Open The Dialogue

There’s a section of this story on how media companies are struggling to make money that I think is important:

After spending millions of dollars to buy digital media companies, online advertising firms and search engines, only a few of the 350 magazine and newspaper companies represented at the conference said, in a show of hands, that they were making more than 3 percent of their sales online.

Combine that with all the chatter about whether or not Google essentially wasted its money in the YouTube acquisition and I think you have a clear picture of the problem. Companies spent tons of cash to buy their way into the online game and they’re now finding it hard to actually make up that money. They felt they had money to burn and did so accordingly. Now they’re finding that, since a news organization’s brand name isn’t exactly a guarantee it will win in head-to-head combat with citizen media, it’s a bit harder to make that money back than they thought it would be. It takes more than that brand name to compete. It takes user relevance and usability, two areas most media publishers need to make dramatic strides in.

Not to be outdone in the arena of pandering to the public by Time’s Person of the Year, Advertising Age has named “The Consumer” its Agency of the Year. Seems they were on the cusp of naming DraftFCB but then decided that didn’t have quite the headline value.

What’s the point of this? Are we as either media producers or consumers so needy and insecure that we need this sort of validation? I don’t think so. Which means these publications are doing this, embracing the general public so that they might be embraced in return.

As Joe Jaffe and others say, there’s still a lack of marketers who, as Mack Collier puts it, are willing and able to walk with their communities. To often CGC is co-opted by big companies or people are asked to create ads or something like that. There’s not enough genuine interaction between marketers and the people who are talking about them. Regardless of how many times we’re given the tacit endorsement of big publications like this it’s not enough – there needs to be action there for it to really mean something.

So I’m in a meeting today and we’re talking about different approaches for garnering mentions in trade versus consumer media. As I’m listening to the others having this discussion it occurs to me that such designations mean almost nothing to me. There are certain sites that certainly have a focus on one or the other but they’re open for everyone to read. There’s no barrier for consumers to read a B2B-oriented site just like there’s no barrier for B2B firms to read a consumer-focused site.

Many of the previous lines between such publications have been broken by the all-powerful link. It doesn’t matter what the source is – if it’s of interest to the blogger it gets linked. So I think in terms of how to get coverage that will get linked to by the influential bloggers in this space. Where it originates is immaterial to me. There are strategic decisions that impact who gets pitched and such, I know, but overall it’s just not something that I think about too much. I think about getting coverage – period.

What do you all think about this?

This morning I heard this story on NPR about how the ease of self-publishing has impacted the role of the traditional media critic. It contained this quote from former Village Voice critic Robert Christgau:

“Has the Internet made the rationalization of critical opinion easier? Not in my opinion. I don’t think so. Because there’s simply too much for anybody to digest. You need gatekeepers,” Christgau says.

I completely agree. But instead of defining this in terms of media I’ve put my RSS reader in the place of gatekeeper. I define what gets in, using Newsgator as a proxy. It allows me to give all voices an equal starting point and then I can assign weight and influence as I see fit.

I know that I’m supposed to be all flattered by Time magazine’s naming of me as their Person of the Year but the award is diluted slightly by the fact that it also awarded all of you the same honor.

That award is supposed to mark something truly special; it’s supposed to commemorate someone who made a lasting impact on their world. By naming “You” (or, I guess, “Us”) Time really copped out. I can’t decide if the editors who made this decision were lazy, trying to blatantly generate link-bait for the online world or just didn’t want to talk about those messy things (genocide, civil war, nuclear proliferation, etc) happening in non-U.S. parts of the world because it would make people feel bad.

Even worse, though, their profile of the citizen journalists included almost solely A-list bloggers and corporate executives like the founders of YouTube. To many people on the web those people, because of their incredible popularity and/or financial success are still “them” and not “us.”

This choice by Time is basically an attempt to play to the cheap seats. It’s a power chord in a stadium-ready anthem. It’s a chase scene. It’s a flatulence joke. It’s meant to make as many people as possible feel as good as possible as opposed to actually showing them what’s important.

We’re important not because Time has told us we are. The online community is important – and will continue to grow in importance – because we’ve used the power of self-publishing to fill in the gaps and pick up the slack left by the mainstream media. We talk about the things they’re not talking about. We connect with other people because doing so is easy in the online world. We create content because we can and no one else is.

The awarding of the Person of the Year to Us is an attempt by the mainstream media to bestow legitimacy on us lowly bloggers and podcasters that we don’t need. The producers of good content earn that legitimacy on their own and fight for it against the perceptions of others every day. It’s the MSM that needs to work on proving its relevance to the people and not the other way around.

So while some people are applauding this decision I’m not going to join them. I’ll continue to work hard to use the tools that allow for self-publishing to engage with an audience that finds what I write of interest. Everyone should do the same.