From BusinessWeek blog
He said that the day of the classic “beat reporter,” is coming to an end. Replacing the legions of beat reporters banging out their stories in newsrooms, he predicts, will be a far smaller group of so-called multimedia journalists. These people will be higher paid. They will know how to harvest the knowledge of experts and citizen reporters alike, and will fashion new journalistic products out of various media. They will have entrepreneurial skills and many will create their own brands.
Feel free to think some similar thoughts about industry analysts (i am not sure about better paid but some of this is happening)…
Such thinking is music to my ears for lots of reasons. For one because RedMonk has been arguing something similar about industry analysts for a while.
“Join the Dots with Depth in Pockets” is how Rob Curran of WaggEd describes RedMonk. I like the description.
I am not going to say analysts with depth in an area are dead. That would be daft. But i will argue these folks will need new skills to stay in the game (like their own colleagues research, maybe).
You don’t have nine months to master a new area, any more. What matters more is to find people with depth, people that are practitioners, that have already got some skin in the game. You have to be able to assess the credibility of these sources, and reach out to them, to foster a dialogue that will improve your analysis. You will have to work on improving your gut instincts. Because the new world is a blink world. More data can just lead to sklerosis. Which data matters, who can you trust, have you got enough variety in your sources, to prevent groupthink? Analysis will increasingly be about wisdom of the crowds, and being an uber aggregator.
We’re seeing the reemergence of Renaissance People, with a wide range of skills, unafraid to dabble, and sometimes dabble deep, in art, politics, economics, natural sciences and technology.
All of this makes me happy because i am a generalist. A master of none, perhaps, but that’s a trade i am prepared to make. The must specialise must specialise brigade sound ever more shrill. I can’t tell you how boring it is to people say you have to specialise, you have to. Its a very common meme. But I got this far, didn’t I? I love literature but i have some geek tendencies and love natural history.
At RedMonk we don’t think ourselves as a Boutique so much as a Boot-IQ. That is what do. We try to boot our clients IQ, to help them get smarter on subjects in a time of rapid change. Often that means pointing to smarter, deeper practitioners, and not being ashamed of the fact. Its all part of the ongoing trend towards Open Source Analysis.
As Jon Udell says, the analyst/practitioner ecosystem is refreshingly new. He should know. And talking of those that should know – i hereby apply the term industry analyst to Steve Gillmor. He is the guy that hired Jon Udell and called him an analyst rather than an editor. Prescience: an ability to see the future is surely what we want from an analyst (hockey sticks are usually offtrack because they don’t embed complexity into the analysis). Steve is smart, a voracious networker, has a big ego (a essential character trait for an analyst that is going to make an impact). He may be a little too one-sided in his analysis; but since when has that not been the case for industry analysts?
If you are a major corporation trying to work out how blogs are going to change your business, and thinking about podcasting as a corporate strategy, by all means call Charline, (who is hiring for Forrester, by the way. her RSS doesn’t offer full text so i don’t read it unless someone else i read points to one of her posts, but that’s my choice). I would argue you should call Steve Gillmor too, though. RedMonk would do a good job for you as well. And an army of bloggers that have already done it, rather than talk about it, might bring some value.
I am skeptical News Corp is doing the right thing in bringing in McKinsey for its attempt to get it. How many McKinsey bloggers can you think of? Better to beg Udell to come along. And far more economical, i should think. You just know McKinsey now has a huge team of new MBAs (trawling the web to “get” RSS and all, probably with sex on the brain). They are being paid by Rupert to find knowledge that others have. Aggregating sure, but very top down and priced accordingly. So why not “view source” instead? Oh yeah- because McKinsey, like a premium beer, is reassuringly expensive. So Where are the McKinsey bloggers?
Oh dear – try searching for RSS or blogs on mckinsey.com. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.
The categories, they are a changing… next i will be arguing i am a management consultant.
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