That’s the view, at least, from a growing number of cultural pundits and armchair cynics, not to mention from a good deal of the people who work in traditional mediums, who say that social media and the blogosphere are killing news companies, publishers, and even the film and television industry.
As a writer, editor and project manager working in traditional print – who recently became a statistic of the job-cutting phenomenon facing all media organizations – I’ve seen the shift first-hand. But while it’s obvious that the media industry of 2020 will look significantly different than the media industry of 2010, I’m not ready to forecast the imminent death of print newspapers, magazines and books.
Kindle may be convenient enough to take on the subway, but – and feel free to call me old fashioned – you can’t fold it up and stick it in your coat pocket when you’ve reached your destination (although this might become a possibility before too long, which could be a game-changer). And it’s never going to be able to replace the feel of printed pages.
Media convergence is an idea that has been around in force since the dawn of the millennium. The prevailing notion back in the early 2000s – that individual media companies could simply merge into giant conglomerations as a way to cut costs and combine synergies (translation: lay employees off and just repurpose the same content across multiple information platforms) – has largely been proven wrong through the failed marriages of Time Warner and AOL, Canwest and Hollinger, and Canwest and Alliance Atlantis.
But the push for media convergence isn’t dead, it’s just shifting gears. With the emergence of real-time, omnipresent social media technologies such as Twitter, convergence is being approached as value-adding, rather than cost-reducing. A newspaper or magazine can have its journalists preparing an in-depth piece on a topic to run in the next day’s, or next week’s, print edition, while also getting those reporters to hook loyal readers through real-time news updates via Twitter. And a respected print publication such as The Globe and Mail can offer the same insight it always has through its newspaper, while also offering additional (and often less rigidly edited) insight on issues via reporters' blogs.
Of course, the popularity and ease-of-use inherent in social media technology means traditional media outlets face ever-increasing competition. I can break a story via Facebook or Twitter about something happening in my neighbourhood just as quickly and easily as the Toronto Star can through its website.
One can even write and publish fiction via Twitter, as I found out several months ago. Writers have experimented, alone or in groups, with developing short stories through a series of interlinked 140-character “tweets” on Twitter. Others have taken this a step further, by mastering the art of telling a complete story in 140 characters or less. You can read my attempts at 140 character Twitter Fiction @TOtweetrature, or check out some far more compelling works from writers such as @arjunbasu and @InstantFiction. While Twitter Fiction might never be up for a Governor General's Literary Award, it marks one of the more interesting and dramatic evolutions in storytelling that we've seen in many years.
It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how the shift takes shape over the next decade. I for one predict a media landscape by the end of the 2010s populated by a healthy number of traditional corporate media organizations made stronger (translation: forced to pay greater attention to the quality of their work) by the emergence of an ever-growing number of citizen journalists, fiction writers, etc. And more importantly, I believe we will see greater, not fewer, opportunities for individuals to earn a living through the sharing of news and information.
Is it weird to take the Kindle to the bathroom when you take a dump?
What you take with you into the bathroom is your business, my friend.