So, apparently Old Media is dying. The following clip from this week’s Daily Show very enthusiastically discusses some of the difficulties traditional forms of media currently face. More after the jump.



Is Print a dead medium? Much evidence points to that conclusion; between the massive delays caused by a print publishing cycle (Daily newspapers have a lag time of about 12-24 hours; weeklies can have a lag time of up to six days. Magazines are produced months before their shelve date), the enormous costs of producing a print publication and the immense competition provided by newer media, the so-called “Death of Print” seems inevitable. Yet at the same time, there is some irony in the above clip — television faces many of the problems print does without much of its added value.

Really, the driving evolutionary force in media right now is the Internet. That everyone from CNN News anchors to Washington Post columnists are now on Twitter is just one way in which the established media has tried to make use of this new technology (And rather miserably, at that). Blogging and web-based news outlets like the Huffington Post or the Drudge Report have demonstrated how quickly net-based production cycles can produce late-breaking content without a tenth the overhead traditional media requires. Yes, Broadcast media makes the production speed of Print seem incredibly lethargic, but the mere requirement of Broadcast media to occupy time-slots imposes its own inherent lag-time. To overcome this, 24 hour news channels such as CNN have emerged, but even this is slow compared to Internet distribution. What’s more, to realize the continuous feed required for a 24 hour news cycle, much content is repeated over and over, and quite a lot of it is mediocre at best (Ironically, a continually-profitable topic for the Daily Show is the banality its own medium experiences when conducting a continuous news cycle).

Print has, in my mind, some enduring value. You can archive it short-term fairly easily, you can read it in the bath, leave it on your coffee table for bored guests to read,  receive it at your doorstep with regularity. The doom and gloom coming from Print media is, in my mind, more due to the fact they’re not able to create value-added content in the way Broadcast is.

Think of how Red Bull does their sports promotions. A decade ago, nobody had heard of Red Bull and their terrible tasting (yet effective) magic elixor, and now their motocross and airplane slalom events are the modern equivalent of the X-Games in the ’90s. Their use of media is a good example of how Broadcast media are in some capacities more suited for new media applications: every event is recorded and the clips are sliced apart, put in ads, posted on YouTube, replayed on sports channels and more. They get a lot of value from their content. While it may be expensive as hell to have giant air-filled plane racing pylons dotting an entire harbour, it becomes a measured investment when one considers Red Bull’s massive ability to reuse content.

Broadcast news agencies also reuse content quite well. To use a Canadian example, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) has both radio and television news endeavours, both of which are reused as web content. However, they also have a team dedicated to writing web content to supplement video content, while other textual content is provided through wire articles. This use of three media in a single conglomeration is the heart of New media — no longer is it acceptable to be merely a newspaper or a radio station or a television station. The norm is now to be all three.

For a time, Print media was able to use the transferability of text to aid in content proliferation on the web. By this I mean you can place text in RSS feeds and have it proliferate via other web applications (Hotbox’s Smokkr.com website is a good example of this in action). Video was really unwieldy and it would take users hours to download a single clip. Now, with Flash-based video streaming sites like YouTube and the proliferation of high-speed Internet access, video is as accessible as text. This means competition between the two media is now as vivid on the Internet as it was in the meatspace a half century ago. But to portray it as such is to really miss the opportunity provided by Internet media — the ability to transcend medium-created barriers and creatively juxtapose related work in a single content frame.

The question in the end really continues to be how content agencies (News bureaus, publications, et cetera) can receive the most value from their content creators, whether it be by sending out a single journalist armed with a voice recorder or an entire live news team. Probably we will need to redefine our assumptions about journalists in the process. Radio journalism can be done by a single person with a voice recorder while Print traditionally involves a writer following a lead with perhaps an accompanying photographer. Simple Television assignments can be done by a single person and a tripod, but often involves one or multiple people handling technical elements with a journalist in front of the camera. There’s sometimes a news copy writer back at the studio as well, or a team of writers for the website. This is perhaps an effective model for large, established organizations with a lot of capital, but is not quite yet feasible for the many new New media organizations that use the web adaptation of the older media but doesn’t have the added ability (or constraints) achieved through continued output in the meatspace media. For web-based organizations, much work is done in a freelance capacity and it just isn’t possible to coordinate teams in the physical world across such a large distance. And this is why freelance writing strikes me as one of the most promising frontiers reinvigorated by New media: freelancers with knowledge of content creation in multiple media are perhaps the ultimate way in which new content agencies can receive value from content. Here’s why:

Mobile technology is currently in the midsts of a revolution similar to what the Internet experienced with the advent of high-speed Internet. Data plans have dropped in price, and many are wondering why cell phone companies are still charging by the kilobyte instead of a flat rate. Yet even still, the technology provided by mobile platforms such as the Blackberry and iPhone allows instantaneous communication by a journalist with a content agency. These devices are currently capable of textual, aural and photographic content, though decent-quality video isn’t far off. While the camera leaves a little bit to be desired with regard to optics, it can suffice in an emergency. With some discipline, these devices can be used to create rich multimedia content on location, and even live, as content can be transferred via mobile networks back to the content agencies without any lag time. The real value of these devices is less in their ability to create multimedia content and more in their ability to transmit it. It doesn’t take much to realize the next killer app will be the add-on that allows digital cameras and video recorders to use the mobile device as a temporary hard-drive, to allow content creators to then submit the work recorded on the camera or camcorder to agencies via their cell-phone network. Flat-rate data plans will also facilitate this.

Thus, a single freelancer thus gains the ability to be a functional mixed-media creator if he or she has a few basic technical skills. This ability is only increased as teams get bigger and individuals are allowed to concentrate on producing content for a story in a particular medium. Independent media has always been immensely important and these technological advancements only broaden its scope and ability. Further, because Independent media now has the same ability as large corporate news institutions, while lacking many of their hierarchal, organizational and medium-imposed constraints of Old media, there is the very real possibility for it to make a significant impact to the entire industry in its use of Internet-based distribution.

Don’t train to be a writer. Don’t train to be a photographer. Don’t train to be a videographer, don’t train to be a news anchor. Get really good at something, and learn how to do all the other things well. In redefining media, the journalist itself is being redefined.