The Sky is Falling. Er. It Fell.
May 5th, 2008 | by Brad King |
Image by dipfan via Flickr
I’ve been toying around with social media all day today, discussing the future of media with lots of smart friends — particularly those who think that I’m a little half-cocked and off my rocker when it comes to the future of journalism.
It’s good, mostly. It certainly makes me clarify my thoughts on the subject. But I can’t get away from the idea that the world is about to change. It already has. We’ve reached the tipping point. The users are here — and they want to be heard.
More importantly, they are being heard. And more and more, they are listening to each other, working together, creating a conversation and dialog together.
Newspapers are in trouble. If you’re here, you either know that, agree with that or suspect that. It’s unfathomable that newspapers will be able to compete with straight-up data sources in the future, places that collect data, put them in databases and deliver on-demand information to people.
That’s the future. And when that happens, we’re going to see a fundamental shift in media consumption and creation. One more seismic that we’ve seen.
For instance:
In his blog, Jeff Jarvis linked to some Pew research that found: 50 million people read newspapers in 2004, while 53 million had used the Internet to publish something personal. In 2006, 57 million people were reading newspapers.
The shift has already happened. Newspaper circulation is on the decline. Newspapers haven’t figured out a way to monetize their content yet (although I’m sure they will stop some of the bleeding). Meanwhile, the crowd hasn’t waited. Other organizations are putting out data, which is in turn sparking a conversation among those 57 million Americans reading blogs.
Sure, some of it will be the nutters reading about their friends’ cats (I love cats, be quiet). That’s okay, some of our newspapers are full of Britney Spears crap. Happens. No sense in throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Then, we get to Jarvis’ next post about ad revenues drying up thanks to services such as Craig’s List, Ebay and other free-type services that remove the middleman — the newspaper.
Increasingly advertisers are looking for direct ways to reach customers, which means cutting out the middleman as much as possible. Now, the ad folks are always going to look for a crowd, particularly an engaged crowd.
And one thing we know about the social media types: they are engaged. The folks at Social Media Today have stats from another report that show just how engaged we are.
We are creating, making, consuming and spitting out more content than ever before. We are truly standing on the precipice of a new age in media, one that requires all of our outlets to view the reader not simply as a passive eye, but as a future participant.
So that’s no big revelation. We know this. What these figures DO show, though, is that there is an active, willing and participatory culture yearning for some intrepid group to reach out, engage them and bring them in as partners.
Whichever company succeeds in doing that won’t have to worry about advertising dollars and sales.
