With so many people observing, documenting and opining about the financial impact of the failing mass business model for newspapers and other mass media, I don’t hear or read enough about the cultural impact of this change. I am saddened that 15,000 people lost journalism positions in 2009. And it’s hard to grasp that a 150 year old institution like the Rocky-Mountain News can just vanish.
While jobs and P&L’s are important, I think we will look back at 2009 and remember this as the year consuming media changed from a “shared experience to a sharing experience.” Phyllis Myers, producer for NPR, coined that phrase on a December 23 broadcast of Fresh Air. Here’s the difference in a nutshell:
Shared Experience -
- In the morning we all would pick up our daily newspaper and read about the same events and trends. While the angles journalists took were different, the articles were generally pieced together using a simlar investigative method.
- At night we would all gather around our living room and watch the same broadcast news as our neighbors.
Sharing Experience -
- In the morning we read the links emailed to us, the status updates of our friends and the Tweets of those we follow.
- Throughout the day we check in with any number of social networks that make up our communities of interest.
This is the big change. We don’t share an experience anymore, we just share information and opinion.
I want to share my best wishes for 2010.
Photo Credit Funchye
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