Media Is Dead . . . Long Live The Media!
By Tom Foremski - March 20, 2009
All the chatter in the mediasphere about the death of newspapers (and TV) makes the subject of media seem so morbid. But, we have more media happening now than at anytime in humanity's existence.
We have more media, in more formats, and at anytime we choose. We consume more media today than ever before. [It's just that we haven't yet figured out how to make money from it (but we will).]
These are the best times to be a media or PR, imho.
I spent 20 plus years working as a journalist in Silicon Valley, interviewing people about the work they were doing on a chip, software application, or one of many technologies. These days people are looking over my shoulder, and that of my colleagues in journalism and PR, looking at what we are doing with a plethora of media technologies.
Silicon Valley has turned into a Media Valley, because so many of our large and startup companies are essentially media companies. They are technology-enabled-media-companies, they sell advertising around content. That's true for Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Craigslist, and it is true for many smaller companies, Web 2.0 companies, etc. And the rise of social media is just a continuing part of this trend.
As journalists or PR/corporate communications people, we are in the middle of a unique period in history. I think it is very likely that we will never, ever, experience this kind of disruption that is happening in our industries, in our lifetimes, again.
It's not a pleasant time for many, because the chief quality of disruptive technologies are that they are disruptive. But, these are also incredibly creative opportunities.
There are so many questions and so few answers, and that's great. Because we all get a chance to figure things out, we all get a chance to make mistakes and create the best practices that will become part of the future. We get to discover the new rules of story telling and communications. And that's what gets me out of bed.
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Comments (4)
Media Valley -- Perfect!! Although I thought that was in Southern California? Oh! Different industry, sorry... The great achievement/bane of the internet is that it was developed out of an ARPANET project, and therefore free of commercial concerns. Had it been developed here, Timothy Berners Lee might have thought to include a mechanism for automatically withdrawing a penny from your account every time you visited a new web page. As it is, we now have to go back and figure out how to extract value from a free service. But I do believe that is being accomplished quite well in some quarters.
Posted: March 20, 2009 9:43 AM
Great to meet you last night, Tom. Per our conversation, I couldn’t agree more that this is an exciting time to be in the media or PR.
The changes being driven by social media are fascinating and with so many people focusing on the negatives, it’s refreshing to see a positive viewpoint on the great opportunities that are being presented. Like with any industry, the media will continue to evolve as new technologies reshape established business models. While there will always be a natural resistance to change with naysayers clinging onto the status quo, I would echo your thoughts that media companies and PR professionals that embrace it have an exciting future ahead. After all, wouldn’t it be boring and kind of dull if everything stayed the same?
Simon
Posted: March 20, 2009 11:22 AM
Media Is Dead . . . Long Live The Media!
Absolutely spot on Tom. The days of spending two hours stuffing envelopes or standing by the fax machine to mail or fax out news releases seem a hundred years ago now... and thank your deity of choice for that.
"PR 2.0" and the plethora of routes to market and communications tools can seem daunting, but it's an opportunity and vital that organizations and PR/marcomms folks get a handle on it and embrace it. There's no avoiding it.
Like the dot com boom of a decade ago, we're seeing a flood of social networking sites, service and channels emerging almost weekly (or at least it feels that way). I expect to see some kind of shake out or rationalization over the next couple of years. It would be almost impossible for an organization to monitor and maintain every single social media channel, and we could see a 'survival of the fittest' scene play out... as we did with dot coms.... Fascinating times.
Posted: March 20, 2009 11:56 AM
It really is about adapting now. I work at a very traditional business print pub in San Diego. We have been very slow to adapt to style changes, and editorial formats and may be out of business any second. You, on the other hand used the text acronym IMHO (Tecronym?). That would have FLIPPED our Executive Editor, yet it is proper. Communicate in a way that can be understood. You do, it's great.
This is one of the most experimental generations since the cave-scientists, they/we are very open to new things. "Traditional" doesn't feel safe to us and we want to try new things. Heck, it's traditional to die after a healthy lifespan, old media can expect that unless it breaks from tradition. We will however, always need the trustworthy hard data collectors and therein lies a fantastic opportunity for the traditional newsroom operators.
Just the other day I wrote a blog post about our local newspaper being sold, The Fourth Estate is having an Estate Sale!, my Editor in Chief read it and immediately pointed out, "You still got your facts from the AP." and the poignancy of that statement still rings.
I agree with you that it is a great time to be in media, but only if you keep your wits about you.
Oh, and if tecronym gains ground in our new vernacular, I am staking claim to it right here.
Posted: March 22, 2009 11:37 AM