Newspapers, television, computers, and community
Out with the old media, in with the new! I came across a pair of unrelated articles that illustrated the same point for two different media: ignore communities at your peril.
Newspapers: Not Adding Value
In the first article, Mike Masnick of TechDirt points to a newspaper lawsuit to illustrate what he feels is the reason newspapers are in trouble: “because adding value never seems to be an option.” The lawsuit in question involves GateHouse Media suing the New York Times because a Times-owned paper was “stealing” headlines and ledes (the first paragraph of a news story) from its local paper and aggregating them on the Times paper’s website.
Masnick complains about a statement that Howard Owens, a former Gatehouse employee, made about the trial. In his statement, Owens talked about the legal threats Gatehouse made against the Times, and said, “I don’t know what more we could have done.”
What more could you have done? You could have competed more effectively. Owens complains about "substitute home pages," where the Boston.com was trying to take away GateHouse’s readers. There’s a pretty straightforward response to that: if that’s all it takes to take away your community, you’ve failed your community. If the entire value of your site was in providing the headlines and ledes, and someone else copying those headlines and leads causes you to lose the community, you haven’t been providing enough value to that community, and you deserve to lose it. Newspapers have neglected their biggest asset, their own communities, for way too long, and this is another example of that. If GateHouse provided a better service where the value went beyond the headline and the lede, there wouldn’t be concerns about how such "copying" would take away from GateHouse.
I suspect that newspapers have gotten locked into thinking about themselves in the old one-way top-down print paradigm: we print the news, you read it. The Internet provides an easy channel for bottom-up and side-to-side feedback that could totally change the nature of interaction between paper and readers. It could truly form a virtual community related to the real community.
The virtual community would add value to local readers’ interaction with the website. It could make the paper’s site “sticky” enough to keep people coming back to it, and no amount of aggregating headlines and ledes could take that away.
Why TV “Lost” the Convergence Game
On his blog, Paul Graham mentions that, twenty years ago, people first started noticing the “convergence” between television and computers, and wondering what the end result of that convergence might be. As Graham puts it, “We now know the answer: computers.”
It turns out that computers and television have not so much “converged” as computers have replaced television for many purposes. Failed experiments in WebTV notwithstanding, computers have taken on far more features from television than the other way around.
Graham identifies several contributing causes—the open nature of the Internet, explosions in bandwidth and processing power, piracy showing people that watching TV shows on the computer isn’t so bad after all—but he considers the most crucial factor to be social networking applications.
This was the most powerful force of all. This was what made everyone want computers. Nerds got computers because they liked them. Then gamers got them to play games on. But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that’s what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers.
After decades of running an IV drip right into their audience, people in the entertainment business had understandably come to think of them as rather passive. They thought they’d be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another.
Graham goes on to talk about the implications of this shift in the general public’s viewing habits. He makes some very interesting points, as when he brings up the way that computer-viewers are much more accustomed to being able to watch what they want when they want, and not have to make themselves (or their VCR) available during a set timeslot every week. The importance of shows with high ratings that can “lead into” other shows is fading fast.
As the music industry did in the last decade, TV is trying to fight these trends, but sooner or later will have to give in. The nature of video content delivery is changing, and nobody knows what the television/Internet content landscape will look like in twenty years.
Conclusion
Both these articles point to the importance of communities in the survival or failure of old media formats. Thanks to the Internet, media is no longer a one-way proposition. Individuals can “broadcast” just as easily as corporate entities now—and really, what is “piracy” except for unauthorized rebroadcasting? And even piracy requires communities—it takes at least one person to upload and one to download a pirated good.
Consumers cannot simply be dictated to anymore. The Internet has empowered them to talk back to the businesses who make the media they consume, and to act in ways those businesses do not enjoy. The smart businesses will try to work with the community instead of against it.
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