How the Media Can Save Itself

Taking potshots at mainstream media -- or defending the old guard -- seems to have become an online mania. From what I can see, there are ways out of free-famish on one side and pay-poor on the other. It is possible for companies to look at what is happening online and realize that if you're going to survive on the Internet as a viable medium, you have to find ways to go native. Simply translating what existed in print isn't going to work any better than thinking you can take a novel and translate it, page for page, into a screenplay.

Unfortunately, much of the adaptation that old line media have grasped close has been nothing more than trying to layer additional "stuff" onto the old structure. For example, a daily newspaper decides that adding multimedia selections to accompany a story is the way to be hip. Uh, hep? Hup? Hop? Or a magazine tacks a place for comments at the end of an article, or makes it easy for audience members to vote for a piece on Digg.

But what media companies are effectively doing is extending their product lines rather than creating something new that will stand on its own. And as marketing expert Al Ries notes: "Line extension is a loser's game. It doesn't usually work, but even if it does, it almost always damages the core brand." An extension gives you just enough rope to hang yourself because you change the definition of your company.

What media companies must do is forgo the notion of extending their current brands and product lines in linear ways. I'm coming to the conclusion that this includes multimedia, aggregator sites, pay walls, and the like. All these do is attempt to maintain an old approach with new technology. The companies need to find new approaches to presenting information and making it relevant. Actually, they need to realize that while many on the Internet expect that "information wants to be free," they don't necessarily feel the same way about what the media has always been best at: telling stories.

Telling a story can happen many ways. Maybe it does mean combining text, video, and audio in compelling ways where none stands on its own and the sum is greater than the individual parts. For example, this MSN Money package on WalMart in China uses video and graphics to offer integrated descriptions that the framework of text simply cannot touch. Could it possibly make the need for both more obvious? Sure, but it's a good start away from running a text story with a single accompanying multimedia snippet. But full integration means having people learn how to tell stories in multiple media, because they way they tell any single part will have to change.

Or look at Slate's News Dots, in which story topics are graphically shown, with their interconnections made obvious.

It's not as though there haven't been visual search engines that did the same thing with various representations of search terms. But putting together the connections with the stories seems like a natural. Why doesn't AP, with its volume of stories, do something like that instead of insisting on trying to be its own aggregator? Good lord, how powerful would that be? And how compelling to audiences?

But all these approaches require something that most media companies may not be capable of doing: thinking differently. Success means not only willingness to experiment to see what draws audience, advertisers, and potentially new revenue models, but willingness to toss approaches that are nothing but line extensions. That's the willingness missing in much of media, and it's why many media companies are going to cease to exist, at least as they've been known, within the next five years. Mainstream media companies are willing to change to save themselves so long as they don't really have to change.

Image via Flickr user Thirteen Of Clubs, CC 2.0.