A Stray Thought on the Micro-chunking of Media
This is one of those blindingly obvious revelations that make you feel a little dumb in retrospect. It occurred to me over the weekend, as I leafed through the Economist's special section on new media that, it is impossible for a magazine that depends on wide circulation to efficiently deliver insights to a professional audience. I love the Economist for many reasons but when reading about a subject that I spend most of my waking hours thinking about, I found little that was new. But of course that would be true. Because the economics of the paper based media business dictate that they write for a broad audience, they inevitably frustrate anyone who is deeply immersed in a particular subject.
The corollary of that observation is that blogging and the micro-chunking of media are here to stay, at least as a means of communicating among professionals. Bloggers invite a dialogue with a much larger audience that they could ever interact with personally. But they are under no obligation to provide context for their musings or insights. They can just throw them out and let their audience self select. That means that posts can be small focused observations. The blogger themselves can efficiently extend their knowledge about subjects they already know well by posing pointed questions and inviting a response. For blog readers by using tools like blog search, delicious and by navigating the link ecology of blogs, they can stay current and informed about narrow subjects they care deeply about.
The continued growth of blogs and of micro-chunked media is driven by the attention economics of a society populated, increasingly, by time starved, curious people looking for efficient ways to learn more about subjects they already think about every day. This does not suggest that mass media will go away. We all need to know about breaking news and general interest areas like art and science, and few of us have time to be expert in these areas. But it may make it difficult for specialized industry publications to survive as a one way paper medium.
May 2, 2006 02:30 PM, By Brad Burnham
Tags: attentioneconomy microchunking newmedia
Comments (5)
Interesting
What you are getting is somewhat indepth stories that bloggers than use as part of their thought process to drill down on issues.
It is a good evolution and the magazines may actually benefit as articles get referenced more over the years.
They are probably smart to stick to their plan here and don't do anything radical and let bloggers make them popular through linking.
Business Week seems to be doing this.
Posted by howard Lindzon , May 4, 2006 09:39 AM
Brad,
Just taking some distance to the subject and making some empathy to the "general audience" (as "not experts in a specific area"), the magazines and newspapers still have their place out there. I understand YOUR point of view, but think about the manager of a restaurant willing to know more about the "internet": the magazine brings him general news and insight, more and more inspired by experts blogs, and so very specific.
And our interests in any subject all started in some general audience targeted information source.
The paper medium might be the karate yellow belt of any news area, no ?
Another thought is that paper medium is clearly less relevant for any fast changing area/matter of the news. The Iran situation, the last law on immigration, the economy and politics of a country won't change, be reviewed, analysed, challenged (...) in a 24hr period. This leads me actually to thinking that only web-related news are concerned by your post, don't you think ?
Posted by laurent kretz , May 4, 2006 11:53 AM
Hey Fred- my business partner wrote a piece yesterday arguing that the industry analyst white paper is just too long for today's economy and use patterns, and so becomes defunct. We practice micro-chunking, but this is an interesting take, because it involves potentially voluntarily removing ourselves from a traditional revenue stream. We already don't do commisioned white papers for reasons of ethics and the extreme boringness of dealing with marketers that want puff rather than context. But now Stephen is pushing for an even more agressive non formal report approach.
http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/001594.html
Stephen has noted before that our business model is freemium...
http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/001440.html
Posted by James Governor , May 10, 2006 08:46 AM
Hi Brad,
read your blog post with interest - am very interested in your thoughts about the changing media landscape. You outline a number of problems facing the mainstream print press, but given that magazines like the Economist are ‘generalist’ publications, it's not immediately obvious to me why they should feel threatened? In fact they’re having a great time if you look at their numbers.
But the rise of blogs IS very worrying for specialist publications, which account for the majority of the trade press industry.
So there’s an interesting UGC company called Scoopt (www.scoopt.com) and I'd be keen to know if you think they might have the answer, or part of it. They’re doing some very disruptive stuff right now, making UGC available to the mainstream media etc - such as ScooptWords (www.scoopt/words) which launches tomorrow. Rather that compete with the print media, they claim to provide a potential win-win solution.
Some comments about their soon-to-launch service at: www.scooptwordsblog.com
Happy to discuss offline (nick.wright@eslink.org)
Best regards,
Nick
Posted by Nick Wright , June 4, 2006 03:25 PM
But Brad, look at what the gang over at Nature Publishing Group are doing in the science space... Greg Suprock has just arrived on the scene over there recently and is harnessing the power of his 8 person dept to do AMAZING things (micro online as well as the obvious macro real world publishing they're so well known for)...
I think the world of publishing is in for a bumpity ride for the next few years as this space shakes out: Online ad sales at the expense of print ad sales; look at what O'Reilly is doing with Safari (cool!).
I was listening to Friedman's "The Earth is Flat" on the plane from and to various places this last month and I thought it VERY interesting that he (an op-ed columnist of the NY Times) is no longer reading much in the way of print. WOW! The guard is definitely changing right before our eyes.
Posted by Gerald Buckley , May 3, 2006 03:19 PM