And so it begins…
Resident Digital hatched in November 2007 but it had been incubating for the last few months. The core Resident team has known each other as friends and colleagues (and clients) for the last few years so the decision to set up Resident was a logical one.
At the moment we are doing some really exciting work for The Telegraph, an ex-client of ours in a former life. The issue of user generated content and social media for newspapers is such a fascinating problem. How much do you break down the barrier between traditional journalism and user generated content whilst still upholding the core values of editorial policy and editorial identity?
We previously helped develop the award winning My Telegraph but the work we are doing at the moment is really going to push things forward to the new level… A newspaper site made in total collaboration with its readers. Very exciting times indeed and we are really happy that such a potentially important project is out first engagement as an agency.
In the 2006 AOP conference, most of the major media owners were talking about adding UGC and social media elements to their sites. I left that conference extremely excited..traditional media was at least acknowledging how important the peer production revolution was. But 12 months on, nothing has really changed. During the same conference this year, the only mention of social media in connection with news sites was from the US. Caroline Little, chief executive of Washingtonpost.com gave an impressive (if jetlagged) overview of how they were developing hyper-local communities and using comments. But…er, that was it.
So it’s a pretty open playing field at the moment. Either people are keeping their cards quite close to their chests or traditional media companies are just a bit too terrified of Facebook (aren’t we all).
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