Introduction to Media Mindsets Blog
The Media Mindsets blog, as I envision it, is a work in progress. Today we move from discussion in meetings to putting thoughts in writing. (I almost said “on paper,” but that’s only one of the things I am having to change in my thinking.)
Let me start by sharing some of my thoughts on the role that a Media Mindsets blog can serve. I invite you to offer your suggestions on directions in which the blog should move and topics it should—and should not—address.
The creation of a blog should stimulate ideas and encourage discussion. Some personal blogs are heavily opinionated—and the opinion that prevails is that of the blog master. This blog is designed to be a research blog, not a personal blog, and, therefore, a forum for expressing ideas.
First there is so much material being produced daily that relates to areas of interest and importance for members of the Media Mindsets group: new media technological developments, changes in media businesses, media use by different groups and so on.
A contribution I hope this blog can make is to help us sharpen the focus of the Media Mindsets project. Perhaps discussion engendered here will produce agenda items for our formal meetings.
One goal for the blog is to reduce the amount of reading for the Media Mindsets group. Certainly if reading this blog becomes just more “chore,” it will have been counter-productive. I invite you to share with me sites that regularly or even occasionally post content of relevance for this project. I plan to write a new posting at least once a week with comments on and links to perhaps a half-dozen articles.
A second function this blog can serve is to provide a communication outlet for the group. Pearle’s latest message went out to 24 people and this number is growing. It's getting to be difficult for everyone to have an opportunity to share his/her thoughts during meetings. And as the group grows, it is becoming harder to find meeting times that non-retired members can work into their schedules.
The technical side
As for the technical side of the blog, credit Val Kelly, Rosemary DuMont and Sam Harper for getting me this far with the blog. Val is continuing to work on RSS feeds and related technical matters.
I invite your comments on either the content of the blog or other matters related to it. Add a comment to the blog or send it to me at jharper@kent.edu
Actually you might want to do both while we are in the testing phase.
Also you might test a couple of links to material related to media use. A good site to try is Pew's:
http://www.pewinternet.org/
. . . and for a site updated on weekdays that includes some media usage material:
http://www.iwantmedia.com/
. . . which referred to a story at
http://observer.com/media_offtherecord.asp
To go to a story posted on Flashline for the Media Mindsets group, try
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/171/report_display.asp
--Joe Harper
Let me start by sharing some of my thoughts on the role that a Media Mindsets blog can serve. I invite you to offer your suggestions on directions in which the blog should move and topics it should—and should not—address.
The creation of a blog should stimulate ideas and encourage discussion. Some personal blogs are heavily opinionated—and the opinion that prevails is that of the blog master. This blog is designed to be a research blog, not a personal blog, and, therefore, a forum for expressing ideas.
First there is so much material being produced daily that relates to areas of interest and importance for members of the Media Mindsets group: new media technological developments, changes in media businesses, media use by different groups and so on.
A contribution I hope this blog can make is to help us sharpen the focus of the Media Mindsets project. Perhaps discussion engendered here will produce agenda items for our formal meetings.
One goal for the blog is to reduce the amount of reading for the Media Mindsets group. Certainly if reading this blog becomes just more “chore,” it will have been counter-productive. I invite you to share with me sites that regularly or even occasionally post content of relevance for this project. I plan to write a new posting at least once a week with comments on and links to perhaps a half-dozen articles.
A second function this blog can serve is to provide a communication outlet for the group. Pearle’s latest message went out to 24 people and this number is growing. It's getting to be difficult for everyone to have an opportunity to share his/her thoughts during meetings. And as the group grows, it is becoming harder to find meeting times that non-retired members can work into their schedules.
The technical side
As for the technical side of the blog, credit Val Kelly, Rosemary DuMont and Sam Harper for getting me this far with the blog. Val is continuing to work on RSS feeds and related technical matters.
I invite your comments on either the content of the blog or other matters related to it. Add a comment to the blog or send it to me at jharper@kent.edu
Actually you might want to do both while we are in the testing phase.
