"The media are not in control of the world anymore"

Citizen Kane is dying, and Google is helping to kill him.

The cliched image of the all-powerful newspaper editor, wielding a dominating iron grip on the world view of his readers, is all but a relic of the past.

According to new media expert Jeff Jarvis, the new power lies not in who controls the information, but in who collects the most links.

He said: "The media are not in control of the world anymore.

"Because of the nature of what we did, and the production schedule we had, we had to be perfect once a day.
"We put the world in a box, put a bow on it and put it out there. But in blogs, you can produce half-baked posts.

"It's a way of telling people what you know, what you don't know and then other people add what they know."
The rise of useful tools such as Google News, which collects breaking stories from news and opinion sites all over the web, has changed the way that many people keep abreast of the big issues of the day.

What separates Google from many old-school search engines is its method of ranking pages, which throws out the concept of grading by site editors in favour of a more democratic approach.

Jeff said: "Google realised one could value pages by the number of links to their content. They were effectively trusting the general public to be human aggregators.

"It was a critical insight. Now the search engine is a living organism and a clearer window to the world."

This new world order has thrown many larger media companies, who must now compete for links with less high-profile providers.

Google guru Vint Cerf even toured the offices of many UK national titles last year to offer advice on how to ride the wave of the internet revolution.

Jeff said: "In the US and UK, there's a lot of innovation and media companies are trying to outdo each other. But for some, it's a matter of sheer desperation and for many companies it's too late.

"They waited too long. They had 15 years to figure out this world and change with it and they're now way behind.

"A lot of newspaper sites assume that people are going to come in the front door and go where we tell them to go.

"We need to go where people are. We should work more collaboratively with our audiences. People can do amazing things when they work together."

Jeff had worked online since 1994, but didn't realise the full potential of the medium until he found himself in the midst of one of the most devastating terrorist attacks of modern times.

He was on his way to a meeting in lower Manhattan when the first World Trade Centre tower collapsed a mere block away, leaving him engulfed in soot and fleeing for his life into the lower levels of nearby Chase Plaza II.

He said: "I survived and wrote my story for media and websites. But I still had more to say, so I started blogging.

"A couple of bloggers in LA read what I had written and linked to it. It was like a huge lightbulb lit up in my head.

"It changed my life, my career, and my world view."

Jeff has since built up a following at buzzmachine.com, and it was those visitors who helped him develop the core arguments in his book.

He said: "I signed a contract to do the book a year ago but I've been blogging since 2001 and about this for two or three years.

"Blogging about the ideas for my book was a little like thinking things through out loud. The development of much of the information in my book was down to my generous readers. Sometimes they had ideas when I didn't.

"I see some anger at the media on blogs, but blogs aren't necessarily about replacing the media. They value journalism but they want a different relationship with journalists."

Google is now branching out into innovations on-the-go such as Google Latitude, which allows you to track the movements of any friend with a Google Map-enabled phone on your PC or mobile.

Jeff said: "Google will make more money in the future from mobiles than the web.

"The money from here on in comes from organising social networks. The clash of the titans there is Google versus Facebook.

"Google organises information. The next big thing is helping us to organise ourselves."

* What Would Google Do? is published by Collins, priced at £15.99