MediaSnackers—Interview#2
The 2nd email interview discussing new/old media.
(WORLD) The MediaSnackers interviews focusses on individuals, organisations or companies who are simply impressing us and which are crying out for more discussion.
Jon Fine is a Media Columnist for BusinessWeek.
Tell us about BusinessWeek and your role within it.
I write a weekly media and marketing column—Media Centric— for the magazine. For the Web site I write a blog, which is brilliantly titled Fine On Media and can be found here: www.businessweek.com/innovate/fineonmedia. I aspire to update it daily, but we always aspire to things we never quite achieve. When breaking news warrants it I write it up for the Web.
How do you see mainstream media evolving to compete with consumer/peer/self-generated content?
Poorly and fitfully? There are, obviously, things self-generated content won’t replace; there are stories that require a massive news operation. (Although there are fewer of these than most mainstream outlets believe.) I find it interesting that a bunch of people I know have suggested independently of each other that movie reviewers at second-tier papers are doomed—there are just too many places to get opinions like that on the Web.
But evolving—you will see more Technorati/blog feeds, you will see more reporters blogging, you will see more comment boxes on stories. Most of this will be handled poorly and most of these reporters’ blogs will not be good, but then that’s true of most user-generated content too.
Parenthetically: I am grateful I am not responsible for a monthly teen magazine. Given how teens interact with media now (as opposed to just 3 or 5 years ago), I have no idea what that a monthly teen magazine could be anymore.
What trends are you seeing in young peoples media consumption/creation which is exciting and scaring you?
Anytime you can put creative and communicative (is that a word?) tools in the hands of lots of people, it’s good. What scares me is how much time I waste on myspace and youtube. Actually the only thing that scares me is the bigger question of what happens to people like me who draw paychecks from traditional media organization, but my ego is not sufficiently developed to insist that all evolution in media should happen in a way that benefits me personally.
You recently highlighted in your blog a Technorati study of blog postings by language (41% of blog posts are in Japanese, 28% are in English, and 14% are in Chinese) – does this reflect future influences over the culture of the net?
I don’t think so, because there is no crossing the language barrier, at least for us hammerheaded English speakers. I mean—I just don’t understand what’s on a Japanese blog, so what happens on it by definition can’t influence me, even if I want it to.
In terms of entertainment, will mobile technology and broadband tv really be as popular as everyone is making out?
My gut is that the potential impact of both (and especially mobile) is overstated right now in America, but now that some devices are available to Americans that can effectively bridge TV and Internet I kind of want to see how they’re received before gasbagging some opinion.
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