Yesterday, at Write! Canada 2009, the annual conference sponsored by The Word Guild I gave a workshop on the way the new social media are changing the publishing world, and how writers might adapt. I made some notes and said I would put them up here at Future Tense.)
One caution: I am not an expert. I am in the process of working it out myself, and hope to share what I have learned so far.
1. Understand the difference new media make.
Let’s look at how the tsunami of different choices in communication has impacted traditional media:
A) Newspaper death watch
From journalist Paul Gillin:
The high fixed cost of print publishing makes the major metro newspaper business model unsustainable in a world that increasingly wants information to be free.
Add to that the toll from management neglect during the heady days of the industry and damaging scandals at a few major publications and you have an industry that’s teetering on the brink of an abyss. The newspaper model scales up very well but, it scales down very badly. It costs a newspaper nearly as much to deliver 25,000 copies as it does to deliver 50,000 copies. Readership has been in decline for 30 years and shows no signs of ending. Meanwhile, new competition has sprung up online with a vastly superior cost structure and an interactive format that appeals to the new generation of readers. On top of that, many newspapers assumed huge debt loads over the last two years, forcing them to plow dwindling profits into debt service.
Ultimately, this painful decline will give birth to a new model of journalism built upon aggregation and reader-generated content. I’m an optimist, and I think the new journalism will be better in many ways than what preceded it. It’s just that getting there is going to hurt a lot.
So a large part of the newspaper’s problem is economic.
A note about newspaper bias
People sometimes say that newspapers are in decline because they are biased, but – as I have pointed out before – they tended to become more biased when they were in decline. The more publicly vital a source of news is, the less it can be merely ideologically driven. (Or, put another way, how many air traffic controllers are allowed to rant their political and moral opinions to pilots?) Bias doesn’t matter any more because readers can just go elsewhere for news.
In fact, the new social media can be much more biased. Consumers organize their own media world and systematically shut out what they don’t want to hear. (Of course, people have always shut out what they didn’t want to hear but it never used to be as easy to organize a whole world around it.)
Here are some more notes and stats on old-media decline:
B) “Television audience plummeting as viewers move online”
“May 19th, 2008 | By James Lewin | Category: General, Streaming Video, Video
It looks like mainstream broadcasters will have to come to terms with YouTube, video podcasts and other Internet media or they’ll face the same fate as newspapers.”
I’m not sure exactly how they can come to terms with it, because the whole point of the new social media is that there is no longer any mainstream or non-mainstream medium. Anyone can podcast or videocast. The media professional is no longer the gatekeeper to information.
A note about gross or trivial TV
Again, I don’t think that low quality programming is what’s driving the decline, but rather the reverse. TV became increasingly gross and trivial as it became a less important source of news and entertainment. What’s driving the decline is simply the fact that people can watch whatever they want any time of day anywhere they want. Those of us old enough to remember prime time TV will understand the significance of this: TV producers voluntarily accepted prime time standards because everyone was watching TV. And again, a key question is economic: Whither ad revenues?
C) Radio audience decline:
From Anything But Ipod:
Bridge Ratings recently did a study to see what effect MP3 players are having on radio listenership among 12 – 18 year olds. Not surprisingly people who owned players have tuned in less since they the purchase of their MP3 Player. They also mention in an earlier study that listeners are listening to a wider variety of music genres forcing radio stations to change their programming.
It will be interesting to see once music services like Yahoo! and Napster are more widespread there will be more of a loss in radio audience. Services like that are like creating your own customizable portable radio station and you are not forced to listen to the same top ten songs over and over day after day. Personally, I’m done with FM radio, I can’t take anymore fity-cent.
The thing to see here is that Anything But now has choices he did not have 20 years ago; he can listen only to his favourites if he wants. He is his own disk jockey, and fifty-cent will not be on his air space..
D: Some stats on the overall decline
From Boing Boing
* Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
* Television: network TV’s audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
* Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
* Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
* Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
* Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole
Take-home point: If you planned your career around traditional media, back up and rethink.
2. Understand why the new social media make that difference
We talked a bit about that above. People worldwide want to choose their own news, and they can.
As Podcasting News notes,
Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development.
Asian markets (not including Japan) are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region
All social media platforms have grown significantly over the three Waves: Video Clips are the quickest growing platform, up from 31% penetration in Wave 1 to 83% in Wave 3
57% have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content: 55% of users have uploaded photos, 22% of users have uploaded videos
[ ... ]
Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and a collective rival to traditional media (184m bloggers world-wide, China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers)
– 73% have read a blog, 45% have started a blog
Will this lead to a world of social isolation? Yes and no. People won’t be isolated from those people and ideas that they already like and agree with, but they may be isolated from others.
The system will likely favour minority positions; they were the ones that tended to get left out or misrepresented in the age of mainstream media. But we shall see.
Also from Podcasting News:
Social media has strong impacts over brand’s reputation – 34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog – 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs
This, of course will impact marketing and advertising campaigns. The consumer is his own marketer and advertiser.
3. Understand how new media affect your writing career.
The writer, like everyone else, struggles to find ways to get paid in an era where anyone can be his own broadcaster, publisher, or disk jockey. Some methods are:
a) advertisement, including Google Ad Sense The writer need not manage the ads; Google Adsense does that.
b) PayPal button. Regular readers often choose to contribute to your blog, even if you are not a charity.
c) possibly national strategies for digitized content like the traditional Access Copyright and Public Lending Right, which compensate writers for lost opportunities. In Canada, Access Copyright covers the free use of a writer’s material in public institutions (for example, when a nursing instructor runs of 30 copies of your recent health sciences story and distributes them to the class.) Public Lending Right covers the use of your books in libraries. (If the library system buys 30 copies, they probably prevent many sales you would otherwise make because patrons can just reserve one on the Internet, and don’t need to pay for it.) Writers should research their eligibility for such systems.
d) You may be eligible for a payment under the Google settlement.
e) Self-publishing is a much more viable option than it used to be because you need not end up acting as your own distributor, with 18 cases of books in the garage. For that reason, I used to be down on self-publishing. Now, I would say, look into it. You are going to have to market your own book anyway.
