Want a preview of how Mainstream Media will look in the coming years? Go stand in front of the mirror. The next Mainstream Media is you.
By you, I mean anyone who thinks, has the desire to be expressive, and has the ability to publish. Today, that can apply to just about everyone on the face of the planet.
A lot has been written over the past year about the decline of the Fourth Estate: the Press, the Mainstream Media. And things are certainly in a state of rapid change. Newspapers are putting their brightest writers on the streets as readership and advertising revenues collapse. With the exception of organs such as NPR, radio Journalism has been dead for years. Even television — the dominant news media of the last few decades — is thinning their newsrooms as they struggle to maintain profitability.
Where does this end, and where will we look for reliable news and information as traditional media spins down and begins to wobble?
Mainstream Media and advertising
The rise of what we now call the Mainstream Media was not so much a development of Journalism as a response to an advertising model. Newsrooms, with their large staffs of producers, editors, and reporters, are expensive to run. But they were sustainable as long as mass media remained attractive as a primary advertising vehicle.
Mass media requires a great concentration of eyeballs. This is why a baby food company could afford to advertise on a national soap opera, or why any product which is targeted to a market segment could be presented to a mass audience: there was always the assurance that a sufficient number of qualified prospects would be available to receive the intended message.
With the coming of the Web and multiple content delivery channels, mass media is doomed. And with it, centralized Journalism.
This is an uncomfortable prospect. We have long regarded newspapers and television newscasts as our proxies in this world, accurately reporting its events and standing as a watchdog when necessary. It is an illusion we share. In fact, Mainstream Media has always been a creature of the governments which have used it for propaganda purposes, and of the commercial interests which underwrite it.
Newspapers were Blogs 1.0
A hundred years from now, monolithic news media will be seen as an aberration in the history of Journalism. A century or two ago, such consolidation of information would have been inconceivable. Newspapers were once a lot like blogs are today: sometimes eccentric; sometimes biased; the mouthpieces of whoever could afford a press and the means to distribute. It similarly took decades for commercial radio and television to acquire its modern respectability.
For better or for worse, all this must now pass. A few of the great brands will survive as they embrace the Mainstream Media of the future, which will be infinitely more granular, more agile, and able to funnel itself into whatever technological conduits and formats await. It will at first change, then become indistinguishable from what we now regard as blogging and social media.
The rise of the superblog
The first incarnation of this process will be the emergence of superblogs. The Huffington Post is an early example: high-profile writers banded together in a high traffic setting under a common theme. This will provide sufficient mass for a galaxy of viable “mini” mass media sites.
Superblogs will provide homes for professional bloggers and journalists displaced from other media. But this is also a transitional state, since it relies on what is essentially a scaled-down version of today’s advertising paradigm.
Embracing the social graph
The real change will come as users acquire better tools to control the information they consume, and as the increasingly trivial differences between blogging and social media break down. The explosion of mobile computing will be a major agent of this change.
Content will become far more portable and interactive than it is today. It will go this way as users demand it, and because advertising will also be increasingly predictive — based on a user’s social associations, past content choices, and both self-declared and behavioral preferences.
This is why companies like Google are happy to give away “free” services such as Google Friend Connect. It’s why they bought FeedBurner and Doubleclick, and why Google Analytics is there for the taking. Google understands that the social graph is where content and advertising must necessarily go, and they intend to dominate the mechanics of its delivery.
Mainstream Media of the 20th century took the shape of its monolithic revenue model. Media of the new century will be atomized by the same forces.
The good news — if you’re already a blogger or participating in social media — is that you have a seat at the table. You are the next Mainstream Media, whether you like it or not. That’s both a sobering responsibility and the greatest engine for wealth and social progress since the invention of movable type.
