[column]In the onslaught of writing about the future of the media—in essence, printing words about the future of the printed word—David Carr wrote in his New York Times The Media Equation column on November 30, 2009, that the island of Manhattan, a center of the print media world, was not sinking, but was “rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.” The bright young things that have always come to New York to seek their fortunes in media are still coming, they’re just not coming to be part of the traditional media. Instead they’re the ones who will rescue us from this sinking feeling we in the business all share.
Remember the owner of the old-style resort in the movie Dirty Dancing? Just before Johnnie takes the stage, after rescuing Baby from her corner, he says to his band leader, “It’s that it all seems to be slipping away.” What he is about to see is that people haven’t stopped dancing; they’ve reinvented it.
The media business has arrived at that same point. Carr believes that, just like in the movie, the reinventers are toiling away right under our noises while we’re busy trying to protect our revenue streams, our business models and, in thousands of instances, our jobs.[/column] [column]Revolutions are never pretty unless you’re on the winning side—we forget that someone loses—and even then, the battle itself bloodies everyone. In this case, the industry as is will be taken down through a combination of financial, technological and environmental change.
Some argue that we are the perpetrators of our own demise. Unlike television or music or movies, we gave our content away. We failed to create an alternative business model—cable, iTunes, Netflix, etc.—that could pay the bills. Or, to hear Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, tell it, we neglected to make the not-so-new free economic model work for us. We failed to set up a system where we gave things away in order to get other things later—give away the cookbook in order to sell the box of Jell-O, to use one of his examples. Now that the genie’s out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back. Just as public appetite for news and information became insatiable thanks to digital media, the revenue model that paid to create that content disappeared. Today, the average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data and information a day, an increase of 350% over 30 years ago, according to a study by The University of California, San Diego.[/column]
[column] At the same time, both advertising and newsstand sales declined precipitously. Total advertising revenues for newspapers (both print and online) declined 16.6% to $37.85 billion, according to the latest figures from the Newspaper Association of America. Revenues from classified ads has declined a whopping 70% in the last 10 years. From a peak of almost $320 million in 2002, magazine subscription revenues declined to just over $180 million in 2009, according to the Magazine Publishers Association.
In fact, print content always was more or less free. Subscription prices and newsstand sales have not covered publishing costs for years. Instead, publishers capture an audience based on the type of content they create, and they sell access to that audience to advertisers. The usual model is 80% of revenues from advertising, 20% from circulation. Now that they don’t control the audience or the access or the information, publishers have nothing to sell—even if advertisers were inclined to buy which, in the current economy, many aren’t. There is also the little matter of the environment. The publishing industry has done much to move to more environmentally friendly practices—recycled paper, less toxic inks, water conservation, replanting trees—but when there is a zero-impact alternative to receiving the information you want, ink on paper is a hard sell. [/column] [column]Again, the printing industry has a hand in its demise. When you set yourself up as environmentally aware, the logic chases you to a conclusion that may include your disappearance.
First, Forget the Word Media
In July 2009, Anderson gave an interview to Spiegel Online International:
Mr. Anderson, let’s talk about the future of journalism.
Anderson: This is going to be a very annoying interview. I don’t use the word “journalism.”
OK , how about newspapers? They are in deep trouble both in the United States and worldwide.
Anderson: Sorry, I don’t use the word “media.” I don’t use the word “news.” I don’t think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a horseless carriage.
Which other words would you use?
Anderson: There are no other words. We’re in one of those strange eras where the words of the last century don’t have meaning.[/column]
[column]What does news mean to you, when the vast majority of news is created by amateurs? Is news coming from a newspaper, or a news group or a friend? I just cannot come up with a definition for those words. Here at Wired, we stopped using them.
Among the comments to this interview were:
“There already is a word for what Anderson is talking about. Gossip. News created by amateurs is gossip. News created by professionals is journalism. I am not employed as a journalist, but I know the difference.”
“How should companies navigate a world where ‘free’ is an option? We think that there are a few fundamental questions that businesses should start asking themselves. (And I know that the New York Times started asking themselves these questions long ago.) For example, are you selling something that is suddenly being offered by someone else in a new way, something that resonates more powerfully with your customers? Have your customers found substitutes for what you’re offering (like Kindles versus books)? Are those substitutes gaining momentum as an option?”
We struggle to come up with a new vocabulary to describe this industry because we must, first, define what business we are in.[/column] [column] “Media” covered it. Media, plural of medium, is the conduit through which something is delivered, in this case, information. There was the print medium, broadcast medium, newspaper medium—slice it as many ways as you want. The fact is that the medium, the delivery mechanism, was never the point. It became a big part of the experience and consumers could select which medium they preferred—the Sunday paper over Meet the Press, fashion magazines over fashion shows, novels over radio plays—and the medium added to the information. Graphic design conveys a great deal of information quite apart from the words that surround it—a picture is worth a thousand words and a well-designed info-graphic may be worth even more. The medium, after all, was the message.
We were in the communications business—as long as we were the ones doing the communicating. We gathered information, ideas, opinion, memories, advice, impressions, commentary, and we crafted it into journalism or literature, fiction or non-fiction, and we disseminated it.
But the conduits have changed and exposed a fatal flaw: who controls the information. We’ve already moved from the one-to-many world to the many-to-many world.[/column]
[column]Creators of all sorts of content struggle to maintain ownership to their intellectual property, but once it’s out there, control ceases. When we controlled the medium, the conduit, we also controlled the information. Quite frankly, we liked it that way. Knowledge is power and as long as we controlled access to knowledge, we were the powerful ones.
So what business are we in? We’re in the business of “telling people stuff they don’t know,” according to Tim McGuire, the Frank Russell Chair for the business of journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, using news judgment oriented to a public agenda and a general audience. What is missing from citizen journalism—gossip in the words of the commenter above—is news judgment.
Crafting the information always was part of the job and what made one journalist more readable than another. But judging what was important, what was news-worthy, helping readers decide what to pay attention to and eliminate what was trivial, was what added value to it, what made it worth buying, that has not changed. We still prefer reading the professionally crafted journalism to the musings of one unknown non-professional.[/column] [column]Instead of talking about media, let’s talk about the future of publishing, publishing in its broadest sense—the “telling” part of business we’re in. This is more than the migration from print to online or the evolution of words on paper to words in many other media but it is less than “the media” in the old sense. Anderson, for all his recalcitrance to answer questions, is right about one thing. It is impossible to say that the future will be this. The future will be many things. The future will be limited only by the limits of imagination, that is, limitless.[/column]