August 5, 2005

The Masses' Medium

Terry Heaton comments that "Blogs are not mass media."

No, they are not. The era of "mass media" is over, or almost over. The era of niche media and grassroots media and personal media has taken root and is now pushing up millions of tender shoots.

Few people understand what that means...

Most people I know in the media business - whether they be in newspapers, broadcast, radio or on the PR side of the fence - don't understand it.

That's why most newspapers and teevee stations are still churning out their product the way they have since 1950, and most businesses and organizations and PR firms are still doing press releases and media relations the way they've done it for decades.

But "media" doesn't work that way anymore, and it never will again.

The Daily Bugle is being replaced by The Instant Blogosphere. The they-talk-we-listen model of broadcast is challenged by the proliferation of cheap, easy-to-use digital tools that allow anyone to become a reporter, to produce and distribute text, audio and video to a global audience; to do it faster than any lumbering TV news dinosaur could hope to manage, and then to interact with readers and viewers in ways that scare the willies out of most traditional broadcast journalist elites.

"Mass communication" is rapidly being replaced by the Many Conversations of the blogosphere. Blogs are not a new mass medium, they are the the medium of the masses.

It's a huge change and Big Media and big institutions that feel threatened by it can't stop it.

I work in the PR field now, not journalism, and I've come to realize that PR is going to be increasingly ineffective the more that mass-comm is dwarfed by the conversations of the many. A decade ago, a company or organization hoping for a little media coverage in Nashville could send a press release to two daily newspapers, three television stations, a radio station or two, and maybe one or two niche publications. The database of contacts was easy to keep, and the players were known quantities you could interact with.

Not so now. The other day while killing a couple minutes of time I ran a Technorati search for the name of an organization for whom I have done some PR/marketing work and was stunned at how many blogs - blogs I had never heard of - mentioned that client on their sites. Understand, these were not blogs by people who work for the client. Some of those mentions were 100 percent favorable, some were favorable to the likely audience of the blog but perhaps not to the client and some were simply bad for my client.

And that was just on the first two pages of search results. There were 32 pages of search results.

A press release just ain't gonna do it no more.

You have to be in the conversation. It's risky. But there is no alternative. Mass media is dead.