Vin Crosbie
Image Credit: S.I. Newhouse School of Communications website
In response to the question on whether social media posed an actual threat to newspapers, Vin Crosbie, managing partner of Digital Deliverance LLC, and an adjunct professor of multimedia, photography and design at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, as well as the school’s senior new media consultant, sent me this insightful response when I asked him whether social media was a threat to newspapers. Check out the entire story here.
Vin Crosbie: Traditional media folks – that is, folks who still engage in the Industrial Era media doctrines and practices known as Mass Media – have blinders on. Their long beliefs and confidence that no other forms of public media could successfully evolve and arise have blinded them to exactly what the rise of Social is. They mistakenly think that Social Media are new Mass Media vehicles competing directly against traditional platforms such as newspapers, magazines, and radio and television broadcasts.
They are correct that new forms of Media competing with Mass Media have arisen (and indeed will supersede Mass Media as the dominant means by which people obtain news, entertainment and information). However, they’re wildly wrong to think that these new forms of media are merely alternative vehicles for Mass Media.
Underlying Mass Media and its theories and practices is an Industrial Era technological limitation— everyone must simultaneously receive the version of an edition or program. In other words, an analog printing press or broadcast transmitter (even on cable or satellite) cannot customize the edition or program it sends to each reader’s or listener’s individual mix of needs, interests or tastes. Instead, everybody today gets the same edition of the New York Times and the same edition of the CBS Evening News. The result of this limitation of Industrial Era printing (Gutenberg) and broadcasting (Marconi) technologies, that everyone simultaneously receives the same version of an edition is that editors select and package which stories to include in that edition based generally upon two criteria: those stories which might have the widest demographic interest and those stories about which the editors think everyone should become informed.
An anecdotal example I use in my classroom is this: I’m a soccer fanatic who lives in the New York City suburbs, yet neither of two daily newspapers to which I subscribe publish soccer stories. With limited page space in print, they instead publish stories about sports with even wider demographic appeal than soccer: baseball, American football, tennis and golf. There’s probably hundreds of thousands of soccer fans in the 17 million person Greater New York City metropolitan regions, but we don’t get to see stories about our sports. Yet one of the two newspapers to which I subscribe is the New York Times, which 20 years ago when I was Reuters’ business manager in New York City bought the Reuters soccer wire, which provides literally hundreds of soccer stories each day. So, I know that the New York Times has the stories I and hundreds of thousands of other soccer fans want daily. The stories exist, but they aren’t being distributed, a distribution problem.
What most Mass Media executives don’t realize is that the greatest change in media history occurred during the past 30 years. It wasn’t the Internet or mobile connectivity or people changing their media consumption from analog to digital platforms. It was that people’s access and choices of news, entertainment and information [that] has changed from relative scarcity to surplus (even overload) during the course of some 30 years. Prior to that change, people might have put up with receiving a daily newspaper that printed not specifically for their own individual interests, but for a demographic approximation of the region. Because they had no other choice back then, they’d read that edition, but perhaps read only two to four stories in it, despite the edition having containing perhaps 30 to 100 stories. Yet now that people have instant desktop, laptop and mobile phone access to every newspaper, magazines, broadcaster, blog and other information source on earth, they instead gravitate across all that as if it were one gargantuan edition, each person hunting and gathering for sources of stories that meet her individual mix of needs, interests and tastes.
At first, they used only search engines to hunt and gather those stories. However, the ever accelerating pace of Moore’s Law has allowed creating of turn-key websites that allow an individual to tag and feed into her own “page” (be it a MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, Renren, LinkedIn, etc., page) a flow of stories that specifically meet her individual mix of needs, interests and tastes. Moreover, because those personal pages are linked to friends who she’s tagged, people who probably have distinctly similar needs, interests and tastes to her own (which indeed is why they are friends), the flow of stories into, say, her Facebook page, gives her an extraordinarily more articulate matching of stories to her uniquely individual mix of needs, interests and tastes than any Mass Media edition or program ever can.
These new forms of public media that provide feeds of news, entertainment and information, which much more articulately match individuals’ needs, interests and tastes, are known as Individuated Media. Social Media are the major subset. Most have all the reach and even greater mass scale than any Mass Medium, yet each user simultaneously sees an entirely different mix of content than every other user. Think of Facebook as an example – 1.1 billion users, yet each sees an entirely unique mix of content based upon individual needs, interests, tastes and choices of friends. Is Facebook a Mass Medium? No. It’s and Individuated Media.
The characteristics and capabilities of Individuated Media change the role of traditional Mass Media organizations. For example, no longer do people purchase and consume an entire edition; they instead consume only selected stories from within a dozen to hundreds of editions. The effective role of Mass Media companies is no longer to produce packages, but individual stories, and not be limited to only providing a number of stories that fit in print or within a 30-minute news program. The sum of the parts individually is now worth more than the whole.
Moreover, the rise of Individuated Media is causing a reversal in how people obtain stories. In the old days, they’d have to purchase multiple periodicals to get the mix they wanted or enjoy broadcasts only at the day and times specified by the broadcaster, but now a flow of the individual stories they want (or their like-minded friends think they should see) [are directed] into their own page or site. Rather than having to flow to multiple media companies publications, channels or websites, the individually-specific elements they want now flow automatically to them.
Reporters or Mass Media executives who see Social Media as potentially competing platforms that do what their organizations do, don’t realize the entirety of it. The billions of people worldwide who use Individuated Media aren’t going to abandon its superior capabilities and go back to each consuming a few Mass Media periodicals or broadcasts networks for all their needs. There is an epochal shift in media underway.
