How yesterday’s news became just tables in a database

Thanks to a tweet from Craig McGill I was wandering around Alison Gow’s excellent blog on the changing times for Newspapers and Journalists reading an insiders thoughts on topics like improving reader engagement and building paywalls.

Her focus, like many in her industry, was exploring the ongoing question of how do we make newspapers sticky and how can we make them pay in the Internet age?

I have canvassed these issues before and tried to explore them in a number of ways. (Think: Notes on the Future of Newspapers, What Apple can teach the newspapers about innovation, What Google can teach the newspapers about innovation, Will the iPad save the Newspapers and Magazines? and What If: Journalism is the real reason Newspapers are dying?)

Anyway I thought today I’d try to explore them once again within the context of the ideas I raised in the search of the endless lists of likes and why old media isn’t being unbundled it’s being rendered meaningless. Where we discovered that

1. Telecoms has taken over the distribution of the products and there for captures the lion’s share of the revenues
2. The Internet primarily functions as a distributed database network which we access through a browser (i.e. the presentation layer)
3. The market leaders aren’t creators of content or functionality but simply those that allow us to create endless personalised “lists of likes” from that data stored in that distributed database

To demonstrate this I thought I would attempt to visualise how the convergence of the mass media communications theory with the information theory has created a new industry model.

So here then is a diagrammatical sketch of what I think has happened to the print media industry’s traditional media communications model when it collided with Information Technology’s generic 3-Tiered Architecture Model.

At the moment it is a pretty crude conceptual framework but at least if you know where you sit within the new model it allows you to explore ideas that may lead to more productive long-term strategic outcomes for media than just the short term tactical mantras being pursued today (e.g conversational economies and engagement strategies).

After all most the media’s efforts to date have been focused on the presentation layer (i.e Building web sites) rather than the pivotal database layer. (Think In the future which box will you call home?)

 

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Tagged: Amazon, Death of the Newspaper, Facebook, Future of Newspapers, Google, Media Covergence, MobCon, Ways of Seeing

Posted in: eBooks, Ideas, Information Systems, Internet, Magazines, MobCon, Newspapers