Five Thoughts on the Future of Journalism

Last night, a Twitter conversation between David Armano (SVP of Edelman Digital), Brian Morrissey (digital editor at AdWeek) and me about the disparity between mainstream media and the social web got me thinking about the future of journalism. Our conversation was sparked by a recent report conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (via this blog post).

The report itself is a good one, however, there was one point that stuck in my craw a little bit (and I think David's as well):

While social media players espouse a different agenda than the mainstream media, blogs still heavily rely on the traditional press -- and primarily just a few outlets within that -- for their information. More than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks. And just four -- the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post accounted for fully 80% of all links.

While I don't disagree at all with the concept that social media relies heavily on the same four legacy outlets for source material, this doesn't mean that social/new media can't or won't survive without these traditional media outlets. 

What I will concede is that IF traditional media were to die -- something I don't think will ever happen -- we would fair just fine. The biggest shift in my mind would be a need for better filters that would help us collectively sort through the wheat and chaff. This likely is some combination of human curation and a variety of technologies relying on collaborative filtering and natural language search.

With that as a backdrop, here are my five thoughts on the future of journalism.

1. As traditional advertising dollars continue to shrink, so too will budgets that support traditional advertising. Hopefully this means that rags like the New York Post go away and that gems like NPR and the Christian Science Monitor rise to the top via user support and innovative new sponsorship opportunties.
2. Following up on an earlier thought, as social media news sources grow and traditional ones shrink, there will be an ever increasing need for curation and technology to help us find and filter. Think Alltop.com with less Guy Kawasaki.
3. Traditional outlets will do themselves a favor by keeping an eye on the likes of The Austin Statesmen (h/t to Rob Quigley for the work he's leading there),  AdWeek's AdFreak co-created by Mr. Morrissey and Boston.com with its clever use of hashtagged content, regularly updated blogs and complementary video footage.
4. The need for PR firms and departments to brief/pitch top podcasters, bloggers, video bloggers and micro bloggers will continue to increase. Not saying this is a real "aha" but as a the reliance on the top news bloggers as primary source of information grows bigger, so too will a need to keep these influencers in the loop.
5. Only a few select organizations will ever be able to charge for their content irrespective of whether or not micropayments ever catch on.

I'm quite sure I'm missing a bunch of hot topics here but this should get some of the creative juices flowing. Where do you see the future of journalism headed? Join the conversation in the comments below.

Facebook Connect: Rockstar Podcast Interview

Cross-posted from blog.powered.com.

In an earlier podcast I did regarding Facebook Connect, I talked about the fact that I think that this is the future of social marketing. I am so excited about it, I enlisted the help of our PR firm, SHIFT Communications, to collect three more big brains including Forrester senior analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, digital editor of AdWeek, Brian Morrissey and marketing blogger/consultant, Susan Getgood.

A few highlights from the session for those that like to read more than they like to listen:

• Jeremiah Owyang (3:49 - 3:58) "In the past, we thought of interactive marketing which is user to Web site. Now, in social marketing, very different, it's user to user. "
• Brian Morrissey (5:18 - 5:43) "What we're talking about here with Connect, is how brands can look at these social platforms and tool sets as ways to really further make connections with their consumers wherever they are. And Facebook Connect has the possibility of allowing them to embed social marketing into how they interact with consumers."
• Susan Getgood (10:08 - 10:34) "Knowing what people find interesting to share is as important as knowing what they are looking at themselves. When we have a Web site, we can look at analytics and see which pages people are hitting and where they click-through and all this other stuff, but the idea that they thought something was important enough to share, that kind of information gives a company of any size the kind of information to know what kind of content really engages your customer and you can build more of it."

During the podcast, I also referred to some engaging statistics put together by the Business Insider regarding the effectiveness of Facebook Connect (thanks to Pearl Russell on the Powered team for finding these):

• Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.
• Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content
• Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site. Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.

Most importantly, you probably want to know the answer to which successful companies are currently using Facebook Connect? Unfortunately, there aren't many Fortune 500 companies using it yet but during our podcast, Brian brought up the examples of JC Penney (it's number 4 on the list of 10 in a great post by Mashable) and Red Bull. Jeremiah mentioned Volkswagon's Meet the VW's campaign.



To download this podcast, right-mouse click here and select "save file as."

If you're interested, we've got a slick demo of how Facebook will work with some of our Powered clients.

NOTE: The "Back to School" podcast series will be a regularly occurring podcast focused on the business value of social marketing, social media and online communities. Guests will include practitioners, authors, analysts and thought leaders in the space.