TV consultant Terry Heaton offers his take on the latest “State of the News Media” report from Pew (Project for Excellence in Journalism) and offers a few predictions:
- It’s gone and it’s not coming back. Acceptance of this is the beginning of reinvention.
- Future revenue is about enabling commerce, not about serving advertising adjacent to or as an interruption of “content.”
- Journalism will survive the death of its institutions.
- Most journalists will be independent and work for whoever pays them the most, on a non-exclusive basis.
- Journalists will develop and exploit niche specialties.
- “The News” will be fast, transparent and authentic.
- Anchors will become mostly obsolete, like other middlemen that the Web routes around. I simply can read faster than I can have it read to me. Those that remain will be live hubs that filter multiple content inputs.
From the reports intro:
“There are growing doubts within the business, indeed, about whether the generation in charge has the vision and the boldness to reinvent the industry. It is unclear, say some, who the innovative leaders are, and a good many well-known figures have left the business. Reinvention does not usually come from managers prudently charting course. It tends to come from risk takers trying the unreasonable, seeing what others cannot, imagining what is not there and creating it.”
Right on target with these prognostications, I think, except for point 7. As much as we might like to believe that everybody is an interested self-directed agency of self-enlightenment, I think a lot of people’s interest in expressing choice stops when they pick a channel to beam propoganda in through their empty, lidded cow eyes. Such people won’t want to give up being spoon-fed glossy summaries by attractive people. Not for a while, still, anyway.
I do believe that the medium through which such spoon-feedings are experienced and the source of the material is certainly due to evolve, but passivity is a lifestyle that’s hard to overcome in a single generation.