Journalism’s New and Emerging Realities
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The new competitive landscape requires media organizations to develop new competencies to succeed. Finding new ways to meet users’ needs and desires will be the sources of value that drive new business models.
These four questions about new industry realities reveal opportunities for change:
- How is the competitive landscape changing?
- What new competencies are needed to succeed?
- What needs can be met, problems solved or desires met to create value?
- How are media organizations structured to capture this value?
New Competitive Landscape: How is the competitive landscape changing?
When the media industry was more stable, the primary risks were clearer. For mainstream media, risk centered primarily on rivalry among existing commercial competitors. The risk for independent media centered on competing against the mainstream as controlled by corporate conglomerates and government powerbrokers. Today, risk comes from all directions. The competitive forces in mainstream and independent media overlap almost indistinguishably. As David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous and fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, puts it, “There is no more mainstream.” An important aim of progressive media could be to fight to keep it that way.
The basis for competition has changed due to significant shifts in abundances and scarcities, which underlie the basic principles of supply and demand. The proliferation of media devices and convergence of content on them exacerbate these dynamics. Furthermore, globalization and demographic shifts have made audiences more complex, yet their consumption habits still fall into familiar patterns described by “power law.”
Power law (aka “rich get richer effect”) is a self- reinforcing positive feedback loop. For example, the more babies are born, the more people grow up to have babies; or the more money you have in the bank, the more money you earn to put in the bank. This dynamic shows up in nature, social systems, financial markets and many other places.
This week, we’ll cover the following changes in journalism’s competitive landscape:
- New abundances (Tues)
- New scarcities (Weds)
- Device proliferation, convergence, and their effects (Thurs)
- Dawn of a demographic revolution (Fri)
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
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