At the Globe, content is platform-agnostic

No, nobody actually said that, but that’s clearly one jargon-laden inference a reader can draw from all the other jargon in this morning’s Stackhouse announcement.

"Content is platform-agnostic" is one of the things journalists tell one another, dying a little inside each time, when they want to seem all webby and forward-looking. It means the words don’t care how you read them, and what it really means is, eventually we hope to boil the whole product down to a moving headline crawl at the bottom of a fast-food restaurant’s digital menu. That’s the meaning of these highlights from this morning’s article:

"But news organizations can also seize upon new opportunities to expand online and into mobile platforms, he said."

"The move is part of a broader set of changes at The Globe and Mail designed to expand the newspaper’s digital strategy."

"Amid the flux in the media sector, the public’s appetite for news and information remains strong, regardless of how it is delivered, Mr. Stackhouse said after addressing staff."

And my own personal favourite:

"It doesn’t matter if it’s detailing the recession or covering a war in Africa or social trends in India. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a 5,000-word story in a newspaper, or a tweet or a blog. The basic challenges are the same: finding out information that matters to people."

Well. I hate to spoil the party, but here’s a fun fact, direct from the Inkless labs of one of the Canadian media’s first bloggers: Yes, it actually bloody does matter whether it’s a 5,000-word story or a tweet.

Or it used to.