Also you might test a couple of links to material related to media use. A good site to try is Pew's:
http://www.pewinternet.org/
. . . and for a site updated on weekdays that includes some media usage material:
http://www.iwantmedia.com/
. . . which referred to a story at
http://observer.com/media_offtherecord.asp
To go to a story posted on Flashline for the Media Mindsets group, try
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/171/report_display.asp
--Joe Harper
posted by Joe at 9:27 AM
25 Comments:
Thanks for posting this, Joe. I'm looking forward to an active discussion.
Thanks for creating this blog. I hope we have an active discussion area.
Here's an update on the media use survey. I've been working with the open-ended responses from survey form 3 that give reasons for using particular media. The SPSS Text Analyzer is providing some interesting feedback. So far, my main recommendation is to avoid open-ended responses to this question. The subjects are not sophisticated enough to know the kind of response you have in mind. (No reason they should be.) So, instead of saying that they choose newspapers to be informed or TV to be entertained, many of the responses go something like this:
Why do you use the computer?
So I can access the Internet.
No clue from that response as to the real reason for use.
I hope to have more for you at our next meeting on Jan. 25.
Blog looks great.
I'm not sure how this blog should intersect with the Media Mindset portal we have in Flashline. In many ways they serve a similar function. Which vehicle are people comfortable with and for what purposes? We want these tools to work for us appropriately.
Rosemary
I'm posting this article on our blog. Would you prefer postings here or on Flashline. It doesn't matter to me. Perhaps posting here will lead to more conversation. Let me know your posting preference. Thanks! Rosemary
Old media
King content
Jan 19th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Don't write off Hollywood and the big media groups just yet
“PAIN is temporary, film is forever.” That hopeful thought, which found its way into the original script of Peter Jackson's recent re-make of “King Kong”, might be seized upon by today's beleaguered entertainment industry. Media companies are suffering intense pain—and it is starting to seem worryingly permanent. In America shares of “old” media firms such as News Corporation, Comcast and other giants of television, film, radio and print, have fallen 25% behind the S&P 500 in the past two years, despite some heroic financial results. Meanwhile, the market value of Google, which made its debut on the stockmarket in 2004, is now equal to the combined worth of Walt Disney, News Corporation and Viacom, three beasts of the old media jungle. One investor, who recently moved two-thirds of his $1 billion fund out of American media and into emerging-market companies, moans that “the market thinks something's going to get them, whether it's piracy, personal video recorders, or Google.”
Desperate to rescue its share price, Viacom broke itself in two on January 3rd. Time Warner, the biggest media group of all, is under attack from Carl Icahn, a corporate predator perfectly adapted to sniff out the weak and vulnerable. The big groups have seen their newspapers and magazines lose readers and advertising to the internet; their music businesses suffer piracy and falling sales; and someone else's video games captivate new generations of consumers. Now come fears about film and TV, the bedrock of their business.
Hollywood took 7% less at the box office in 2005 than in 2004 and growth in sales of DVDs has slowed. Internet video threatens the satellite and cable systems of companies such as News Corporation and Time Warner. Dozens of advertisers are shifting budgets from television to such places as the internet and billboards. Brand-owners hate it that people are using digital video recorders to avoid their pitches. And if media firms move on to the internet themselves, they risk losing their films and television programmes to pirates.
Moguls still
No wonder that on media island they are downcast. Yet, if Hollywood teaches one thing, it is that stories can be re-made and dreams can come true. Rather as big retailers, including Wal-Mart and Tesco, have discovered advantages online, so too will big media companies.
True, the internet and digital devices will eventually break those companies' grip on distribution. But they gain something else: a digital world in which what you supply matters far more than how you supply it. In satellite radio, for example, Sirius has crept up on XM Satellite Radio thanks chiefly to its content, in the controversial form of Howard Stern. And this world holds another promise, too: an abundance of virtually costless ways to supply consumers with what they want to watch, whenever they want it—things established media are ideally placed to provide.
