Taking "mass" out of mass communications

We'll be getting back to interviews with the press in a few weeks once we get the times scheduled. This week's podcast is me, again, pontificating about the effect of the internet on journalism link. It's worth considering. Brian Fuller was talking about the state of content in the media on Greeley's Ghost (link on this page), which is worth your time.



Oh, and we have reached agreements with journalists to provide content for New Tech Press. Cheryl Ajluni, Dylan McGrath and Greg Lupion are on board. More to come.

Comments

  1. Ed SperlingAugust 29, 2007 at 5:03 AM

    The news business has always been about reaching the largest number of people through the least expensive means possible, while still making sure you're the first one to break the story or the first to add enough depth to make it meaningful. That's what the penny press revolution was all about in the last century. The Internet has upped the delivery ante, making news delivery instantaneous to as many people who want to receive it. The cost, moreover, has been largely hidden from the consumer of that news for the first time. How long that model lasts is a subject of much debate among publishers of newspapers and news weeklies.

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  2. Gary SmithAugust 29, 2007 at 6:30 AM

    Lou,

    Certainly it is disruptive, but that disruption has been destructive also. I have found that in forming my new company it has made things possible that in the past I couldn't do without a large corporate structure. This freedom from corporate structure allows new ideas to reach the market faster and avoids the bureaucratic filter that has killed many great ideas in the past. Unfortunately that leaves the consumer the difficult job of separating true from false. The internet's negative impact on the print media has made that job even tougher. In our industry Richard Goering was the trusted source and when he was laid off from it left a big hole in our infrastructure.

    The main problem I find with the Internet is that it is a directed search engine. The good news is that I can get in depth information on the subject I'm interested in with very little effort. The bad news is that all of my major breakthroughs have happened because of knowledge I had from a different area. Fortunately that technology generally was adjacent to the technology I was working on. That made a good general electronics newspaper invaluable, and now that has gone away.

    Bottom line is that we need to fill two voids in our present infrastructure. The first is the Trusted Source and the second is high quality "electronics" weekly (preferably printed) publication. And by electronics I don't mean supply chain information, I definitely don't mean IT, and I'm not interested in an in depth analysis of the latest consumer gadget. Dean Takahashi does a great job of that in the Mercury. Keep in mind I'm an engineer and I'm after technical information, and infomercials don't count.

    Gary

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  3. Ann MutschlerAugust 29, 2007 at 7:56 AM

    What the Internet means for mass communications is that the very definition of "mass" has changed. Echoing Gary's comment about the Internet being a directed search engine, what this means is that there is no more "mass." As a result, audiences have changed, so all the talk about "SEO optimization" is a real and serious challenge. Who is the reader today versus who it was 7 to 10 years ago? Gaining an understanding of the audience today is critical to what I do, and it is harder to get that all the time. I am very curious to see how this all shakes down in the next who-knows-how-many years.

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