By Brendon C
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of catching up with PR industry friends across the US, taking in trips to New York, Boston and the Bay Area.
One of the themes that came up time and again in our conversations was social media and the increasing emphasis being put on this channel by clients and PR agencies alike. The other major theme was, conversely, the corresponding decline of quality general interest and business publications.
Across such publications, highly respected journalists are losing their jobs and the quality of journalism is being called into question: one contact told us how a national paper delegated an interview with a former Secretary of State to an intern due to lack of staff! Amid this, some of the most respected titles are going out of business or closing key bureaus. So far in the US this year layoff and/or bureau closure announcements have been made by Business Week, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times, and many more. In Europe, we have seen the same if not worse.
There is no doubting that social media should be embraced. I love how innovators are exploiting Web 2.0 to provide users with quality content tailored to their own interests. As well as providing a better service to their readers it helps them align advertising more easily. Today there are a plethora of special interest sites catering for nearly every subject area you can imagine, providing a depth of information that general interest and business media cannot rival. These sites then skim off advertising revenues aimed at these niche communities of readers. There is no doubt this is what consumers want most of the time and I am no different in appreciating the instant gratification you can get from highly tailored content. But I also believe there is a place in our lives for general interest and business media that can enlighten, surprise, and take us out of our comfort zones.
Reading specialist, tailored media is like an evening with friends – familiar, often great fun but comfortable. Reading the general interest and business media can be like an evening out meeting new people – challenging, refreshing, sometimes irrelevant but mostly pretty stimulating. Ultimately at the very highest level democracy and modern society depends on the free flow of information and ideas. In the past information and free thought were restricted by force of law, today, we seem to be moving towards a form of self censorship where we only read information of direct interest to us, at the cost of the bigger picture.
These are interesting times, and while there are undoubtedly cyclical reasons for the implosion of general interest and business media, there are clearly some fundamental changes in the way content is being consumed and will be in the future. My only hope is that in the process of moving towards a new media landscape we do not lose the best parts of the old one.
