Print: Advertising is adjacent to content
Broadcast: Advertising interrupts content
Movies: Advertising is within content
The Web: Advertising IS content
— Terry Heaton
Tag Archives: Terry Heaton
Pew: State of News Media
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.”
Terry Heaton: Field of Dreams and broadcasting
“The geeks of the world built their own Field of Dreams years ago in this thing we call the World Wide Web, a disruption of Biblical proportions to the status quo. Like Busfield’s character, however, media companies walked right through it. We could see the playing field, but we couldn’t see the magical players. We scoffed and viewed it with contempt, because, after all, we are were “the media.” Now is the season of our tragedy, and our eyes are suddenly opening. Let’s hope it’s not too late.”
— Terry Heaton on Field of Dreams and broadcasting
“We are the Arabs!”
“In the 1980 film “The Formula,” George C. Scott plays a detective who uncovers a plot to kill anybody with knowledge of a secret Nazi formula for a synthetic fuel. The bad guy in the film is Adam Steiffel, the Chairman of Titan Oil, played by Marlon Brando. The two meet on Steiffel’s patio, where the oil mogul is enjoying breakfast, and the scene produces a couple of memorable lines in a case of art imitating life.
“You’re not in the oil business; you’re in the oil shortage business,” Scott says to Brando. An aide to Brando’s character races to the table with news of price activity by the Arab states, to which Brando’s character responds, “You idiot, we ARE the Arabs!”
— Terry Heaton
Internet overtakes newspapers as news source
From latest Pew Research Center Survey:
“Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%).
For young people, however, the internet now rivals television as a main source of national and international news. Nearly six-in-ten Americans younger than 30 (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online; an identical percentage cites television. In September 2007, twice as many young people said they relied mostly on television for news than mentioned the internet (68% vs. 34%).”
Radio gained a little ground (from September 2007 to December 2008) among young people (18-29), up from 13% to 18%.
In this essay, Terry Heaton argues that just surviving is not a strategy:
“This theme of surviving 2009 is everywhere, but I’d like to pose an important question for anybody so hunkered, hanging, waiting or rowing, because waiting it out assumes “it” will end and that there will be a reward for those who are still standing when “it” is over. I’m not so sure, so here’s the question: What if the old model is gone for good and it doesn’t come back?”
UPDATE 12/26/08: A number of folks have accuratelty pointed out that a LOT of the news on the Net comes from newspapers. Worth noting but doesn’t solve any of the problems facing newspapers. If it comes down to getting less news (volume and variety) online or buying a copy of the Daily Bugle, online is gonna win. Business models will evlove that will support quality reporting w/o the overhead of current publishing models.