Ten Things that Will Happen to TV and Newspapers

Posted on September 14, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |

I tend to see it through the eyes of somebody trying to make a living from the media scene. These are the top ten outcomes I expect.

1. Newspapers will have shorn most of their staff within five years and will be relying on a new breed of writer/audio/video patch-maker to add to their online quilt. There is no point hiring people when you can get it for free.

2. Newspapers will have a much reduced physical presence on newsstands and on shop counters and will realise belatedly that physical distribution gave them the kind of presence only the milkman and the baker dreamed of. The result will be a much reduced influence online.

3. Wikipedia or an equivalent will become the Daily Delphic aggregating “authority” from around the web. Newspapers are well placed to be part of the Daily Delphic but so too are news broadcasters, A list bloggers, specialist bloggers and niche meme aggregators.

4. What you know will become more a case of what can you believe and who else believes it too. Confusion and uncertainty will have an impact on social and political life.

5. That means online affiliations will be crucial to a sense of certainty and it will be embedded in virtual and animated worlds like Second Life. What we know and feel comfortable with will exist and be nourished in a fake world.

6. As all information is now free to the end-user, everybody in news production has to go to the advertiser pool for every cent that it takes. News bureaux around the world are closed and the “source” becomes the local blogger pool.

7. Television companies go shock-jock. Increasingly focusing on the bizarre and the celebrity as talent moves onto the web as part of the creatives pool. But they have to comepte with vlogs that can do shocking much worse and hence much better.

8. The television set is given over to individual and group creativity and becomes a tool in the house where we carve out a pattern of interaction and creative endeavour co-building new applications such as our own e-democracy dossiers that compiles and delivers messages to erring politicians or your own games hacked from content that’s out there. Making video clips for YouTube will be passe.

9. Every major organisation and many minor ones have their own audio-visual production facilities and many own channels. The sports network will be run by Adidas, Puma, Nike and Reebok with no need of content and distribution intermediaries.

10. Recommenders will become a new profession.

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