New Media Influence (part 1)
Much has been written and said about the influence of new media and the rise of “citizen journalism.” The old media model is being flipped on it’s head. It’s clearly a time of rapid change in mass communications. Legitimate questions are being asked about what will become of the old stalwart industries like journalism, advertising, marketing, PR and others caught up in the changing tides of media.
The big local, regional and national newspapers are seeing circulation shrink and revenues disappear as classifieds and other advertising go online. Also going online are the readers that used to read the morning paper. The problem for the traditional or “mainstream media” is that the people who used to read the newspaper are not reading the online version. Instead, they are discovering new ways to consume, share and comment on the news of the day.
Editor and Publisher reports: “According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950. Total advertising revenue in 2007 — including online revenue — decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.”
Some news organizations are beginning to embrace blogging and other new media technology as a way to stem the flow of their readership away from traditional media and toward online sources. Today, TechCrunch. Com and the Washington Post announced that TechCrunch stories will appear on WasingtonPost.com. Michael Arrington wrote of the partnership on TechCrunch today, “adding new types of content to the site to retain reader interest, over and above their existing stories. And this is certainly a great partnership for us, allowing us to get our content in front of a larger, more mainstream audience.”
Other newspapers still mistakenly see the printed publication as their primary offering and newspaper affiliated blogs as a place to post about topics that don’t make the paper. A more realistic stance for editors is to break news — and follow it as it develops — on their blogs and then build out the story more fully and with reader perspectives in the print edition. If more traditional media companies don’t come to this realization soon – and then better monetize their online eyeballs — they can expect to continue to get scooped on stories and can further expect the people who used to subscribe to the paper to instead go elsewhere.
Newspapers aren’t the only ones struggling with a changing news model. PR is struggling to figure out how to remain relevant as the landscape changes. For example, do the firms whose bread and butter was the press release have any place in the new media environment? Does PR take on trying to influence new media? What about other forms of digital media? Where is the line between what an ad firm might do and what PR takes on?
In PR for example, there was a model of influence that was very linear and consistent. Making planning media for national announcements pretty straightforward. (See the chart below.)
But, with the rise of new media and our ever-expanding connectedness, that model no longer works. Instead something like the following is probably closer to reality.
This has significantly changed up the way PR must think about news and storytelling. Good PR people and entrepreneurs alike should already know who the influential bloggers are in their space and should be treating those bloggers like traditional media — pitching stories, respecting deadlines and tracking influence.
While I’ll virtually always advise against writing a press release and more specifically advise against relying on a press release to drive coverage – unless you have a fiduciary responsibility to do so – there is still a place for PR and neither journalism nor public relations will go away. The medium or media a journalist uses to tell a story will continue to evolve and companies / organizations will continue to want to communicate their stories. How this is being done now and how it will be done in the future will be very different from how it was done in the past.