NYC: US Mobile networks worse than in Africa, claims Reuters chief

Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media, told an industry conference that US mobile internet networks were 'much ado about nothing'.

Speaking at the Digital Hollywood Media Summit conference in New York, he said that Reuters liked to use mobile devices for reporters to file and to gather content from the public, yet American networks lagged behind technologically.

He later told Journalism.co.uk: "Mobile networks in America are not up to snuff, it's not what we have in the UK, on the continent or even in Africa or Asia . . . in America we have a way to go before we see it as a distribution network like you see in Europe."



He added that Reuters had forged deals (with Pluck and You Witness News - the citizen journalism service it runs through Yahoo) as ways for the organisation to extend its reporting reach and get to content captured on mobile devices.

Mr Ahearn conceded that this new model for gathering news threw up concerns about whether the content was collected safely and in line with Reuters' ethical constraints.

"I'm not going to claim that a lot of these problems have been sorted out, I'm not going to pretend that people aren't doing it [collecting news unethically] today.

"So we're finding a way of bringing where we are today to a future stage and I think it's very important to do that."

He added that Reuters was experimenting with new ways of using virtual worlds to get the public involved in the news business

"We did an experiment with Second Life in Davos [at the World Economic Forum] where we invited in a variety of interesting newsmakers and opened it up to the crowd in Second Life to ask questions and comment alongside our moderator.

"It was a very interesting next generation of where our news gathering goes.

"It really doesn't work in every single format but, if someone is coming in to be interviewed, why not open it up to the audience that's sitting there as well.

"Journalists might get another question that they may not have thought of before, isn’t that how you take the classic TV interview into the online experience and involve all the various comments and other aspects as well.

"It has also brought a lot of issues. I wouldn't say that we have got it all sorted out but it's an interesting experiment and I think we will see more of it."

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