Topic: Media
Perhaps the biggest challenge that the online world has brought to the “traditional news media” –and by that I mean mainstream network broadcasters, daily newspapers and major newsweeklies- has been to end their omnipotent role as gatekeepers of information. The handful of senior editors and producers at major media outlets no longer control the information agenda, full stop.
The online revolution has happened so quickly, that this kind of statement seems so self-evidently true as to be the accepted conventional wisdom now. But I think this change is such a radical challenge to the mass media world we’ve lived in for the last 120-130 years, and really such a recent phenomenon, that most of us –especially those of us working in the mainstream media- don’t really “get” what it means. We all say we acknowledge its truth, but we don’t completely comprehend its full implications.
The panel I’m taking part in on Wednesday afternoon at this week’s Canadian Institute’s Media Relations conference in Toronto is centered on the question “How are traditional media outlets adapting to the electronic age?” This is a conference for PR professionals, who are hungry to understand how they should be adapting their pitches to new realities in the newsrooms of the nation.
I’d suggest that, while traditional media are adapting quite a bit, they are probably not adapting anywhere near as quickly as they could or as dramatically. So the more interesting question maybe is “How should traditional media outlets be adapting to the electronic age?” Admittedly, that’s probably beside the point for the audience at the Canadian Institute conference. (That said, maybe the larger message is that PR folks should understand that their jobs, in the electronic age, should be increasingly less “media” relations and more “public” relations. While they probably won’t ever completely exclude media in their communications efforts, PR people will increasingly spend a lot more energy speaking directly to audiences that they ever have.)
Social media thinker and commentator Paul Gillin has written extensively about the way the electronic age has removed the need for mediators and altered how we interact with media and each other. (By the way, Gillin, author most recently of The New Influencers, will be the morning keynote presenter at Éditions Infopresse’s first Toronto Interactive Marketing Conference May 15 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.)
A little while ago I stumbled over one of Gillin’s blog posts from a year ago, titled “Social Media and the Open Enterprise” where he rifled off a host of mind-bending probes on the meaning and implications of the age of unmediated “many-to-many communications”. To give proper credit, this particular post was Gillin’s notes and thoughts arising from a speech by Cluetrain Manifesto co-author David Weinberger. But they really crystallized for me the enormity of the changes that mainstream media are only beginning to contemplate.
Consider some of these things:
• “For the last 100 years, broadcast has dominated our communications and our democracy. Broadcast is now being put in its place. Many-to-many communications will become more important than broadcast.”
• “It’s not about the content. We’re able to get past broadcast because we’re able to escape reality. Broadcast works because it’s constrained by the limitations of reality…You can’t be in two places at the time, so everything has to have its own place. It’s a terrible limitation that the digital world escapes.”
• “In mainstream media, there’s a limited amount of space. So only a few things get to appear and only a few people get to [write]. It’s the same order of information for everyone. Take away those constraints and now everybody can talk. We decide what’s interesting to us.”
• “The authority system is changing. This goes back to the basic assumptions of our culture. The base assumption is that the larger the project, the more control you need. If you want to build something big, you need managers and managers to manage the managers.”
• “Marketing, business and media are all about fake, phony voices. Conversations are open and honest.”
• “Blogs aren’t journalism. They’re blank pieces of paper. The fact that they’ve been judged in the context of journalism is because the media can’t get past itself.”
• “Journalists define their value in terms of their judgment. That has passed into the hands of readers. Since people first began exchanging news articles by e-mail, judgment passed into the hands of users. That’s our front page, what we recommend to each other. The Web is a recommendation engine and it has been since the beginning…”
• “Peer-to-peer is about us making the communication world ours again. Wikipedia is for us. It’s ours. It cares first and foremost about us. Craigslist is ours. People fall in love and get married on Craigslist… YouTube is ours. It enables us to organize content the way that we want to, the way no TV channel ever could. It feels like ours. It exists for us…Google feels like ours. That simple home page feels personal. If marketers saw that home page, they’d want to throw all kinds of ads around it.”
It all rings true.
But how are mainstream media companies to respond to this kind of challenge? Maybe they can’t. Maybe they shouldn’t. Or rather, maybe they shouldn’t worry about completely upending how they do everything. Not that they should do nothing.
I’m sure the reality will be mass and one-to-one “social” media will co-exist side by side. But it is the traditional media that will have to adapt to the new realities, and come to terms with its frankly lowered stature in the information food chain.
