I’ve often opined on the state of what I call the “old media (i.e., print media).” And, to be both fair and honest, many in print media have been taking a long hard look at their industry as well. It’s hard not to do, given the fact that print media sales and readership have been steadily declining for some years now.

Michael Getler, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, recently caught my eye with something he wrote regarding the state of his medium:

The Web and the explosion of personal blogs, or Web logs and journals, have tapped into and greatly expanded that public reservoir of knowledge and understanding in important ways by challenging the accuracy of reporting and adding analysis.

On the other hand, nothing out there is going to supply you with the extraordinary daily content of The Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal or other fine newspapers.

I’m having some trouble with this statement. Yes, these papers do provide a huge variety of content, and they have some great writers, but they are also slanted, slow as compared with other media formats, and rigid in their internal heirarchies.

If they weren’t all those things, they would already have recognized and taken advantage of the fact that the advent of the Internet and the appearance of blogs was the single greatest boon to their industry EVER! Here is how “old media” could become new again:

KEY POINTS TO CONSIDER

• A couple of key points regarding the advent of a “Renewed Media” are that many journalists helped originally empower the Blogosphere and turn a passive readership into an active participant and, in many cases, voracious consumers of theirs and other media services. Until this time, talk radio had a clear advantage over print media because they could more quickly and easily respond to media events and even engage with their listeners by taking phone calls. The Renewed Media (RM) could do better by far.
• Print media should consider that perhaps overall circulation now matters less than overall influence (though, traditionally, the one more easily leads to the other). The fact is, an individual Blog can have very low circulation as compared to the MSM, but can be, at the same time, highly influential. How can that be? Because a Blog can extend it’s influence through the network of Blogs we call the Blogosphere. Other bloggers rebroadcast content in such a way as to magnify the influence of any one blogger immensely (for example, when a blogger “swarm” occurs.)
• This is why the Blogosphere is really a type of Open Source Media, as I’ve said in the past. The Open Source Media, is composed of enourmous numbers of independent contributors who are, at times, able to act in concert, and they have been an enourmous challenge to print media. But this Open Source Media also offers an enourmous opportunity.

THE ROADMAP TO A RENEWED MEDIA
Print media could potentially become THE dominant media if they are willing to take some risks, like giving up the centralized control that senior editors currently have over content, and finding ways to influence the OSM. Here are my ideas:

• A 24X7 newsdesk, with content updated by the minute, rather than by the hour or day. In that sense then, journalists will have greater content freedom, but MORE accountability. How so? Because they will have the entire Blogosphere fact-checking them by the minute.
• The old print-media houses should adopt a “realtime mobile media” approach. What I mean by this is, find a way to make their content mobile, so that articles can be quickly and easily ported to any other site or service available. In the software development world, the rage is “object oriented programming.” In the corporate education field, the rage is “object-level” learning design. Well, the media needs to get on the bandwagon and develop media objects. Pieces of content that can be used and reused all across the Internet and Blogosphere, thus tapping into the Blogosphere to reach a far larger audience and realize more ad revenues.

  Whenever an update is made to the original piece, those updates are pushed to every piece whereever it might be. The real key to success here, in my opinion, is the ability of a mobile media house to port advertisements along with their content. If advertisers know their content will follow a certain article, and that certain mobile media providers have their content ported widely, then they’ll pay a premium to advertise with a particular media company.

• More importantly, they’ll pay even to have their ads attached to content provided by certain journalists. So, in the renewed media world, journalistic talent will be rewarded by their ability to draw advertisers to their company, and also to their own personal content. Market forces will drive demand for certain content editors, not the media moguls.
• As stated above, mobile media (formerly print media) companies will give greater authority and control to their content providers, the journalists themselves, but, of course, will still retain the right to edit or delete any content they deem inappropriate. At the same time, the journalists are going to work and live much closer to their readers than ever before. Those readers will help determine the journalists’ success, so they’ll want constant feedback from readers quickly, which means maintaining either a bulletin board or some kind of live feed which delivers thoughts and feedback regarding the content they are providing on a moment-by-moment basis. Journalists are going to know their readers and vice versa, it should make for a much more honest media environment.

Using the “mobile media” model, print media could really harness the power of the blogosphere in a way that would make media companies wonder why they ever thought the Internet in general and the Blogosphere in particular were a bad thing.

In the old print media world, higher circulation meant higher influence. All that changed with the appearance of the Internet because relatively small websites can be very influential. If print media were to move towards the mobile media model I’ve suggested, circulation would again be a reflection of influence.

will older print media companies take such a risk? I have no idea, though I do believe the transition could be made without incurring too much risk. How could this be done? That I’ll leave for a future post.

David Flanagan
Viewpointjournal.com