Imagine if, 25 years ago, a time traveler from the present day appeared to newspaper, television and radio executives to outline the media landscape in 2008. He’d tell them about how the Internet has dramatically increased the number of media outlets and how it’s enabled everyone to opine or present news via text, audio or video for virtually no cost at all. That it’s decimated the newspaper classified ad market with free, wide-reaching alternatives. That people no longer have to wait for the evening news or the next morning’s paper, but can follow along with up-to-the-minute updates of breaking events that are pushed directly to them, wherever they are in the world.
Executives would grumble. After all, good reporting costs money. The infrastructure that supports the production and distribution of news, be it print, radio or television, is extremely expensive - It’ll be impossible to compete when everyone is a reporter and can instantly broadcast or publish around the world. Plus, there’s only so much ad money to go around – if advertisers flock to the little guy, that’s fewer ad dollars for the big companies! Not to mention the loss of revenue that comes in from the “for sale” and “want” ads!
The time traveler, if he were savvy, would agree, but with a few caveats. While it’s true that things will change a great deal in the next quarter-decade, he’d say, you’re missing the big picture. Wouldn’t you want your content distributed instantly and inexpensively, all over the world? (I can travel to Europe and still read live updates of baseball games at the Web page of my hometown newspaper.) Despite the new influx of opinion leaders and “new” media personalities, don’t people still need and crave local news? (All news is local news, after all.) Won’t new means of content distribution provide new ways to deliver advertising? (There’s a reason Google wants in on the mobile phone market, and it’s not to sell handsets.)
Finally, don’t you realize that quality reporting will always cost time and money, something usually out of the reach of everyone but news organizations that can afford it? (People can only have an opinion about the news if there’s news to opine on.)
After leaving executives with those thoughts, when the time traveler returned to the present day, would anything have changed? Could the big media companies have figured out how to leverage all of these opportunities, or would we continue to hear stories about major media outlets, from those with national reach to those in major local markets laying off personalities because of the rise of the Internet and social media?
I wonder sometimes.
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