Measurement: Impact, trends and developments

There’s a debate raging over which direction the media industry is going to take – recently the buzz has focused on paywalls and subscriptions as publishers struggle to work out a successful business model for a media landscape that changes as quickly as it’s innovated and reengineered by its audience.

At a recent talk led by Vin Crosbie, an Adjunct Professor at Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, the discussion centered on the speed at which these changes have occurred over the past several years.

In his discussion, titled “The Greatest Change in the History of Media,” Crosbie traced the history of great changes in the media industry over the past 20-30 years, including the development of cable TV and the growth of the topical magazine industry due to cheaper printing costs (the magic words: offset lithography). Key turning points were the introduction of public access to the Internet in 1992 and widespread acceptance of broadband in the early 2000s. According to Crosbie, that more than one-fifth of humanity has now gained instant access to information over the internet in the last 18 years.

The key takeaway was that the great change we’re seeing in media these days is not in the Internet, or in mobile, or in any one platform: it’s in the availability, in fact the surplus, of information which once was scarce.

This has had drastic effects on the newspaper industry around the world which relied on charging a premium for content – we’ve seen this recently with the closures of major newspapers in markets like the US, UK, and Germany (notably this has not proven the case in Singapore, where traditional media continue to thrive). Simultaneously the growth of sources online - at last check there were approximately 238 million active websites - has resulted in a robust and thriving internet economy.

However, with the increase in accessibility of information comes one major problem: relevance. Where journalists once did the job for us by picking and choosing “all the news that’s fit to print,” we now rely increasingly on search engines and algorithms to seek out information that’s useful to us. As Crosbie termed it, we act as hunters and gatherers of the web.

There’s an important space opening up for someone – or something – to come in and help us to understand and access relevant information. Google news and search tries to do this for us by taking stock of our previous searches and allowing us to customize the look and feel of a site to predict what’s up next. A few publishers are also looking into a customized print newspaper option, where users can select sections they’d be interested in reading.

But what about news we don’t know to ask for yet? Content curators may have a key role to play in the next media wave. A couple steps beyond your local media librarian, curators serve the public by predicting and aiding them in identifying what information they’ll want to consume – and what they can do without. Mashable recently made an interesting post overviewing the arguments for and against editorial curation (access it here), but I’d argue that we’ve reached a point in this day and age where making sense of the media has never been more important.