Facebook: Your New Newssource
By Elizabeth Filippouli
I just read a very interesting blog piece in Harvard Business Review, written by Melbourne Business School’s economic professor, Joshua Gans. Gans argues (quite rightly in my opinion) that “Facebook is currently the largest news organization”.
Without a doubt, over the past years, the world of digital media has been changing at an astonishing pace. Digital technologies and platforms are fundamentally transforming the news media industry and the speed of change is only accelerating. In the post-information age personalization is a key aspect and today everything is made to order. Information is extremely personalized. A widely held assumption is that individualisation is the extrapolation of narrowcasting-one goes from a large to a small to a smaller group, ultimately to the individual.
The phenomenon of industry convergence within the Media, Telecoms and Technology industries is transforming the communications and entertainment sector and creating a challenging new environment for traditional broadcasters and news organisations, regardless of their size, who need to prove as successful in narrow-casting as they are in broadcasting.
Today consumers are faced with an unprecedented number of methods to acquire information, watch, post or obtain written or recorded content. In this shifting landscape, media companies—old and new—are showing signs of true innovation and are exploring new delivery systems, business models and participation conduits.
Clearly, t is not always easy for incumbent industry players and organisations to recognise the change happening around them and accordingly adapt their strategy. The threat has often been more visible than the opportunity: user-generated content diffuses editorial power.
To reinforce Gans’s argument I will add what CNN President Jon Klein had publicly admitted in May 2010; at a BusinessWeek question-and-answer session, Klein declared Facebook “a bigger threat for CNN than Fox News”, pointing out that the popularity of these platforms reflects a high demand for new information, while Facebook draws many more users than Fox does. Obviously, organisations that can synthesize information will provide a highly valuable service to their audiences. Those who don’t they may well lose out on three critical elements: popularity, audience and revenue.
Agreed. My children and my students do not read or watch traditional media, unless they happen on it while perusing the web. The group of college students I’m about to take to central/eastern Europe and London/Oxford for a month of study will be asked this year to present a research paper as to whether Tim Berners-Lee will be as significant as Gutenberg in revising society. I argued today in a radio interview that social media is having more of an effect, (although usually quite overlooked) on U.S. culture, politics and mores than it is on the Arab nations. I’m glad to see innovation journalism taking off as a medium for discussion of our future media.