The internet is still in the digital equivalent of the silent-film era. It has been formidable for text, still images and music, but is only now, with broadband access, entering an age of high-quality video. As it does so, Time Warner, News Corporation, Disney and other media companies will be able to cash in on their film and television archives. Selling video direct to consumers, without distribution getting in the way, lets media firms, and viewers, mine their vaults for old episodes of “The Outer Limits”, Johnny Carson, or whatever: minority tastes, to be sure, but taken together, a vast new market.
Moreover, old media will command audiences for many years yet. New media understand this: Google has just bought dMarc, which sells old-fashioned radio advertising. Websites, such as BabyCenter.com and AlwaysOn, have recently launched print-magazine versions of themselves, to capture advertising that was out of their reach online. As the best remaining source of a mass audience, TV and film are the best places to create and promote the next “Simpsons” or “Narnia”.
Some people worry that new media companies may over time shunt old ones aside as producers of content. Certainly, digital media will create new stars and new businesses, but making high-quality video content will always be a daunting and expensive task. Music or a blog can be composed from a bedroom, but not an episode of “Friends”. Just last month DreamWorks, Hollywood's youngest studio, sold itself to Viacom, despite its strong financial backing and the talent of Hollywood luminaries. It made some money, but could not afford a billion-dollar investment in films year-in, year-out. Yahoo! has a media unit, but so far it hasn't had any hits. Responding to the news this week that Yahoo! intends to spend up to $10m on a reality-TV concept called “The Runner”, analysts complained that the investment would damage its margins.
By contrast with Yahoo!'s dabbling, old media is now investing in digital media in earnest. It all went terribly wrong before 2000 when bewitched executives squandered money on the internet and Time Warner sold itself to AOL in one of history's worst-ever deals. But now they are back. Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corporation, made a series of acquisitions in 2005 (see article). Disney is supplying two hits, “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost”, using Apple's iTunes download service. Last summer Viacom bought Neopets.com, a virtual-pets site. Old media is well placed to steer its huge offline audiences to its websites.
Helpfully on cue, piracy now seems less of a threat. The music industry now has a healthy business in legal downloads. Operators of peer-to-peer networks, such as eDonkey, are going straight. And Hollywood is realising that it has no equivalent to a big musical weakness—that many albums consist of a few decent tracks padded by dross.
Any media business has two products to sell: its content (to readers and viewers); and its audience (to advertisers). The task for old media is first to protect its advertising revenues by amassing audiences online and, second, to offset their viewers' intolerance of mass-advertising by making them pay more for content—which they are increasingly willing to do. It will not be easy, but then saving the heroine never was.
Val Kelly recommended the site below for all of us to look at. It fits right in with our work.
MediaShift
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift
MediaShift is a weblog that will track how digital media technologies and techniques such as weblogs, RSS, podcasting, citizen journalism, wikis, news aggregators and video repositories are changing our world. It will tell stories of how the shifting media landscape is changing the way we get our news and information, while also providing a place for public participation and feedback.
MediaShift elements include:
The Blog: The main meat of the matter, where we will dig deeper into issues, interview important minds, and showcase intelligent sources and you, the readers. Plus, you have the chance to add your comments to each post.
Top 5: A running tally of the people, trends and technologies that are on our radar.
Your Take: Grab the podium and run with it. Well, don't run away with it, but please give your 2 cents on an important media-shifting question of the week.
CHECK IT OUT!!
Tagosphere (web surfing with a difference):
Furl.net: allows you to save and retrieve web pages. Recommends other pages you may enjoy.
Kaboodle.com: a shopping site where users save the web pages of products they may purchase for others to view and rank.
Reddit.com: users can post any web link. Other users can then vote on whether they find the site interesting.
Wink.com: lets users search links that other users believe to be interesting or important.
Shadows.com: users can save their favorite web pages and search others’ favorites too.
I tried out Furl.net and shadows.com to see what I could find about “media mindsets.” Furl.net worked better for me. Try them out. What do you think?
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