COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

The State of Media: Content at a Crossroads

Media is changing. In fact, our very concept of what media is is undergoing a transformation as well. I can explain the changes or I can simply show you this video. You’ll think it’s adorable, but it’s sure to make traditional media types’ blood run cold. Watch and then we’ll continue.

Isn’t it cute the way the baby keeps trying to touch, swipe and otherwise engage with the dead-tree magazine pages? Each tap might as well be a knife in traditional media’s heart. This child is a part of the generation that will someday rule the world. Physical magazines and newspapers will seem like sad, silly things to her. Only of use to doddering fools who remember a simpler time.

I’m one of those fools.

In my lifetime, I have seen media and journalism go through tsunami-sized changes. I fell in love with journalism, newspapers, TV, TV news, movies, and books when all of them were discrete objects. Synergy was reserved for science and not a word used to describe media entities. Our lives were pleasantly modal. I watched TV, on which I saw sitcoms, cartoons and the afternoon news anchors (no, the 24 news cycle did not exist). I read books — lots of them — went to the movies and read my parents’ newspaper. Everything in its own neat little drawer.

Lead is Dead

The digitization of the news started in the 70’s with the retirement of lead type and introduction of computer-based galley and layout systems. These were all seen as improvements in the newsroom and news cycle. I visited two newspapers back then (The Daily News and The Rocky Mountain News) that both extolled the virtues of new technology — none of them could have foreseen what was to come.

Fast-forward to the mid ’80s where those same digital creation tools arrived on the desktops. This was the first step in the re-democratization of news. It put powerful tools in the hands of small-town newspapers and individuals who wanted to produce professional-looking content and print it out at printing plants or in decent quantities on their own laser printers.

CNN introduced the 24-hour news cycle in 1980, but it would be years before anyone would believe it made sense or was in any way necessary. Traditional media and network news still ruled the day.

Back then, newspapers were still reaping the benefits of the digital change as they reduced costs and continued to expand (and sometimes gobbled each other up — Times Mirror devoured numerous rivals, for example). The arrival of a national newspaper — USA Today in 1982 — was the apex of print news ubiquity, but in no way threatened local newsgathering and media. Movies and TV spent most of the ’80s grappling with new competition from an ever-expanding number of cable channels. Yet, some of the most popular cable networks, like HBO, served mostly as clearing houses of all the dreck (and some of the good stuff) movie studios delivered to theaters earlier in the year.

This was the state of things until the mid 1990s and the arrival of the World Wide Web on the Internet.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Most traditional media, like TV, cable news, movies and many magazines, ignored the web. It was clunky and slow in those early days. There was no broadband, just a sputtering dial-up network that was best at serving primarily text-based (pure HTML) pages with a few GIF images thrown in. There were some, though, who saw the potential.

I was working at Ziff Davis’ PC Magazine back then. A publication devoted to technology, PCMag had been in print since 1982 and “online” for years — though only through Electronic Bulletin Board Services and CompuServe. The Internet was a natural fit for PCMag and publications like it. Soon they were posting magazine content online after it hit newsstands and slowly building out original online content teams.

Things started moving quickly back then, and as some media outlets began embracing the web, the web met them with improved connectivity and display options. Soon we had 56Kbps modems and DHTML for simplistic in-browser interactions.

In the meantime, thousands of newspapers and magazines (as well as most networks and movie studios) mostly ignored the web. They either put very little effort into their web entities or weren’t online at all. At the time, this made perfect sense. Magazines, in particular, made virtually all of their profit from print ads. They charged $60K to $100K or more for a single full-page color advertisement near the front of the book. Magazines like PCMag were 400 pages at the time, 40% of which were ads. You do the math.

Traditional media advertising partners stepped rather slowly into the online advertising space in the mid-to-late ’90s and the ad deal numbers were comparatively low. Initially, there was some excitement because people were clicking on banner ads in big numbers, but those response rates soon dwindled to 1% and then below, and I remember some people wondering if, without advertiser support, the Internet would simply fade away.

