Seeing the New Media Shift

Alan Mutter (great aptronym for someone writing a blog) is a "veteran media executive, who fears our news-gathering companies are stumbling to extinction," as says his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur. I only came across this last night via the BoSacks blog (worth being on the mailing list).

Mutter's background makes his observations in his post Dead animals, large and small even more telling. He mentiones how he's seen two occasions where a post of his received attention from Major Media Sources and a site called Small Dead Animals, written by "an airbrush artist and schnauzer breeder who resides in a small town in Saskatchewan." In one case, the latter sent 1,000 readers to Mutter's site while a mentions on the sites of Forbes and BusinessWeek resulted in ... 1. That is, one, singular, do not go to two, but still bigger than zero. A similar overwhelming imbalance in attention happened with a second post, this time pitting Small Dead Animals against Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Philadelphia Daily News.

Folks, this isn't just amusing (though it is decidedly that). It shows you that as media moves to the web just how unbalanced the playing field can be. In this case, the largest media companies in the world are outclassed by a small cadre of schnauzers. Yes, the Internet is still relatively new, but few people are getting just how much of a change there is from the past. Sure, the Major Media Sites can attract traffic because of their brands and audiences. But how much pull do they have? How much do new generations of media consumers care about what they are doing? Money alone isn't going to establish them:

With the formidable creative talent, market reach, commercial relationships and financial capability they possess, the Large Ones ought to have an enormous edge over Canadian schnauzer breeders in creating editorially compelling and commercially successful online content. But they are failing, because they try to confine their new media ventures to the tightly edited and carefully modulated conventions of their existing brands.

Right. So where does that leave all of us? With two big lessons, I think. One is that you can't depend on someone making your business happen, and that especially includes Major Media. I can attest to several times having a post on my BizBlast blog ending up being references via Sphere on the Wall Street Journal's site - and getting, oh, three readers from it.

The other lesson is that if you do something smart and entertaining and work to get how things happen on the web, you could become one of the Small Dead Animals, which apparently isn't such a bad thing.