Merging Media and the Market

“All of us who professionally use the media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it.

Or we can help lift it onto a higher level”

William Bernbach

In the red corner we have new media.  New media is convenient, accessible, personable, easy, targeted and since it’s mostly free it puts up one heck of a fight. Pay no mind to its ‘stalker-like” qualities and questionable reporting methods.  In the blue corner we have old media.  Old, or traditional media, is tried, true, private, and accountable.  And in the instance that it’s not accountable there is a professional somewhere who is, and oftentimes pays for it with the loss of their job.  Pay no mind to the fact that you can’t get in now!  It is predicted that new media, sometimes referred to as ‘people media’, will knockout old-time media and its disgraced professionals before the final round.  But before you place your bets: Caveat lector (reader beware). 

You can’t believe everything read, regardless of whether you’re getting your information from new or old media.  However, credible information is a lot more difficult to distinguish from sponsored results or otherwise supplied by those with ulterior motives.  Despite the reports of unreliability in traditional media outlets, it has been argued that old, paid-for, mediums are more reliable than the new, free media.  Because professionals are paid, trained, and held accountable for their work.  As a culture we expect the absolute truth from traditional media.  Yet, new media isn’t held to this same high standard, with the exception of news Web sites.  The new media, on the other hand, can be very useful and compelling.  You can’t beat the Internet for accessing a diverse view on a wide variety of subjects.  And traditional mediums just can’t compete with the ability to provide such a vast amount of information to readers. 

As such, nearly 70 percent of Americans believe traditional journalism is out of touch, and nearly half are turning to the Internet to get their news.  I guess ‘traditional journalists’ don’t contribute to Internet news stories so they’re more credible.  Plus we all know that ‘Jo-Blow’ has no ulterior motives so his contributions to the Internet are reliable.  So before you bet, its only fair that understand that the sources you are accessing online such as Google News and Yahoo News pull stories from newspapers, television, wire services and other media sources.  While it’s delivered in a non-traditional form, that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t traditional journalism underneath it. 

So who will you put your money on?  Personally, I’m banking on both the old and the new.  There is pain anytime the new threatens the old, but I think in the case of merging media the two rivals will mesh to create something that is so much more than its parts.  Imagine media that is trustworthy, credible, timely, efficient, engaging, targeted, affordable, and requires the informed consent of its audience.  Ultimately, both new and old mediums have their strengths and weaknesses.  Instead of turning the media landscape into the next season of Survivor we should be focusing on merging the admiral aspects of each medium to create entities that equally benefit society and commerce.