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Old Media and Dealing With Its Lost Control
The old gatekeepers are losing control by the day.
Like the SUV precariously balancing on the edge of this bridge, traditional media has suffered from a loss of control. It's often seems like old media saw the accident coming but still couldn't avoid it. The crashed happened. So now what? As consumers, some of us are rubber-necking at the damage. However, many simply don't care and are moving on, finding the best new media to take care of needs.
There is still a need for the community-building, consensus-shaping role that the best of the media gatekeepers -- radio, TV, cable, newspapers, magazines - can play.
Some may survive and thrive. But they'll have to do without economic advantages they enjoyed in the past. Newspapers in particular are in a panic right now. It's not so much that readers are abandoning them (they get an awful lot of traffic online) as they've lost their stranglehold on classified advertising.
For those who place classifieds or read them, the new era of Craiglist, Monster.com, and the like is undeniably better than the old newspaper-dominated one.
The biggest difference between old media and new media is this: old media pushes product to the customer; new media is pulled by the consumer. Old media decided what was cool and created trends; for new new media, what is cool and trendy is decided by the consumer at the grassroots level, one person at a time.
While many media gatekeepers like commercial radio stations are losing out to more select, consumer-generated sources like iTunes playlists, "there is still a need for the community-building, consensus-shaping role that the best of the media gatekeepers can play," writes Justin Fox in a thoughtful essay this week in Fortune. "The question is, who's going to play it? And how are they going to make it work economically?" Fox contends that getting music or other media recommendations merely from other consumers has its drawbacks: "The main one is that it can hard to break out of whatever subculture--of music or any other kind of media--you've decided to join."
The question for old media is this: can it shift its gears from "push" to "pull" and still save its revenue expectations? To get off the ledge and prevent a deathfall, "pull" just may be exactly what it needs.
Fortune.com story
posted by Unknown @ Thursday, January 19, 2006,
