Mike Butcher: Journalist of the future?

Bits of Mike Butcher online

Sitting at the PSFK Good Ideas Salon listening to the mobile panel. As they introduced themselves, each of the panelists described the symptoms of their individual partial attention disorders. Mike Butcher listed the various elements he needs to pay attention to and how mobile enables him to keep a track of them. I think I caught them all;

• His RSS feeds (number not specified)
• Comments on his two blogs Mbites and Techcrunch
• His twitter follows (978 of them)
• The techcrunch Yammer feed (an internal Twitter)
• His email (sorry – no link)
• And his Linkedin connections and quite possbly his flickr comments

And at no point did he mention is wireservice subscriptions.

So it occurred to me – if I am a PR or a company trying to get something in front of Mike so he’ll give it some profile on Techcrunch then I need to be offering something very interesting and I need to be visible in some or all of these environments (and spamming PR Newswire is not really going to cut it). Now Mike’s not typical – he’s working for a tech blog and is a tech blogger and by his own admission works in a very decentralised and disembodied way. But I think he is probably a harbinger.

As journalists can get more and better information from monitoring and participating in social technologies, surely they are going to favor these. And as the number of specialist journalists are not located in a decentralised news organisation (those that still exist) they are going to not just favor but actually heavily rely on social technologies. And if this is the case for the professional media / blogosphere so it will be for influencers.

Now this is no great new insight – I’d just never had iot so clearly illustrated by a real live example.