Dead tree media have had a hard time competing with the internet. Newspapers thought that all they had to do was to take their same content and post it on the web to capture eyeballs. They were wrong. The intertubes are multi-media, and pretty prose, no matter how well crafted, has a hard time competing with YouTube videos and moving graphics.
Check out this story from the New York Times. It’s about conflicts arising from competing territorial claims in the South China Sea, but the story is kind of beside the point. Look at the way it’s presented. Short videos. Moving graphics. Strong photos. Sound loops. And a well-written narrative.
The photos and narrative and maps could make a free-standing magazine article, and I suspect they will appear in next weekend’s New York Times Magazine. But that’s kind of beside the point. Much the way long-running television programming like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad are changing television formatting, this style of story-telling will change long-form journalism.
The problem is integrating the ability to create interesting content with technical expertise. It’s Content is King meets the Medium is the Message. It takes a team, and newspapers are hard-pressed to hire anybody these days. Soon, this format will be available to every computer jockey with an internet connection via templates. And when that happens the old dead tree media will adapt or die. Maybe they’ve already made their choice.
Interesting post. Interesting NYTimes presentation. Professional journalism and the “computer jockey with an internet connection” have access to the same tools but professional journalism will always have an advantage — the well-written, researched story that has been reviewed by an editor or two. Of course a lot of professional journalism doesn’t demand high standards today so the guy with the computer can present a product comparable or better than what people used to pay for.