I’m fascinated by the ongoing convergence / impending collision between conventional and digital media. Robin Good just wrote a nice piece on where radio is headed, for instance. He asks, “Why would your audience keep listening to your radio if all the music they want and like can be more easily accessed via other means, with greater audio quality and more user-control?” That resonated with me… I’ve just about given up on conventional radio, for exactly the reasons he lists in his article.
The interesting trend that Robin and many others point out is the growing numbers of non-professional (semi-pro? pseudo-pro?) content publishers going online. The barriers to becoming a publisher are going down down down, and that means there will be heaps of new content — web pages, text articles, blogs, audio, video — available online for everyone to consume.
Yes, much of this new content will seem amateurish and unpalatable to you and almost everyone else, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s entirely worthless. After all, the same criticism has been levelled at the Web as a whole, and yet the Web in all its amateurish mishmash muddled glory holds real value. One man’s good-for-nothing web site is another man’s gold.
The truth is, provided your content is interesting and good-enough-quality, you can now reach a reasonably sized online audience — some hundreds, say, or perhaps a few thousands — essentially for free, even if the material you’re producing is undeniably niche. And an audience that size, while it won’t make you a mainstream celebrity, may be enough to stoke your ego or even fill your pocketbook a little.
What’s more, a modest audience size multiplied by millions of newby publishers = very significant “attention share”. All that time spent consuming the new media is time taken away from the other stuff you used to do… like listen to the radio.
I’m curious to see how traditional media organizations will react to this wave. Many, I think, will remain in denial for the time being. It’s easy to sneer at unprofessional content and take the naysayer stance. Easy, but wrongheaded. Traditional media orgs that think this way will be progressively marginalized as the online demographic grows. Conversely the traditional orgs that morph their gameplan to accomodate this new wave of content and publishers may live to see another day.
