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November 18, 2009

What's Stronger, the Media Outlet's Brand or the Journalist's? - Courtesy @RWW

Good piece (below), but there's one comment/concept that's worth further debate. Richard talks about the the strengths of the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times "brands" and how that favors them in a fight against blogging and "citizen journalism." I'm not sold on the fact that the personal brands - of individuals such as Friedman, Mossberg, Baker, etc., - haven't slowly, but surely sapped brand equity out of the top outlets. The dynamic of blogging - both by traditional media and popular "new media" - has, in my opinion, more than slightly marginalized the traditional print brands. This doesn't mean they're cooked, but it does mean that they'd better start thinking differently about the "personal brands" under their umbrellas (columnists with a growing base of Twitter followers is one indicator) if they hope to course correct any time soon. I also believe that the rise of A-list bloggers/Twitters has indeed challenged the notion that somehow a publication, by itself, engenders excellence through association. Now, more than ever, I see each major pub as the sum of its parts, and those parts have been establishing online legs that make walking away easier than ever.

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Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Democratization of News Media

Written by Richard MacManus / November 18, 2009 2:34 AM / 3 Comments

It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.

Just as Johannes Gutenberg's printing press brought books to the mainstream public in the 15th century, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web brought commercial publishing to the people.

The Web has always been a medium where people could just as easily write as read (yes, the read/write Web), however it didn't reach its potential until blogging came along earlier this decade.

Blogging

Blogging not only allowed anybody to publish easily to the Web, it ended up shaking up the print media world.

Blogging began in the 90s as a form of online diary - Rebecca Blood wrote a good pre-history in 2000. One of the early popular blogging services was Blogger.com, launched by Evan Williams (who subsequently became a co-founder of Twitter) and Meg Hourihan in August 1999. The service was acquired by Google in February 2003, a couple of months before ReadWriteWeb began. At that point, 2003, blogging was still seen as an informal diary-type of publishing.

Around 2004-05, blogging started to become accepted as a legitimate news source. This was around the time that ReadWriteWeb began to publish tech news, as well as analysis.

By the end of the decade, many blogs were directly challenging newspapers - proving that a solid news brand, such as Huffington Post, can be created from almost nothing in a few years.

RSS

Blogging software was one part of the democratization of media. RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") was another. There were and still are different versions of RSS, created by Dave Winer and others. But whatever the flavor, syndication has had a major impact on media.

Basically RSS allowed people to subscribe to updates from blogs and other publications. Using RSS Aggregators, people could read news from a selection of niche and general news publications.

Blogs were the first to utilize RSS, but mainstream media followed during the 2005-06 period. Today it is very rare for a major news website - whether it be the New York Times or a leading blog - not to use RSS.

Twitter & The Real-Time Web

The next major development in news media occurred towards the end of this decade. It was of course Twitter and the Real-Time Web.

To be fair, this has challenged not only traditional media - but blogs as well. Now anyone, whether they're a writer or not, can publish 140 characters to the Web. And it might end up as breaking news, as the Hudsen River plane crash proved earlier this year.

Media in the Next Decade

There is much talk of the mainstream media "dying" and blogs usurping traditional media companies like the New York Times. While it's true that blogs sometimes report breaking news stories or analyze them better than newspaper websites, I'm a big believer in the power of brand. Washington Post, Wall St Journal, New York Times - these are all powerful brands and they reach a much wider audience than the vast majority of blogs.

The challenge of course for mainstream media is to (drastically) reduce their costs, because few people want to pay for content these days - news or otherwise.

However, in my view the traditional news media industry is in much less danger of extinction than the music industry. Musicians can bypass record labels completely nowadays, but there will always be a need for news to be questioned, put in context and analyzed. The best media publications of the next 10 years will do that and be successful, the ones that don't will fade away.

See also: Top Internet Trends of 2000-2009: Online Music


Comments

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  1. Innovation for both traditional and the new democratized media in the next decade is less about driving traffic to a destination site and more about how the original source benefits (i.e., makes money) from their content as it's distributed and re-aggregated across the web.

     Posted by: jeffjaner Author Profile Page

    | November 18, 2009 3:48 AM



  • Brillant. Simple, complete, smart and short. I agree with your concepts and selection of highlights.

    Posted by: Fernando Arocena | November 18, 2009 3:52 AM



  • Interesting post. But I beg to differ on your assertion that "By the end of the decade, many blogs were directly challenging newspapers - proving that a solid news brand, such as Huffington Post, can be created from almost nothing in a few years."

    Is the Huffington Post really a solid news brand? As far as I am aware, they produce very little original content, relying instead on the aggregation of news from established players.

    One man's aggregation is another man's theft ..

    Posted by: Bryce | November 18, 2009 4:38 AM



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