Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Business Wire’s 2015 Media Survey is now available and it offers startling results about how journalists see the future of news media. The landscape of media is changing – new platforms and new styles. The New York Times is an institution but it didn’t start off as one. How will we be referring to BuzzFeed decades from now? Will the two seemingly different lines of media style intersect at some point in the future? These questions are part of the debate regarding the future of media and journalists are split.

According to an article published in The Guardian back in 2013, BuzzFeed is described as an, “irreverent US news and entertainment website taking the social web by storm” and investor Kazz Lazerow, co-founder of Buddy Media, described the website as “the defining media company for the social age.”

Only a few years ago, BuzzFeed represented the wave of change the digital age brought upon news media and that wave has only continued to grow. Now, BuzzFeed is challenging traditional forms of news, jockeying to become the standard of journalism.

When asked to decide between The New York Times style and the BuzzFeed style, journalists made clear that while the classical form isn’t going anywhere, it will have to share its place at the top....

The New York Times Innovation Report has been ripped to  pieces by many brains in the media world but the issues are the familiar TBD framework I work with, namely Technology (can/does it do what is needed?), Behaviour (will people do what we need/want?) and Data (will enough people do what we need?).

After ploughing through it, despite a slightly depressing overtone, I am confident the New York Times will pull through…the industry can’t afford it not to (read: have an R&D budget). The very fact it is doing a report of this sort (especially considering who asked for it) means they are focusing and clear about their future problems – success therefore is predicated on hard decisions being made about some very core issues (staff etc).

A few things stood out when I read the report...

Last July, The Washington Post launched a live video channel that its president proclaimed would be “the ESPN of politics.”

Instead, PostTV turned out to be more like a public access show. Within five months, the live content had vanished and the “channel” became little more than a clearinghouse for pre-taped video packages and recycled press briefing footage, along with the occasional original report.

What the Post learned in its video flop in 2013 is what The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO and other large news organizations had discovered in years prior: Creating quality live television is expensive — the Post invested millions of dollars and dozens of staffers to Post TV — and much harder than it looks. The end result didn’t interest readers — or advertisers....