Having been at the forefront of social media news for five years Mark Little announced last week that he has decided to leave Storyful. His blogpost announcing the departure didn't leave any hint as to where he's headed next but his talk at the FuJo launch touched upon the concept of 'brand newsrooms' and the importance of leveraging this new revolution in advertising.
The former RTE reporter left the state broadcaster in 2010 in order to launch his new social journalism venture, which comprises a team of journalists and programmers involved in searching, finding and verifying newsworthy content on social media for use by publishers.
Storyful's newswire is now used by over 100 newsrooms around the world including the BBC, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and was acquired by News Corp in 2013 for €18 million.
This week Mark Little said that he was leaving the company with perhaps a hint of what is next to come: branded news.
"Increasingly we're working with 'brand newsrooms'. Some of the fastest growing newsrooms in the world are companies like General Electric, MasterCard, Coca Cola. There's a revolution in the advertising business that we're also leveraging."
Watch his full talk here.
Speaking on a discussion panel at the FuJo launch, he said the media industry can focus on the wrong things. He said that many have missed a “fundamental shift in the way that news is created over the past eight years since the birth of the camera phone.” He saw digital migration as having created huge opportunities.
Five years from Storyful's creation, there are still not many players in this space but since Mark Little and the Storyful team carved a niche where they saw a demand, the Irish have been leading the charge. Storyful co-founder Malachy Browne also left the company to start Reported.ly (currently in beta) which uses social media and User Generated Content (UGC) to advance in-depth and investigative global news stories.
Dublin based Newswhip which drives social media content in real time to news-publishers is also making a major impact and attracting investment. And there are potentially more players coming into the content creation market with UPC making a bid for TV3.
During the discussions at the FuJo launch Mark Little, a former DCU student, described where he thought the future of the industry was going. It might offer some more clues as to where he is thinking of going himself.
“We are missing out on the rise of dark social the rise of messaging services, now the dominant form of communication for a certain generation. We have not begun to think about how journalism fits into that. Aside from a few experiments.”
"We are missing the notion this is no longer an audience. We don’t broadcast like the voice of god […] people are creating news and distributing news, at time of their choice, on the device of their choice."
"And we still have not worked out how our product fits into the reality of the audience no longer being an audience," he added.
Plenty to think about and somewhere in there might be the roots of his next venture. But as one of the driving forces of social journalism and having transformed foreign correspondence for the digital era, whatever Mark Little does next he has forged a proud legacy in Irish and international news.