Emily Bell, Director at the TOW Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, today delivered the Reuters Memorial Lecture 2014 for the Reuters Institute in Oxford. The relationship between technology companies and journalism is uneasy and complicated, but journalism needs to be at least an equal partner, according to Emily Bell, Director at the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. Bell said the media has reached a point of transition.

“News spaces are no longer owned by newsmakers. The press is no longer in charge of the free press and has lost control of the main conduits through which stories reach audiences. The public sphere is now operated by a small number of private companies, based in Silicon Valley.”

Presenting the Reuters Memorial Lecture 2014, Silicon Valley and Journalism: Make Up or Break Up, for the Reuters Institute, Bell, a former journalist at the Guardian newspaper, said that journalists, as well as growing numbers of citizen reporters, now had their free speech standards, reporting tools and publishing rules “set by unaccountable software companies”.