What will the world look like after the media is gone?

Bloggers love to speculate about the death of the media and the death of journalism. They’ve been doing it for years. Big-time bloggers, Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer, are at it again. A new round of speculation, this time trying to envisage what our world would like if the media did actually die. Dave Winer, ever the iconoclast, even reckons it is the news media’s responsibility to come up with the plan for what we might all do after they’re all gone:

It seems to me the responsible thing for the news industry to do, while it is laying off its reporters and editors and the rest, is to help us come up with a Plan B — what we will do for news once all that is gone.

Apart from the absurdity of such a ‘responsibility’, Winer’s comment is also an indication that no-one knows what will happen to the media in the future except that big changes are coming and that our media landscape will be much more diversified than ever before bcause of the emergence of new voices on the Internet.

The notion that no-one really knows what the future will look like was re-inforced for me last week at the future of journalism conference.

It is not even clear to me that the exisiting media will disappear anytime soon. The recent spate of speculation has been, in part, provoked by the financial problems facing the NY Times.

Newspapers are the heritage media most underthreat, largely because of the massive loss of classified advertising. Classifieds are actually more effective online than on paper. Newspapers also have a problem with time and keeping their sites fresh throughout the day (and night) but they are rapidly adjusting to that with, among other things, the use of video and bloggers.

While the growth of the Internet is making the market for advertising more competitive, there is still little to suggest that television and radio is going to adjust soon.  After a period of denial, TV and radio are also now moving fast to embrace the Internet.

Moreover, the audience for a post-media environment is still very small. Miniscule, in fact, as this comment from Brian Robinson on Jeff Jarvis’ blog puts it, and I quote it in full:

This all sounds very erudite, and very analytical. But nowhere in all of this is there any idea about how to feed the bigger audience for news and information. The assumption is that everyone is online reading all of the blogs and twitters and links and God-knows what else there will be in the future, and then recompiling everything for themselves to come up with the news of the day.

Guaranteed that does not describe the real audience for news other than the uber-nerds that read blogs like this (myself included) and who maybe blog and twitter themselves. The real world, even the so-called Internet generation, doesn’t have much time for that. That’s why the biggest sites in terms of traffic remain the BBC, Guardian, Times, NY Times, WPost etc. — people know they can go there and get a compilation of stuff that gives them a good idea of what’s going on.

In what you describe above, where is the idea that these readers will be better served by the info age? In the UK when I was growing up, you had the intellectual papers and then the tabloids which (no surprise) were the best read of the lot. They may have been lurid and sensational, but they provided good snapshots of the bigger stories of the day along with the crappy stuff. How is anything that you propose going to address this audience — or is journalism not bothered with them anymore?

Finally, where in all of the stuff you say is the word story? You speak of links and opinion and organization and blah, blah, but where is the discussion about what story means in the current scenarios for news? People don’t read links, they read stories. And for the great mass of readers — outside of the nerds — that still holds true. What I see here is the fracturing of story, not a way to tell a better one. Or do I have that wrong?

Excellent stuff, Brian.

Unless, we can have a post-media that serves the needs of everyone, the whole audience, than the heritage media will continue to not only exist but also to be far more relevant than either the most-read bloggers and twitterers.