EveryDay Content Moves up The Agenda
Posted on August 16, 2006
Filed Under Insights |
I take some satisfaction in seeing former IT specialists CNET’s strategy with Chow (a food site) starting to make the new media buzz. Over the past month I’ve posted a few times (here, here, and here) on the importance of everyday activities for Web 2.0 and Content 2.0 business models.
The interest is this: much of the buzz around Media 2.0 and web 2.0 assumes there will be technological solutions or drivers that will create tomorrow’s new media businesses. I keep arguing that it is the moral decisions that will matter - they always have for media organisations.
Still I think CNET may be erring. Their food strategy is a way of attracting a young, affluent audience but food is an area that’s very well covered by conventional media, blogs, podcasts, and vidcasts. It’s also making an impression on mobile content.
What’s lacking in mainstream food coverage is not the glitz but the politics of food, the health aspects of eating, and the boldness to dump on some of the culinary grandstanding that’s going on. Going alternative on food is where it should be at.
Sites like Green Living and Grist, which I blogged yesterday are taking media into what used to be the radical edge. In effect they’re going where the mainstream refused to go and that way they are serving a neglected rather than saturated audience.
The challenge the media industry faces is not how to buy up ailing or sucessful sites. I’d suggest it has four elements:
How to create businesses that provide good supplementary income for what might be called farm-writers writers, a class that will merge from citizen and pro-journalists, the people that will settle into creative information roles on a level that’s subsistence and a little more (rewarding lifestyles, leisure time, freedom but also money).
How to create businesses that operate on an ultra low cost basis without relying on free labour
How to serve radicalised audiences that live in times marked by global moral conflicts over religion, environment, illness, poverty, corruption.
How to serve audiences that are at once global and local.
These are not necessarily very Web 2.0 debates to be had but they’re what will make Web 2.0 businesses succeed.
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