The media prides itself on generating much of the content that bloggers, tweeters, facebookers etc thrive on. A journalist friend recently rebuked me:
I think there’s always a big danger of becoming so obsessed with ‘platforms’ that you forget about the content. And in my experience, at least 50 percent of social media involves commenting on, linking to, criticising, or aggregating the dreaded MSM. So if we didn’t exist, to paraphrase Voltaire, you’d probably have to invent us.
Other critics of the media, on the other hand, argue that increasing amounts of media content is actually generated for public relations purposes by public relations practitioners. So much so that on today’s constrained budgets, the media would struggle to fill its pages and broadcast hours without the ever eager help of the public relations profession. Not to mention the growing contributions of citizen journalists in the form of photos, videos etc.
Moreover, the larger point is that as more organisations go straight to market with their content the role of the media will be less central. We saw this with the Obama campaign and we’ll see a lot more of it over the next few years.
Bloggers have fed off MSM because the PR profession kept feeding its stuff exclusively to the media, but as PR wakes up and goes straight to bloggers, micro-bloggers and social networkers the MSM claim that it is their content that makes the world go round will look increasingly foolish.
