Barbarians at the Gate – Should Old Media Be Afraid of New Media?
Mark Evans talks with Loren Feldman (he’s a dude, 1938media.com), Cynthia Brumfield (Emerging Dynamics) and Rachel Sklar (Huffington Post)
- Rachel: newspapers lament growing new media, grand change = opportunity, “Old world that stubbornly refuses to change will be wiped out”, citizen journalism = amazing opportunity
- Layoffs = losing “elder statesmen” in newspapers, important thing to have – value in ppl who have been there, done that, seen evolution, will recognize where strengths lie
- Cynthia: TV broadcasters: video situation complex, broadcasters never depended on subscription revenue so “jumping into internet doesn’t cost them a lot”, losing ppl to cable and internet, starting to look like dinosaurs of media
- Print media: depend on revenues from physical distribution of their medium, tied to that, “have to protect this physical world [when faced with online distribution]” (music sales too)
- Physical distribution = “Fatally impacted by internet”
- Loren: Viacom pulling everything from YouTube didn’t make a dent in YouTube statistics
- “You’re not going to watch an idiot like me on TV” (60 second bits)
- Internet isn’t a little TV box, it’s a completely different medium, but there’s room for both
- Rachel: Rss is all about efficiency, “you have 5 minutes. Where do you go?” = to an aggregater, “I don’t even use RSS…I work hard on my own blog to choose the right image”, “I enjoy going to the actual site and viewing the actual layout”, can’t take your computer to the beach, using computer is a solitary thing – “you’re sorta in your screen” (not out in the world)
- Cynthia: “I do think traditional media will become the way of the dinosaur”, her parents used to subscribe to 3 newspapers but her father gave one up because it was online, now they read 20 newspapers online a day, web “open[s] up geographic reach of what you can read; what you can watch”, Google News opens up competition (and efficiency), not just one game in town
- Loren: ustream = opportunity for event-based media, “At 9o’clock Saturdays there will be two hot chicks kissing” will drive viewers
- Cynthia: Justin.tv is “destined to be a very big hit”, “I’ve watched him to eat lunch in a caffeteria”, “it’s facinating”, ppl tune in to watch cheese age
- Rachel: tools at our disposal to create media are amazing, the “barriers to entry have collapsed”, YouTube = short attention span, if it’s not funny/boring you’ll stop watching, if it’s funny we’ll pass it on to our friends, no language barrier leads to more viewership
- Cynthia: net neutrality = cable TV are accustomed to being video providers, you would have thought they would lead the motion to charge bandwidth but it was actually the telephone companies, it’s too late for them in US/Canada to “hand pick what goes on the internet”, Comcast friend: “we’ll just charge ppl more for the more they consume”, pipelines will be there for quite some time, newspaper companies can’t compensate for lost in one area by charging more for the pipeline
- Loren: Younger generation = “attention economy”, my videos rarely go over 2 mins, that number will go down with the younger generation, “you’d better make sure you’re damn good or damn short to get that attention”
- Cynthia: Younger gen isn’t searching, they are online in a very limited number of interfaces, they don’t cruise, they don’t use email (MSN, Facebook, IM instead), now with Facebook platform they can stay in that interface even more, “I find it really interesting that their world has shrunk instead of expanding”
- Loren: “It’s AOL!” (staying inside IM, Facebook, etc)
- Rachel: the better your product, the better you can hold attention
- Loren: “Newspapers are going to be here 200 years from now…Ppl like touching a newspaper. It’s a tactil sense…It’s important [that they survive]“, “I can get information faster from the NY Post than from the Huffington Post”, “Not everyone has a computer yet”, “I like reading a newspaper when I’m in a diner…If a pickle falls on it, I’m not gonna lose my mind”, “I would read 4 pages of news print”, “The days of newspapers breaking news is done” but they will be around for commentary, they need to cut down their infrastructure, they are just scared and don’t know how to reach, “they’re not idiots, they’re just old-school guys…and women”
- Cynthia: “Transparency…comes up again and again with broadband providers”, bandwidth metering will kick-in eventually, there will be a lot of demands that things are open and transparent because the internet is so important
- Mark: isn’t it interesting that book industry is still thriving (e.g. Harry Potter)
- Rachel: Newspapers cutting book review staff
- Rahcel: “I’d rather be right, than first”, “I didn’t want to be wrong”, internet is a democratic place and “credibility really, really matters”, if a story is breaking “I would always go to the NY Times”, “it’s about presenting the most credible piece to your readers”
- Loren: “The minute you worry about the competition, you’re dead”, focus on putting out quality stuff
- Cynthia: Newspapers were blindsided because they didn’t think they could be challenged, there are blogs that ppl believe equally with the NY Times
- Loren: NY Times vs. Drudge, one person can take out a major media outline, one guy doesn’t have “all that infrastructure”, “one hustler is a bigger threat than another organization”
- Loren: How do you get old media to get online? Tell old media that their families are going to go hungry if they don’t get online, there’s a freedom for writers
- Rachel: Ego is a nice motivator, have your writers check their Technorati stats, Bill Clinton “premium content” that isn’t online has no web presense = only get 1/4 of the eyeballs