4. Decide which new media are critical to your career.
As Web 2.0 notes,
Facebook is being described as many things today, as pundits, marketers, social scientists and educators try to get a handle of what’s going on in this space. Is it the “connective tissue,” or a “social graph,” a resume, or a utility?
New York Times Op-Ed writer Alice Mathias has a different take on all of this, dismissing it as an place that encourages performances and escapism –a time-sucking hangout of the “Fakebook Generation.”
She has a point too. Social media can be a digital water cooler, for those who succumb. You probably only need to focus on some of them, in order to build readership.
For example, a blog is an excellent way to promote a book before, during, and after writing it, building a readership in the process. Twitter can easily reach those who want to be told when you update the blog (provided they are following you). On the other hand, you may opt for a Facebook strategy (that is not Fakebook). It is best to take a bit of time to think about it, rather than rushing into things.
5. Observe and copy techniques from new media stars.
In general, the new social media technology is user-friendly. Where most people go wrong is failure to understand their reader/listener/viewer market, not the technology.
Here are sources of blog tips, to prevent that. But you can also learn a lot just by observing successful bloggers.
Will the new social media be a good thing or a bad thing? Probably both. One thing is for sure: They are not going away, and they can make or break your career.
Denyse O’Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.
4 Comments
June 21, 2009 at 8:01 am
Excellent advice, Denyse.
June 21, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Thanks for the useful strategic considerations. You do a good job of reversing some common “which came first” assumptions (i.e. bias in news papers and their decline in importance etc.) but you haven’t address the perhaps most interesting one. You repeat the wide spread concern that new social media and citizen journalism allows a person to create a whole world entirely around their own specific interest but why do we think there is such a drive to insulation at all? What makes us assume people only want to see what they already agree with or are fairly familiar with? And, if in fact this is the case, when did it become the case and why is it the case? This seems the vital question, and I think we are making huge assumptions in jumping to the conclusion that people will isolate themselves within their own ideological world or that they want to do such a thing (or that online writers will allow such a thing). There are some great interviews with top journalists about issues like this that influence the future of journalism at http://www.ourblook.com/component/option,com_sectionex/Itemid,200076/id,8/view,category/#catid69 which I have found useful.
June 24, 2009 at 2:59 am
In Canada and America the decline in mainstream media is just showing the incompetence in talent in these areas. In Canada one must be of the right ethnicity/sex/etc identity for entry level or promotion. likewise in America, I note CNN, one must be darker then white and female , and non native to get a chance. Conservative or Christian is not good either.
Rush Limbaugh showed that talent will find its audience. Conservative talk won because its banned in the mainstream media.
They do not just ban ideas but identities that are more talented and could bring audiences in.
No excuses about technology anybody.
The people will reward good products. otherwise they will segregate among lesser talent.
Everything just shows a loss of chance for talent because the mainstream has bigger agendas in trying to rule the nations.
June 24, 2009 at 6:23 pm
A well written piece. Thank you.
With respect to bias, I’m not sure the longstanding problems with the state-run media — and in this group I include all organisations that are owned, subsidised, or merely regulated by any level of government in Canada — have anything near as much to do with bias as they do with lies, half-lies, and deliberate omissions and misrepresentation of facts. The CBC, CTV, Global and all of our major dailies either do not do any fact-checking whatsoever, or they lie and lie routinely in almost every single paper or news broadcast. It is not bias that is unforgivable. It is the countless and seemingly willful deceptions that are the undoing of the state-run media. I came to see the deceptions, and to look for them whenever I watched TV or picked up a newspaper, during the 80 day bombing campaign in Yugoslavia. I knew the region well. I knew the KLA were Europe’s single largest drug smuggling ring, and were a heavily armed terrorist group who had been wreaking havoc in Kosovo Province for years. Watching Nancy Durham get taken by KLA con artists was almost painful. I was so embarassed for her, but if she had been at all critical of the KLA or sympathetic to the thousands murdered by them then she would likely have been fired from her post at the CBC. It was like watching my country go to war against Columbia in support of the Medellin Cartel, with the state run press as cheerleader.
I started fact checking what I was seeing and reading on every topic I could look up and I was truly appalled. I’ve met more and more people in the years since who now *know* like they know their own name that state-run press is not and never has been a reliable source of information, and that even when they do get the facts correct, they most often spin them and misrepresent their signifigance. “Rathergate” was nothing at all unusual. It was business as usual until bloggers showed up. I have hardly bought a paper or watched a TV news broadcast since, except to see how the Government and Press were spinning something embarassing to themselves, or to to be alerted (for investment purposes) when some new stock manipulation scheme was being touted in the press. I read papers now to see what propaganda our decidedly Hegelian (if not Marxist) government is promoting this week. I have never since shaken the belief that the state run press richly deserves its present troubles.
I don’t buy the argument that the freedom to seek out sources of information which agree with our religious beliefs leads to a sort of intellectual ghetto where people only see opinions they already agree with. I routinely read posts by people I don’t agree with — mostly international or national Socialists of some sort (Hegelians, etc). I don’t mind and I don’t avoid them because on the ‘net, most wear their bias on their sleeves. Even the most rabid Trots are, generally speaking, more honest on their own blogs than the state run press because on the net people talk back, they fact check, and, well… nobody likes a liar.
Chris