The Future of the Journalism Profession

The future of the journalism profession, from my point of view, is in niching. In his book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson discusses a phenomena of economics. Traditionally, economics has dictated that supply should be determined by demand: whatever the audiences want is what the producers will give them. This is the idea behind “hits”: finding those books, CDs, DVDs, radio songs, etc. that will sell the most and cover the cost of keeping them in a bookstore, or a record store, or on the radio. This means that there are millions of songs played, movies produced, and books written that will never see representation in national bookstores or record stores, meaning they will largely go without audiences.

But with the Internet came an interesting departure from this idea: when production and storage costs are close to zero, what happens to these “nonhits”?

Data from distributors like iTunes, Napster and Netflix shows that while the “hits” are still accounting for high numbers of sales, the “nonhits” are representing a surprising share of downloads or orders. At Rhapsody, 45 percent of total downloads are of songs not even available in the largest offline retail store. For Netflix and Amazon, those numbers are 25 percent and 30 percent, respectively.

What is so surprising about this trend is that demand is now following supply. Every song that Rhapsody has in its online database (an inventory of over 4 million) is finding some kind of audience, even if it is only a few people a month, somewhere in the world. Even the 100,000^th ranked track is being downloaded an average of 250 times a month.

So what does this mean for the media world?

It is sort of the principle of “If you build it, they will come,” only this time, we’re referring to Web content. It’s an uncomfortable prospect for huge media corporations, because it means that mass markets are going to be increasingly hard to find. Audiences don’t want to be “mass”; they want content that is tailored to them and they will find that in niching.

For journalists who love journalism  — uncovering stories, investigating, researching, writing, reporting — the new landscape of media is a wonderful place to be. It is not a hospitable world, to be sure. But media professionals who love what they do, who are willing to do it even if a paycheck is not a definite and who can provide quality, relevant content, even if it’s just to a niche market, will thrive online.

The reason is this: the unlimited capabilities of the Web are such that an amateur with a keyboard, or a video camera, and an internet connection has access to the very same audience that powerhouse news distributors like CNN and the New York Times have. The differences, of course, lie in audience numbers and credibility. Still, niche audiences are turning more and more toward blogs, podcasts and similar nonprofessional news outlets to get niche news and news analysis. I think the future of the media will be less about corporations and conglomerations and much more about niching and specialization.

As for advertising, I think we are going to see that huge ad revenues will be less and less necessary for smaller niche markets. Online advertising has proven to be successful, just not successful enough to keep a huge company on its feet.

Along with click-through advertising, I think it’s going to be increasingly important for companies to produce their own media. In his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott discusses the necessity of companies generating meaningful content for audiences. Marketing is no longer disruptive; the most effective marketing campaigns now come in the form of search engine optimization, which is so successful because it means consumers are actually searching out the product. Consumers don’t have to bombard people with advertising — consumers actually want to find their products! Isn’t that something? It turns the whole world of marketing on its head!

For PR, the goal is no longer to get press releases picked up by major media outlets. The goal now is to provide meaningful content that consumers will actually want to find and to distribute content online through blogs and Web sites.

Advertising of all kinds is all about relational capital, companies building meaningful relationships with consumers.

For TV producers, the key is to be ahead of the technology curve, and that’s tough to do. But according to industry insides, like USA Today’s CyberSpeak editor Andrew Kantor, the future lies in “true on-demand television.” This means that IPTV will become the TV industry standard, where people can download any content they want and view it at any time they want.

I think this service will be revenue-producing if it is provided as a part of a package with music downloads, advertising, broadband subscriptions and the like. One thing is certain: online services cannot be provided free forever and for everyone. Even Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, admits that the Internet wouldn’t be much without quality content for his company’s search engine to look through. But with packaging, people might be willing to paying for the services that are important to them, including social networking, movies, music, games, news and TV.