The Evolution of Mainstream Media
There is a really interesting piece done today in the Washington Post that talks about the increasing encroachment of the Internet on Mainstream Media (MSM). There are a number of interesting passages that I’ve pulled out as they speak to the trends and the business realities.
There is a love-hate relationship, probably skewing more towards hate, with MSM and the rest of us. There’s countless greanades lobbed over the fences - we complain they’re useless, they complain we’re not journalists and the other raft of issues that continue to force misaligned visions and the subsequent opportunities.
Mainstream news organizations, shaken by the erosion of their viewers, readers and advertisers, and only hesitantly embracing the new media, still have significant strengths in the digital journalism world. Though their economic situation is serious, and perhaps critical, it's not over yet. What is over is the era of the well-staffed, single-medium newsroom with once-a-day or even once- an-hour deadlines.Interestingly enough, despite the talk of audiences, what they really mean is eyeballs - right? Is anyone really dealing with the relationship that's held and the realities of maintaining that connection and loyalty over an extended period of time?First, The Bad News
That’s a hard conclusion for many in the news business to handle. Newspapers, the biggest and oldest segment of the mainstream media, are built on the work of creative, contentious and quick-witted people, but also of curmudgeons who resist change.Newsrooms shrunk by layoffs and battered by bloggers, are seeing their traditional audiences shrink. Daily newspapers lost 1.2 million readers in the six months that ended in March, down to 45.5 million. Online newspaper readership grew to 56 million.
As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever Changed
The news media's advantage in advertising is that it's a mass medium, but online users may gravitate to online-only sites for autos, real estate or jobs. Craigslist, Monster or eBay, among others, offer free listings or make comparison shopping much easier.The competition between old-media and new-media companies for advertising dollars is not a foregone conclusion. Craigslist.com is estimated to have cost the San Francisco Chronicle $50 million in lost classified revenue in 2004. But the biggest information provider in almost every market is the newspaper, and the second biggest is the newspaper's Web site.Readers clearly are headed online, in some cases replacing both print and television with the Internet as their main source of news.We're hearing the sound of metal crunching as the big machine slows down a halt. If we are intending to compete with MSM, doesn't some part of how they survived impact our own survival? We want their audiences, their eyeballs but what do we intend to come of that?As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever Changed
Technology has driven behavioral changes, as reporters, producers, photographers and editors learn that interactivity in the form of e-mail, blogs, polls, hyperlinks, Videologs, podcasts and news delivered via cell phones can open their work up to a newer and bigger audience, for better or worse. It's far easier for a reader to find a reporter now than it was in the past; it's also easier for a story published overseas or in a local or regional outlet to have a bigger impact. No longer are readers or viewers bound by network broadcast schedules, the delivery of a newspaper or magazine or the top-of-the-hour radio headlines.What worries professional journalists above all else is whether what replaces the newsroom of today will support the journalism of tomorrow.A new age of technology - most of it free and widely available. Are we maximizing the benefits of our new, shiny tools or are we still applying the old physics?As the Internet Grows Up, the News Industry Is Forever Changed
My biggest concern with our continuous comparison to MSM is that it keeps us in the secondary position. The more we use the terms and metrics of their industry, the more leverage we ultimately create for them. MSM is filled with many bright, intelligence minds that have quite a bit to lose - never corner a wounded animal they say.
Said differently, are we really painting them into the corner or simply showing them where the corners are? I hope we can apply all our smarts to find the alternative pathways.
technorati tags:socialmedia, media, msm, advertising, readership, audiences