson Blair incident by revealing how closely editorial work resembles other available sources. But more importantly Ciarlone points out that these same tools are already used by industry and the government to solve complex problems that classic reportage and research oftentimes fails to address. Content is no longer simply assembling and distributing authoritative information, but increasingly about understanding the relevance of that information in problem-oriented contexts. The real struggle for general news outlets such as the Times is not to control editorial quality on its classic products but to learn how to package high-value, technology-enabled content in a way that fixes its relevance in very specific human contexts. The news room of the future is not only going to have content discovery tools to write stories, but as well to create a new breed of content services.