What on earth am I looking at? The new B&T explained

Welcome to the new B&T. Let us take you on a quick spin to show off all the whistles and bells we now have for your browsing pleasure.

At the centre of our new site is the wisdom of the crowd. No longer will we be a slave to the press release driven news cycle that has ensnared journalism for the past generation or longer. PRs and even better organisations without PRs, will be free to load their own stories to B&T. The appointment of a new ECD, the latest campaign from Carlton and so on are transactional news stories, which don’t need a journalist to re-write the first two paragraphs of a media release. The story will stand or fall on its own set of facts. If it’s worth sharing the story will travel. If not, it will disappear into obscurity quicker than you can say market leading.

We’re sure some PRs will be overly excited and go large on the superlatives describing their client. That’s okay, the readers will soon sort them out and quickly enough. We know we’re no longer a single source of truth and any company that makes a claim and can’t back it up, now does so at its own peril.

So suddenly, our journalists are no longer under the pressure of the fire house of linear, broadcast style brand announcements, banal or otherwise, and able to roam the streets from Surry Hills to St Kilda to San Francisco having chai lattes with real people and bringing those original stories back to the office with them. Of course they’ll also be able to file from the field (but we could do that already).

Because we live in a visual world, we’ll also be focusing much of our time to let pictures and videos tell our stories. Stories we hope will so enchant you that you will do with them what always happens to good content: you will let it travel by sharing it.

We have teamed up with bleeding-edge digital agency We Are Social to make sure that B&T’s content no longer sits within the virtual four walls of its own site. Social sharing is at the heart of B&T’s new architecture and we’ve made some pretty neat twists on traditional thinking.

When you get to the bottom of an article, no longer will you be faced with the narrow bitchy world of a few out-of-work creatives with nothing better to do than poke holes in other people’s work. Rather, through some clever tagging and digital bagging, we’re bringing the broader Twitter conversations that relate to that article into the story. There’s often a much larger conversation around even a very specific topic than what is represented by any one website.

You can join in that wider twitter conversation right from the story, or if you’re in a right lather about the topic, post a new article to air your opinions.

But beyond this, the new B&T offers so much more. Sign in with LinkedIn and as We Are Social’s proprietary Social CRM gets to know your browsing habits as well as your LinkedIn characteristics, we’ll start serving up articles just for you. We’ll give you the veritable reading list to make you the subject matter expert in your office.

And because we know that the wisdom of many will always beat that of a few, we will bring the best from around the web (yes even Mumbrella and AdNews), but more likely Forbes, the Economist and more importantly, the bizarre little corners of the Internet where true insight is often found, and share them on B&T.

The walled garden is down. Enjoy your online B&T experience.

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David Hovenden