19
March
2009
|
16:15 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Media Is Dead . . . Long Live The Media!

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.