4 Comments Add your own

• 1. the dude abides  |  October 27th, 2009 at 1:10 pm

  Of course I agree with it.

  Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the web are allowing for much more personal, direct interaction with consumers, not a traditional “push” message. They reach more and more people every day (what was the fact in that video — the fastest growing Facebook segment is women 45-55?). And of course, the best part — they’re FREE.

  On the other hand, newspapers are at a new all time low — circulation is lower than pre-WWII levels — yet advertising rates are at an all time high. Quality content / reporting is getting sparse (my mother calls the RRStar the “daily pamphlet”). So why should advertisers pay more than ever to reach a smaller, aging demographic? The circulation numbers that salespeople tout as “reach” mean very little to me anymore. What matters is concrete, measurable interaction with consumers.

  Businesses have an entirely new box of tools that they can use to augment (or replace) traditional media. It’s not easy — there’s a learning curve, and you only get out what you put in. In my experience, social media sites have helped grow my business exponentially over the past two years — traditional media hasn’t.

  But of course, that’s just, like, my opinion, man.

• 2. Jim Phelps  |  October 27th, 2009 at 4:27 pm

  Good points, Dude… that is why new media will rule and change the paradigm.

  Why shouldn’t the printing press, an invention and revolution that brought us the Age of Enlightenment be replaced by something much different 500 plus years later in the Age of the Transistor?

  They don’t call it the Age of Aquarius for nuttin’, bro… As a marketing professional I have also made the shift to Social Networks and Peer-to-Peer Marketing with a great deal of success.

  It is interesting that most of my peers only read the daily news on-line.

  Or rely on Bloggers to give it to them straight… It is the Age of Aquarius… and boy, oh, boy, let’s let the Sunshine in…

• 3. Anna Derocher  |  October 28th, 2009 at 11:55 am

  Thanks for the discussion, Jim and Dude. Here’s another question. There are 902 daily print newspapers in the US, with a combined circulation of 49,115,000. Does that make newspapers as powerful a connecting medium as social media?

• 4. Jim Phelps  |  October 28th, 2009 at 12:32 pm

  Maybe the blog, forums and comments connections - on-line.

  Otherwise, the Print News Media Channel is a push, not a pull to the readership. Your remote control with 500 channels of nothing to watch is infinitely more attractive to a cable viewer because the viewer chooses among many choices.

  A print paper is not only not in real time, it is only what the combined crew of editors, reporters and other production folks make it to be. News print is in 2D, and not in multiple dimensions like the web.

  It is one-sided (print papers) and not user definable like web content currently is…

  The future of the web will be much different today as the end content is continually being redefined by the end user.

  “Customized” News, like customized Levis may be more of a reality in the future and the number of “sources” like blogs, commentary, and the like will dwarf whatever print media is available today.

  Maybe a custom newspaper, tried by CNN on-line, in the infancy of the web will become the norm on our viewer screens. Hulu.com is changing the way young people interact with TV, so it is only more likely that our Plasma Screens will become more intelligent, more intuitive to what we want to “pull” to us. As the pipe of the Internet gets broader, there will be more processing power & storage space built into these devices.

  And I shudder to think how Artificial Intelligence will factor into this.

  Interesting question you pose, but in the end, the Age of the Transistor, or it next facsimile will dominate the News delivery channel, not print.

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