"Times They Are A Changing" - Just Like Dylan Said

     Welcome to “Strategically Yours”, and welcome back to those who may have been here before.  My name is Autumn and I’m a grad student working on a second Master’s degree, this time in Strategic Communication.  As a former Public Affairs officer for the U.S. Air Force, one who loved that line of work, I’m invested in this degree program with the hopes of returning to the communication world.  I am working through this degree program at a pretty rapid clip, taking two courses a term while working full time and co-raising a family here in northern California.

     This blog serves as a course communication channel for sharing thoughts, new ideas, and reflections on weekly assignments.  The course is entitled, “Strategic Communication and Emerging Media”.  The blog plan is to post content on a weekly basis but don’t be surprised to find bonus material, as I mentioned I love this field.  If you’ve stumbled upon my blog for the first time, “Welcome”, and if you’re returning “Welcome Back” – either way please use the following link and save it to your favorites so you can return often, read and engage in discussion, or simply follow me on this scholarly journey:  https://communeok.blogspot.com.  In this course we, the class, do not have access to future assignments, it’s taught on a week to week schedule so I, like you the reader, won’t know what’s coming next.  It’s an “emerging topic” format on “Emerging Media” content.  Sounds interesting, right?  So let’s begin with week one: “Are Traditional Media Dying?”

     This week’s topic for consideration and much of the assigned reading materials bring to mind the opening line of a great literary piece, Charles Dickens’,  A Tale of Two Cities.  It reads, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…”.  I find a similar central tension when studying the current status and future possibilities for traditional media.  On the one hand are the readers and subscribers who support the past methods of content delivery, and on the other hand are the readers and subscribers who look to a digital, emerging format.  Let’s not forget the other audiences directly affected by this palpable pull of old and new.  There are the news industries themselves and their employees who are caught in the tension of drastically changing times.  So in short answer to the question, “are traditional media dying?” I reply “no.”  Are they changing, transforming, being revolutionized?  Absolutely!  And that is precisely what I’d like to look a bit closer at in this week’s blog.

     In order to understand what is currently happening in the world of media communications it is important to understand where some of their powerful leverage was lost.  According to a piece in Poynter, “How Traditional Media Are Rapidly Losing Ground to Mobile Apps” (2010) author Damon Kiesow noted that daily newspapers were losing sections that had once been solely theirs.  For instance: real estate has an app with Zillow; car buying has an app with AOL autos; local business listings and reviews were migrated to Yelp.com.  As pieces of the traditional daily newspaper were pulled away and repackaged as convenient apps the newspaper industry felt the lessening of its once all-powerful role.  Combine this with digital explosion of the citizen journalist in everything from blogs to tweets to social media news updates and it became, and remains that “the times they are a changing”, Bob Dylan had it right: 

“Come writers and critics

Who prophesize with your pen

And keep your eyes wide

The chance won't come again

And don't speak too soon

For the wheel's still in spin

And there's no tellin' who

That it's namin'

For the loser now

Will be later to win

For the times they are a-changin'”

(For your enjoyment here’s a video clip of Bob Dylan’s 2013 live performance of “Times They Are A Changing” at the White House)

     So with all of this talk of change and transformation what are some of the communication and media trends that have recently emerged and what is on the horizon for the industry?  In 2015 Mike Elgan contributed an article, “4 News Apps That Will Change Everything” to Computerworld, a publication website and digital magazine.  In this piece he begins by pointing out one of the primary advantages newspapers have over digital sources: human editors.  He says, “software is great, but computers are decades away from being able to even approximate a human editor’s ability to combine reason, experience, intuition, taste, judgement and other qualities in developing and presenting stories for human readers.”  I wholeheartedly agree with this well-made point.  He does go on to admit, “I’m also a fan of socially and/or algorithmically curated sources of news.  These have an advantage over newspapers because they can cherry pick the best stories from thousands of sources, including newspapers, magazines, blogs, and social networks.”  Yet again, on this point, I wholeheartedly agree.  It’s no wonder then that the four apps he claims will change everything all have two things in common: “these apps combine the eclectic harvesting of the best content from thousands of news sources with the curating power and skills of human editors.”  Here they are:

1)    Buzzfeed News – This app offers major news stories in a bulleted format of current stories which can be shared social media graphically.  There is also a related stories section and a summarized “what we know” section with established facts.  This is all curated by editors.    

2)    Twitter Project Lightning (Moments) – This app is a “qualitatively filtered way to participate” in breaking news events and event television.  A team of editors pull the most related and best quality tweets, photos, and videos and place them in the Project Lightning (Moments) app.

3)    Apple News – This app is supposed to come loaded on every iPhone and iPad.  Apple editors will choose news sources, as well as, stories.  Supposedly news organizations will be able to build story format for the app too.

4)    Linkedin’s Pulse – Unlike the Pulse of the past, this version is human curated.  Stories are both pulled from major publications by Linkedin’s editorial staff or are written staff members themselves.  “The real magic of Pulse is that it zeroes in on your business connections.  For example, if a colleage is mentioned in an article, or wrote one, Pulse will notify you so you can read it.  The app also uses your Linkedin contacts to know what industry you’re in, so it can deliver professionally relevant news.”

     As is evidenced in the above-mentioned news apps, “what’s clear is that combining global sourcing with human editing is the secret sauce that will transform the news consumption experience.”  Elgan concludes his forecast by adding, “until now, Silicon Valley has focused on using software to replace human editors.  Finally, the industry has realized that human editors are an irreplaceable aspect of news publishing.  By combining the old editorial process with the new world of global and eclectic news sourcing, news apps have cracked the code at last.”

     Of course, as it true with any prediction, only time will tell.  And that is exactly why I mentioned Dicken’s words, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”.  Innovation and technological advances are stimulated by such revolutionary periods.  The news industries, traditional and digital, find themselves in such a period.

Strategically Yours,

Autumn

Works Cited

Dickens, C.  (1867) A Tale of Two Cities.  Ticknor and Fields.

Elgan, M.  “Four News Apps That Will Change Everything.” (22 June 2015) Retrieved on 11 Jan 2017 from http://www.computerworld.com/article/2938272/mobile-apps/4-news-apps-that-will-change-everything.html.

Genachowski, J. and Waldman, S.  “Newspapers Should Be More Like Amazon (What Jeff Bezos Can Teach The Washington Post.” (9 August 2013).   Retrieved on 11 Jan 2017 from https://newrepublic.com/article/114251/jeff-bezos-should-run-washington-post-amazon.

Hazard-Owen, L.  “What’s the Big Journalism Trend for 2017? Fear (Oh, and Voice News Bots).” (11 January 2017).  Retrieved on 11 Jan 2017 from http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/01/whats-the-big-journalism-trend-for-2017-fear-oh-and-voice-news-bots/.

Kiesow, D. “How Traditional Media Are Losing Ground to Mobile Apps.” (18 March 2010).  Retrieved on 11 Jan 2017 from http://www.poynter.org/2010/how-traditional-media-are-rapidly-losing-ground-to-mobile-apps-2/101487/.

Mitchell, A. et al. “News Attitudes and Practices in the Digital Era.” (7 July 2016).  Retrieved on 11 Jan. 2017 from http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/the-modern-news-consumer/.