Tuesday, March 24, 2009
As a strategic communications firm, comprehending the business end of mass media is one of the biggest prerequisites to doing our job well.
And, right now, a good portion of the mass media is lying on its deathbed.
Reliable estimates indicate that in the United States alone, more than 3,100 journalists have lost their job or accepted a buy-out offer so far in 2009, and 15,500 journalists were similarly affected in 2008. This year, 48 newspapers have shut down.
And it might get worse.
At the same time, new-media’s growth is explosive. More than 3,700 citizen journalists are registered to contribute content on GroundReport, a platform founded by a former journalist for the United Nations. Regional blog networks are springing up different places, supported by both start-ups and established publishers. Readers and volunteer writers are contributing an enormous amount of content online.
Karl Marx said that when the means of production in a system change hands, then a revolution has begun. I can describe today’s media sphere as nothing less.
These changes make our approach to client work different than it was before. Issuing news releases and using personal relationships to pitch reporters story ideas used to be synonymous with “media relations” to many in our industry. Today, because of widespread reporter lay-offs and maturing new-media platforms, the best approach to telling a meaningful corporate story is evolving.
One effect that’s apparent is that news outlets are more receptive to our offers to contribute content directly from clients. For example, explaining a complex story with several moving parts is, many times, better done in a contributed article or op-ed, not a staff-written feature, because publications have more news to cover today and a lighter staff to do it with. These contributions give companies more control over the copy that runs, but this freedom must not be abused: submissions still need to reflect strong news values and be non-promotional in nature.
New-media platforms, too, are opening up new opportunities. If an organization’s news isn’t getting equitable attention or the media is ignoring its industry’s trends, then we can help those clients use new media to publish content themselves and draw traffic to their views.
This line of thinking might be shifting from communications professionals--clearly, it’s beneficial to our clients--to academics. Jay Rosen, the New York University professor who writes PressThink, said during a recent panel that media companies would be best served to think about what other organizations besides publishers can contribute relevant content. Rosen said nonprofit organizations are best-positioned to collaborate more closely with the mass media on content creation.
“Right now,” he said, “there is no [good] business model for news.”
Back to Marx. Much of his theory relies on the assumption that the values of commodities are directly tied to the value of the labor needed to produce them. Skilled journalists, whose craft some media companies have successfully commoditized for years, know how to ask pressing questions, digest complex information, and make sense out of what seems like nonsense. Might they have better things to do than publish news? Like, for example, running the SEC?
Might more of tomorrow’s “journalists” cover their beat from the corporate communications department, not a newsroom?
We may begin to see a divergence between the mass media and skilled journalists and a convergence of new-media editorial and for-profit enterprises. The companies that embrace those changes will be best positioned to succeed in the reformed media environment.
- Andrew Graham
agraham@greentarget.net
http://twitter.com/andrew_graham