The FT and experimenting with journalism

Chris Sutcliffe of The Media Briefing writes about how the Financial Times is experimenting putting content on Facebook and putting requests on Reddit and LinkedIn for sources.

Sutcliffe writes, “The FT’s interactive data journalist Robin Kwong told TheMediaBriefing that while the perception of the FT as an authoritative voice is vital to its brand, it was limiting to an extent the type of content that it could produce:

‘One of the drivers behind why we decided to do that was instead of talking one-way at our readers all the time could we… use them as a journalism resource. So we wanted to test those out with this project. So what we decided in thinking about this was, what’s most useful in terms of reporting is actual stories rather than people’s opinions.’

“To that end, the team put out a call to the community on reddit and LinkedIn for their own stories about wearables in the workplace, something Kwong says is practically revolutionary for the FT:

‘This is really experimental for us…we think there maybe are certain types of stories, certain types of coverage where we can use this approach to readers to say “we’re interested in looking at this, and at this stage we actually might not know everything there is to know about the subject’.

Read more here.