What is the future of media? Good grief, are you kidding me?

How about an easy question like “What is the purpose of the universe?”

A journalism student recently contacted me asking what I think the future of media is and if he will some day get paid for working in the media. 

Truth is, despite my blathering on about what media companies should be doing, I don’t think anyone can predict the future of media at this point in time.  Best I can give is a few hunches I have about where things are going.

1.    There will be fewer paid journalists.

No way of getting around this I’m afraid.  The Internet removed two barriers to entry: geography and access to a printing press.  News organizations are not only competing with the passionate bloggers and citizen journalists in their own markets, but in reality, with every other content provider in the world.  The Winnipeg Free Press now competes with the New York Times, which is now competing with the BBC. 

Competing with the rest of the world means that many traditional content areas are becoming commoditized.  Think movie, TV and music writing, national news reporting, foreign news reporting, lifestyle reporting, travel writing and even some sports reporting. 

To survive, news organizations will have to focus on what they can do better than anyone else in the world.  That’s producing high quality, original, local or national (depending on the site) news reporting and analysis. 

That’s a much smaller content pie, and it will mean fewer journalists.

2.    The new world of media will consist of a mix of professional and amateur journalists and profit and non-profit websites. 

Author, blogger and Outside.in founder Steven Johnson gave a fantastic speech earlier this year illustrating what the new media ecosystem might look like.  He says it better than I could.

3.    Portals and sites with a traditional newspaper structure will fade away and verticals will rise.

There’s a reason Yahoo!’s new “It’s You” campaign has gone over like a lead balloon despite millions of dollars and a very beautiful TV spot.  The problem is that the site experience doesn’t deliver on the campaign promise.  It’s actually not You (or me), because Yahoo! is for everyone.  It’s a portal.

Just like newspapers with their broad range of content, Yahoo! was designed to appeal to a large, diversified audience.  Sure there’s many content channels on Yahoo!, but they are all under the single umbrella of the Yahoo! brand.  Frankly, it’s old fashioned.  Clay Shirky calls it incoherent and industrial. 

Of course print readers have been creating their own verticals out of the bulk newspaper for years.  I can’t tell you how many focus groups I’ve sat through where the participants described how their families separate the sections of the newspaper on a Saturday morning with someone taking Sports, someone taking Autos, someone taking Living, Comics, Classifieds, Flyers, etc.  The bundle made sense because readers were willing to get some of what they didn’t want for a little of what they did.  Besides, there was no alternative, and if there were, it would have been very expensive to subscribe to all of those publications.

Online, mass is not where it’s at.  Specialization of content and concentration of audiences are.  Simply put, vertical content sites lead to highly engaged audiences, greater ROI for advertisers and therefore more advertisers paying a higher rate.

This is why I like AOL’s strategy of creating both branded and non-branded vertical sites.

4.    New role for editors

My entire understanding of what news organizations were to become changed in March of 2006 when I saw Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters speak at an OPA conference in London.

Tom outlined the three new roles of media companies: 

The Seeders of Clouds: generate high-value, original content that is credible and reliable which is then linked to, reacted to, commented on, etc. 

The Providers of Tools: promoting open standards and interoperability, which will allow a diverse set of consumer-creators to combine disparate types of content.  Think of the Guardian’s API.

Editors and Filterers: The world has never been in more need of editors.  Tom says it is their job to “spot the gold in the pan of water and dirt”. 

I think all of these roles fall into “content curation” – it just sounds more Internety – and it includes user interaction. 

As a curator, the new editor works in tandem with their content community.  They provide links to related articles, videos, documents and maps and highlighting interesting articles and blog posts on other sites.  They identify sharp, engaging commenters and invite them to participate more through a blog or a special piece.  They ask users for story ideas and/or questions for interviewees.

5.    Aggregation and networks

The fragmented nature of the Internet can make it much more difficult for users and advertisers to navigate.  Content can be aggregated by topic or with a particular audience in mind.  Same goes for advertising networks.

I think we’re going to see an explosion of highly verticalized content aggregation sites in the next couple of years.  Rotten Tomatoes is already doing this for movies.  Imagine the Huffington post of home decorating, parenting, travel (well actually, USA Today is already doing this in Travel), personal finance, etc.  Find a lucrative advertising category and build a vertical site using a mix of aggregation, blogging and user interaction.  Platforms and tools like Daylife, Evri and Inform make this easier than ever. 

6.    Journalists as brands

If only a few large news brands survive, I think in the future, being a paid journalist will require becoming a brand of your own.   Twitter, blogs and books will lead to more lucrative speaking engagements, and paid assignments with not just one, but a variety of content sites. 

And, it won’t just be writers forming a brand.  Check out Jeff Jarvis’s post about Kai Keikmann, head of Bild in Germany.

This hunch is the foggiest.  We’ll see how it plays out in the coming months and years.

So, will you get paid as a journalist?  I think in the long-run, yes.  But only if you are passionate, dedicated and very good at what you do.  And if you are all those things, not only will you get paid, but you will have the privilege of being one of the pioneers of the new journalism.

That doesn’t sound so bad does it?

Comments

[Christopher Ming Ryan]

Thanks for sharing your hunches.

I think we're all becoming editors of our own newspaper. Google reader and iGoogle make it so easy to have top notch content by writers, artists, journalists, etc pushed into our inbox every day that on many days I don't have time to go through my fave hard copy NY Times (http://bit.ly/1kgSY4).

Indeed, if you can “spot the gold in the pan of water and dirt” in the web and have it delivered to you every morning via RSS (I use Free RSS Reader for iPhone too) do we really need the aggregators to do this for us?