On a more concrete level, Michael Hirschorn, the U.S. magazine editor turned TV executive (he’s the head of Viacom’s VH1, where’s he’s unleashed a slew of reality-TV concepts) and media pundit, offered some great advice as to what newspapers in particular should be doing in his December Atlantic Monthly column. And that is, in a nutshell, they should stop being so boring and give readers what they want to read.
The approach to developing the newspaper front page has hardly changed since its modern configuration was invented in the 1880s by Joseph Pulitzer. Hirschorn argues that by what they chose to highlight on page one, and with what placement and headline sizes, newspaper editors told us almost subliminally what was important and what we should think about it all. They decided what we needed to know and what was good for us. And since broadcasters, while over time reaching far bigger audiences than newspapers, inevitably took their cues as to what was important from leading newspapers, in effect editors set the agenda for the whole society. (It’s another debate altogether, but editors and producers would invariably argue that their so-called power and influence was vastly overstated, but it was and is real, if far more constrained than is popularly imagined.)
But with the arrival of the Web and the proliferation of online media options, readers didn’t have to chose what paternalistic editors think is most important and best for them to read anymore. And they aren’t. Which more than anything else is at the root of the problem for newspapers and declining readership I think.
Its clear people are still reading lots-perhaps more than ever. And they are reading lots of what the mainstream press produces-just not what editors continue to select for them as being the most significant.
Hirschorn put his theory to the test by comparing the front pages of the New York Times, L.A. Times and Washington Post with their top ten most e-mailed stories each day during a week last September. While hardly scientific, the incidental findings speak volumes. In each case, the editors’ page one choices and top ten reader e-mails overlapped less than 25 per cent of the time. But for him, the biggest surprise was that rather than just American Idol updates and other Hollywood fluff, the reader picks were often substantive serious reports buried well back in the papers’ print editions.
Wrote Hirschorn: “What unites the most–e-mailed list (and granted, it’s hard to draw a single thread through stories about parrots, nuns, and Dumpster-diving foodies) is uniqueness. These stories, as they say in marketing, offer a “value add,” something that’s not available on the vaguely Soviet-seeming syndication-fed news pages of AOL, Yahoo, or Google. The real value now lies in non-commodifiable virtues like deep reporting, strong narrative, distinct point of view, and sharp analysis, which even in the blogger era (or especially in the blogger era) is available only piecemeal.”
Hirschorn insisted he wasn’t calling for “all-Brittney all-the-time,” but rather for a less snobby focus on “great reads,” entertainment value and smarter packaging –and marketing- of so called “important” stories so that they loose their spinach (good for you, but boring) factor. As he put it so well: “non-commodifiable virtues.”
He pointed to Rupert Murdoch as now owning perhaps two of the best U.S. properties that currently understand the need to “sex-up” their content: the New York Post and the recently purchased Wall Street Journal. The Post, Hirschorn, has long been a “guilty pleasure” read in New York cognoscenti circles with its “yeasty mix of political outrage, blood-boiling hypocrisy, misbehaving masters of the universe, and hot babes in some sort of peril.”
Likewise, Hirschorn wrote, the WSJ “has been using its front-page news digest to dispense with commodity news for decades, while employing its valuable real estate to pinpoint trends, elevate key personalities, and, with the lighter middle-column stories, reinforce its brand of wry amusement at the capitalist carnival.”
From all that, Hirschorn’s recipe for mainstream media success in the digital age: “A reimagined broadsheet front page could draw from the Post’s id and The Journal’s superego, doing away with the soggy middle of commodity news in favor of a high-low mix of agenda-setting reportage and analysis, strong storytelling on topics not being covered everywhere else, and saucy, knowing takeouts on people the readership actually cares about.”
In the end, rule #1: tell interesting stories well. Never be dull. Sounds strangely like the advice of the old time newspaper guys who taught us journalism 101 back in J-school.
Take Gillin and Hirschorn together, and I’m still not that worried about the long term for professional journalism. People want to choose their sources of information and they want to have lot of them. But they will choose trusted sources and want to hear interesting stories.
In this emerging many-to-many online media era those trusted sources and good stories don’t have to be and come from mainstream media companies. They can be, and often, are found at bobsblog.com. But traditional print and broadcast companies by rights should have a huge advantage when it comes to creating content with those qualities.
Now, can it be as profitable for the giant media conglomerates as it was when there was far less competition for time and attention? That’s the billion-dollar question isn’t it.