Is Today's Media Shift Just Blogs All Over Again?
Frank X. Shaw says the shift in media today is not an exact repetition of what happened with blogs and social media. History does not repeat, but it rhymes, and certain patterns continue.
The first pattern is ongoing fragmentation of media and influence. In a world where anybody can publish, people choose where they get information in different ways. He says the job is to be thoughtful about emerging influencers and creators and to work with them in ways that make sense for the company, for the creator, and for the audience. Lessons from bloggers and early creators still apply. If you force fit something, or jam it into an avenue where it does not fit, everybody suffers. The creator does not get what they want because the audience rejects it. The company does not get what it wants because the effort is not worth it. The fit has to be real, and the company has to show up in an authentic way.
The second pattern is people showing up almost as individual entrepreneurs. Someone has a podcast, and over time they build infrastructure around themselves, become more professional, and start to feel like established media. Some of them lose the magic. Others, as they scale, need a different set of characteristics. They come to see why an embargo exists, and they start thinking about conflicts of interest in a way they did not have to before.
