Making The Guardian in Lego

You might recall that I've used Lego minifigs before to represent some of the staff at The Guardian.

At a recent Meld workshop in the Sandbox at UCLAN where we discussed 'the journalist of the future', I got to go one step further, and build an - admittedly minimalist - model of the company in Lego.

The two control panels represent two crucial parts of the business. I think Lego intended it as a Police control station, but with the tape recorder, phone, and bloke being interviewed, I used the brick on the right to represent our journalism. The space radar device represents technology - although sadly none of our existing software or hardware looks like that. The two control panels are intersecting at the point where the paper connects with the audience.

The pipes represent guardian.co.uk being pumped into the digital sphere. They are two-way. Pushing out are things like our editorial content, PR effort, Twitter streams and appearances at conferences. Coming back into the organisation are open source software components, applications built off the Open Platform, user-captured video footage like that from the G20 protests, reader's comments, and the crowd-sourcing analysis of data.

My opinion on the biggest challenge facing the entire media sector - that an ad revenue downturn occurred at a time when the Internet has put the whole media sector into flux - got summed up as: "Martin Belam: Managing recession and structural change together"

I thought that made me sound worryingly like a mission statement for an acquisition and asset-stripping private equity firm!