A lot happened in those early years, including the first bubble that popped only five or six years after the Internet really got started. In hindsight, these were all growing pains. Unfortunately, they may have emboldened magazines, newspapers, networks and studios. Far too few of them had recognizable digital strategies in 2000.

Tipping Point

It was around that time that I returned to PCMag, after working in the purely digital space for four years. PCMag, like most magazines, was transitioning. Ad pages had fallen precipitously and online pageviews were growing. Over the next five years, PCMag re-positioned its online presence from a sideshow, to the center of the business. Other magazines and newspapers around the country (and world) were also watching ad pages decline and most were slow to realize just how much reader interest they were losing to instant news their audience could find online. Sure, a plethora of 24-hour cable newsrooms was having an impact too, but the overriding sentiment was that traditional print media was trapped reporting yesterday’s news, while the web and cable were reporting news as it happened.

By the middle of the aughts, broadband access was more than five years old, and starting to blanket the nation and developed world. The web was consistent, reliable and jam-packed with countless news websites and video feeds and shows. Newspapers and magazines that had long ignored the web were scrambling to capture the eyeballs and obvious advertiser interest, but they had a very big problem: 80 to 95% of their revenue came from a combination of advertisers and subscriptions. Shifting resources to something that had little-to-no revenues up front was risky because it inevitably meant cannibalizing their core business. Subscribers who saw all the content they paid for in print available for free online were in revolt.

A Massacre

Between 2005 and 2009, many in traditional media faced a number of inevitable decisions: Shut down completely, find a print/online hybrid solution that satisfied advertisers and readers, or shut down print and go all digital. PCMag made the latter decision on my watch in 2009. We actually made the decision the summer before, and I’d venture we’d been preparing for it for years. The website survived to this day and is, I think, healthy. Hundreds of magazines and newspapers were not so lucky. Many closed shop. By one count, over 500 magazine shut down in 2008.

As things grew dire for traditional media, its core foundational principals took another whack to the chin: Social Media.

Even as the web and broadband exploded in the early part of this century, media still thought it knew how to deliver news and content. They reported. They wrote. They delivered on their own schedule and through the medium of their choice: the web, TV, movies, paper, CDs, books. With the arrival of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, traditional media lost its tenuous grip on the flow of news and information. It was, in essence, a further democratization of content, very much like the one we saw in the early ’80s.

Simultaneously, countless bloggers were setting up what might be called daily or hourly online newspapers where they opined on their topic of choice. These destinations probably hurt niche publications most. Those small, vertical magazines (think Cat Fancy) thrived on serving a target audience, but only once or twice a month. Blogs hit the topic hourly.

Books, magazines and newspapers, which are closing to this day, are probably the most visible victims of the changes in media consumption and creation, but TV and movies have clearly had to make some adjustments as well.

All Your Media Are Belong to Us

With the introduction of TiVo and cable DVRs, consumers started skipping commercials. Panicked advertisers have since resorted to stuffing product placements inside shows and finding creative ways for their partners to sponsor entire shows and segments (which is retro if you remember the ’50s). Movies now compete with a number of streaming and on demand options (not to mention super-large screen TVs) that now make the act of going out to the movies redundant.

Making matters worse is that all of these digital mediums now overlap. Those who have worked in traditional media for decades now find themselves delivering text, video, audio, and more for a single story. Content has to have the same ubiquity as our ever-present smartphones. All the while, marketers and advertising partners press for better ways to engage the audience and measure their response.

All of which has led us here: a crossroads. The creation of content is now an amalgam of skills that I worry most universities have no idea how to teach. Advertisers enjoy measuring response, but still don’t see the same kind of numbers they’ll find on a single episode of Two and a Half Men. And some believe print (newspapers and magazines) will inevitably fade away. If I could ask the little lady in the video above what she thought, I imagine she’d say, “what’s a newspaper?”

Even if our little video star can’t answer these questions, Mashable’s Media Summit can. Be sure to register, attend and/or watch as industry leaders discuss how we got here and where media goes next in this lively, one-day event.

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, arakonyunus, lucentius, and Wikimedia Commons, Evan Amos.