Suppose you’re a local media company. In the past, this meant you owned a newspaper or operated a TV station. At the time, you produced content for a single medium, in a single format. You may also have to produce text and video, photos and databases, audio and animation — and you probably encourage your audience to contribute comments, questions, photos and videos as well.
Now comes the toughest challenge: Making sure that people can find what’s relevant to them.
Chuck Peters, CEO of Gazette Communications (which owns the daily newspaper and the ABC affiliate in Cedar Rapids, Ia.) argues that this challenge can be met only by rethinking the traditional media production model.
Peters — whose company is sponsoring my graduate new media innovation project class this fall — has written that media companies need an entirely different approach to managing content. “In many cases our current model presupposes that info gatherers (reporters) gather info based on the media they will use for distribution, a preconceived limiting paradigm.” (Read his introduction to the Integrated Content Management Framework, a Newspaper Association of America effort.)
A media company cannot predict how people will want to use various types of content, says Peters. Consequently, there may be unforeseen opportunities to generate revenue by reusing content once it’s been gathered. He contends that to maximize the value of a media company’s content, it needs to be stored in a database and tagged (or categorized) in many different ways.
Meeting with my students, Peters fleshed out this concept by describing a Twitter “tweet” (140 characters) as perhaps the most elemental unit of content. Imagine that you’re covering a live event with a series of 140-character updates, each potentially supplemented with a photo, video or audio file and user comments and ratings related to each piece of content. With these assets stored in the right production system, people running any of the company’s media products could assemble content packages, and software could identify content most likely to be relevant to individual users.
Peters’ company is investing to try to make this vision a reality. It has created a subsidiary called e-Me Ventures, based near Chicago, to license and/or build the technology platform that would store and tie together all of the content collected by journalists or submitted by people in the community. Peters has been speaking with industry groups and seeking other media companies interested in investing in e-Me Ventures. (More info)
For more about the Gazette’s strategy, read my recent Readership Institute article, Building the local media company of the future. Also, in my Medill class this fall, my students’ assignment is to come up with new ideas for improving conversations and interaction around news. Their work recently yielded this list of the five biggest barriers to online participation. Follow the students’ work at the Crunchberry Project.
