Among the Audience a Survey of New Media April 22Nd 2006
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Among the audience A survey of new media April 22nd 2006 Republication, copying or redistribution by any means is expressly prohibited without the prior written permission of The Economist The Economist April 22nd 2006 A survey of new media 1 Among the audience Also in this section It’s the links, stupid Blogging is just another word for having conversations. Page 3 Compose yourself Journalism too is becoming interactive, and maybe better. Page 5 The wiki principle Are many minds better than a few? Page 8 Heard on the street Podcasting will change radio, not kill it. Page 9 Wonders of the metaverse A fantasy world where people make their own lms. Page 10 The gazillion-dollar question So what is a media company? Page 11 The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media, says Andreas Kluth. That will profoundly change What sort of revolution? both the media industry and society as a whole Both good and badbut it’s too early to say in HE next big thing in 1448 was a technol- tried to stop, then control, then co-opt the what proportions. Page 13 Togy called movable type, invented new medium. In the centuries that fol- for commercial use by Johannes Guten- lowed, social and legal systems adjusted berg, a goldsmith from Mainz (although (with copyright laws, for instance) and the Chinese had thought of it rst). The books, newspapers and magazines began clever idea was to cast individual letters to circulate widely. The age of mass media (type) and then compose (move) these to had arrived. Two more technological make up printable pages. This promised to breakthroughsradio and television disrupt the mainstream media of the day brought it to its zenith, which it probably the work of monks who were manually reached around 1958, when most adult transcribing texts or carving entire pages Americans simultaneously turned on into wood blocks for printing. By 1455 Mr their television sets to watch I Love Lucy. Gutenberg, having lined up venture capi- tal from a rich compatriot, Johannes Fust, Second incarnation was churning out bibles and soon also pa- In 2001, ve-and-a-half centuries after Mr pal indulgences (slips of paper that rich Gutenberg’s rst bible, Movable Type people bought to reduce their time in pur- was invented again. Ben and Mena Trott, gatory). The start-up had momentum, but high-school sweethearts who became Acknowledgments its costs ran out of control and Mr Guten- husband and wife, had been laid o dur- The author would like to thank all those who helped in the berg defaulted. Mr Fust foreclosed, and a ing the dotcom bust and found themselves writing of this survey. Particular thanks go to Orville Schell little bubble popped. in San Francisco with ample spare time. at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California at Berkeley, Lee Rainie at the Pew Internet & Even so, within decades movable type Ms Trott started bloggingie, posting to her American Life Project, Kelly Delaney at Yahoo! and Reed spread across Europe, turbo-charging an online journal, Dollarshortabout stupid Hastings at Netix. information age called the Renaissance. little anecdotes from my childhood. For Martin Luther, irked by those indulgences, reasons that elude her, Dollarshort be- A list of sources can be found online used printing presses to produce bibles came very popular, and the Trotts decided www.economist.com/surveys and other texts in German. Others fol- to build a better blogging tool, which lowed suit, and vernaculars rose as Latin they called Movable Type. Likening it to An audio interview with the author is at declined, preparing Europe for nation- the printing press seemed like a natural www.economist.com/audio states. Religious and aristocratic elites rst thing because it was clearly revolutionary;1 2 A survey of new media The Economist April 22nd 2006 2 it was not meant to be arrogant or grandi- This has profound implications for tra- and turn them into conversations. That is ose, says Ms Trott to the approving nod of ditional business models in the media in- because institutions are closed, assume a Mr Trott, who is extremely shy and rarely dustry, which are based on aggregating hierarchy and have trouble admitting fal- talks. Movable Type is now the software of large passive audiences and holding them libility, he says, whereas conversations are choice for celebrity bloggers. captive during advertising interruptions. open-ended, assume equality and eagerly These two incarnations of movable In the new-media era, audiences will occa- concede fallibility. type make convenient (and very approxi- sionally be large, but often small, and usu- Today’s media revolution, like others mate) historical book-ends. They bracket ally tiny. Instead of a few large capital-rich before it, is announcing itself with a new the era of mass media that is familiar to media giants competing with one another and strange vocabulary. In the early 20th everybody today. The second Movable for these audiences, it will be small rms century, Charles Prestwich Scott, the edi- Type, however, also marks the beginning and individuals competing or, more often, tor, publisher and owner of the Manches- of a very gradual transition to a new era, collaborating. Some will be making ter Guardian (and thus part of his era’s which might be called the age of personal mainstream media), was aghast at the or participatory media. This culture is al- word television, which to him was half ready familiar to teenagers and twenty- Greek, half Latin: no good can come of it. somethings, especially in rich countries. Mr Scott’s equivalents today confront even Most older people, if they are aware of the stranger neologisms. Merriam-Webster, a transition at all, nd it puzzling. publisher of dictionaries, had blog as its Calling it the internet era is not help- word of the year in 2004, and the New Ox- ful. By way of infrastructure, full-scale par- ford American Dictionary picked pod- ticipatory media presume not so much the cast in 2005. Wikis, vlogs, meta- availability of the (decades-old) internet verses and folksonomies (all to be as of widespread, always-on, broad- explained later in this survey) may be next. band access to it. So far, this exists only in South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, Word count whereas America and other large media These words! The inability of the English markets are several years behind. Indeed, language to express these new things is even today’s broadband infrastructure distressing, says Barry Diller, 64, who ts was built for the previous era, not the com- the description media mogul. Over the ing one. Almost everywhere, download decades, Mr Diller has run two big Holly- speeds (from the internet to the user) are wood lm studios and launched Amer- many times faster than upload speeds ica’s fourth broadcast-television network, (from user to network). This is because the FOX Broadcasting. More recently, he has corporate giants that built these pipes as- made a valiant eort to get his mind sumed that the internet would simply be around the internet, with mixed results, another distribution pipe for themselves and is now the boss of IAC/InterActive- or their partners in the media industry. Corp, a conglomerate with about 60 on- Even today, they can barely conceive of a money from the content they create; oth- line brands. Mr Diller concedes that all of scenario in which users might put as much ers will not and will not mind, because the distribution methods get thrown up in into the network as they take out. they have other motives. People creating the air, and how they land is, well, still up stu to build their own reputations are at in the air. Yet Mr Diller is condent that The age of participation one end of this spectrum, says Philip Evans participation can never be a proper basis Exactly this, however, is starting to hap- at Boston Consulting Group, and one-man for the media industry. Self-publishing pen. Last November, the Pew Internet & superbrands such as Steven Spielberg at by someone of average talent is not very American Life Project found that 57% of the other. interesting, he says. Talent is the new American teenagers create content for the As with the media revolution of 1448, limited resource. internetfrom text to pictures, music and the wider implications for society will be- What an ignoramus! says Jerry Mi- video. In this new-media culture, says Paul come visible gradually over a period of de- chalski, with some exasperation. He ad- Sao, a director at the Institute for the Fu- cades. With participatory media, the vises companies on the uses of new media ture in California, people no longer pas- boundaries between audiences and cre- tools. Look around and there’s tons of sively consume media (and thus ad- ators become blurred and often invisible. great stu from rank amateurs, he says. vertising, its main revenue source) but In the words of David Sifry, the founder of Diller is assuming that there’s a nite actively participate in them, which usually Technorati, a search engine for blogs, one- amount of talent and that he can corner it. means creating content, in whatever form to-many lectures (ie, from media compa- He’s completely wrong. Not everything and on whatever scale. This does not have nies to their audiences) are transformed in the blogosphere is poetry, not every to mean that people write their own into conversations among the people audio podcast is a symphony, not every newspaper, says Jeremy Zawodny, a formerly known as the audience.