I want it all, I want it now, I want it free!

I suspect I have heard my title somewhere before, but i can't put my finger on where or when. Essentially my title refers to what the consumer in our current age wants. The questions at this time of recession is as to whether it is really feasible for the consumer to get all their wants fulfilled.

What is happening to the media can be easily compared to what is taking place, or has already taken place in the music industry. The consumer has found through the internet they don't really have to pay for high quality content/music that they are getting, and now don't expect to pay for that content/music and this has left the media/record labels in some what of a bind as this content still costs a great deal to provide.  Our recent lecturer Rick Waghorn, of My Football Writer, paraphrased it that consumers "Want the news in the palm of their hand for free."

So where does this leave the media industry in the current economic climate, with advertising revenue falling massively. Since the consumer doesn't want to pay for their content, media companies must rely on advertising to make a profit, or even break even. As advertising revenue is also falling, this is seeing many media companies folding, and massive job cuts in others. The paying model has not previously worked but increasingly people are arguing this may be the only viable option for the media, or as Jemima Kiss argues the only option an investor may back for media start ups. I would disagree with Jemima and instead am inclined to agree with Shane Richmond who is inclined to think the pay for model is not a viable alternative.

I wonder if the model provided by the spot.us could be a potential solution to many problems. The ways this site works is quite simple in that an article idea is suggested to the community and people volunteer to pledge money for the story to be reported (this is explained slightly better on the about tab).  The community can also 'tip' what they think could be a good story to be reported. Spot.us would also tackle some earlier issues I have brought up for investigative journalism online. It certainly seems that innovative new methods such as this are more likely to succed than attempting to charge for content, as Shane Richmond pointed out this is certainly true in the UK where the BBC is always going to be a free competitor (even if it has a hidden subscription fee of sorts in the license fee).

Building around a community

I have been considering why it is that some blogs successfully build up large viewing figures while others are effectively dead space. Without going into obvious details such as Search Engine Optimization (although those interested in SEO for blogging would do well to read The Bloggers guide to SEO) and using links I think essentially the reason has had a lot to do with community. 

I have witnessed friends and colleagues attempting to attract more readers to their blogs through shameless self-promoting. There is nothing wrong with this, but it was interesting to note that their self-promotion was by advertising themselves where they had already built up a community: sending out tweets (I should admit Twitter is slightly different as you really can build up a much greater community there and, as Mark Drapeau suggests, twinfluence people), notes and status updates on Facebook, updating shared wikis and so on. 

Essentially this is an extension of trying to get friends, family, colleages and peers to look at your blog, which incidentally in my case my own mother still hasn't 'got round' to looking at this blog. It is because the people within these communities should have an interest in what you have written, and may even have some respect for it. My reasoning follows that you are advertising that you have written something because you are looking for some feedback, the simple joy of seeing 0 comments become 1 comment. For myself, I will be joyous about 1 comment for now, I don't wish to get carried away with myself.

Which brings me onto the subject upon which I was lucky enough to receive a lecture recently from Shane Richmond, Communications Editor at Telegraph.co.uk. Shane (I prefer using informal first names, surnames should only be used in blogging when referring to footballers or dictators) talked in some detail about My Telegraph, part of The Telegraph, which is essentially just a blogging platform. What is interesting is that when it was set up in May 2007 and advertised in The Telegraph, many readers did join, and it now has around 30,000 members. 

While that is not a huge number of members (considering Wordpress currently has 5.1 million blogs), it is certainly a very respectable number. Shane identified several reasons for why the membership grew to that number. A large number simply had not come across blogging before, and certainly weren't going to go in search of sites such as Blogger and Wordpress. The more important reason which he identified is that the numbers have been attracted because they enjoy the sense of community they have with the other bloggers on my telegraph, and value having people from that community read and comment on their writing.

Shane said that this sense of community could be particularly picked up on when changes were made to the website. The most comical example was when My Telegraph gave bloggers the power to delete comments which they did not want on their blog, there was somewhat of an outcry by users as they were heavily committed to freedom of speech. Another example was when a rankings table was introduced for the most read blogs, which again users requested to be taken down. 

It is argued that the web provides a space for a 'worldwide community', but I suggest this cannot really be the case if so many feel the need to flock to a banner for a community such as The Telegraph. This makes me wonder if the web will lead to more and more people feeling the need to have pre-defined communities to flock to, with neat little internet fences erected in hope that the undesirables will be kept out.

A discussion about blogging

This is myself (hosting) and a few students on the postgraduate Diploma in Magazine journalism. We are discussing some of the concerns about blogging and what advantages blogging can offer. Apologises for the laughter at the beginning, I couldn't figure out how to edit it out. I think it's interesting to get some other people directly putting their views onto my blog rather than always giving my own. I think that this guest blog by Scott Elliott on Reporter.net confirms many of the points that the group here mentioned.

Comments on Online Media lecture 5

Matthew Yeomans, the founder of Custom Communications, suggested the arrival of blogs 10 years ago was a fundamentally transformative moment. He suggested this on the basis of three key changes that the arrival of the blog brought around.

The first issue that Matthew identified is that it essentially gave everyone (with internet access) the power to publish. He claimed this was a big change as it gave everyone a voice to potentially reach millions of other people around the world. This took the power to publish from the privileged few and put it into the hands of anyone that wanted to publish.

The second change that was identified was that it increased the power to participate. This meant that people worldwide (once again as long as they have internet access) could give their opinion out freely for all to view. This has created a back and forth between those who publish and those who read content. That is very different from the old manner of the media in which journalists could put content out into the public sphere and then generally forget about the content they had published.

The final issue was that the blog gave much greater power to the consumer to choose. It has created much more of a society where we get to choose what we want rather than having the media push itself on his. In some ways, particularly in the Britain, it could be argued that we have long had a wide choice of varied newspapers and magazines so this isn’t really such a great change, but I think that would probably be a slightly limited argument as a wide choice of newspapers doesn’t quite compare to the internet.

The combination of these three factors has certainly had a huge impact, creating a media which is much more conversational, transparent and much faster in providing news. Previous blogs have addressed the issue of whether this massive change has taken place, so this won’t be looked at again in this post.

A more pressing issue is whether the traditional media can really survive unless they attempt to take on some new elements. With dwindling ad revenues and huge job cuts, it would appear that there has to be some change. To quote Matthew Yeomans, “The sky is falling; the question now is how many people will be left to cover it.” It would seem that given the public have grown use to the new online methods that the media must change to the publics new expectations, but it is interesting to consider how this can function as a business model, which is looked at in an interesting manner here.