I’ve just posted the first chapter of Geeks Bearing Gifts: Imagining New Futures for News on Medium. The gist of it: The mass is dead. Or we should kill it, which is only fair because we in media started it. The mass was a relic of Gutenberg-era technology. The idea of the mass determines and corrupts our business model and our relationships with the public and our forms of news. The net allows us to see people as individuals and communities. We need to start. Here’s a snippet of that brief chapter:
I still hear people my age lament the passing of the Cronkite era’s grand shared experience of media, as if we all were meant to sit at the same time watching the same images of the same news. That was a short-lived era indeed, from the mid-’50s — when the arrival of television killed the diversity of voices from competitive newspapers in most American cities, leaving the lone survivors to serve everyone the same — to the mid-’90s and the arrival of the internet, which mortally wounded those monopolistic newspapers and threatened TV’s media hegemony. But the net’s real victim was not one medium or another. What it killed was the idea of the mass.
Should we continue to serve people as a mass now that we can serve and connect them as individuals? I will argue throughout this essay that relationships — knowing people as individuals and communities so we can better serve them with more relevance, building greater value as a result — will be a necessity for media business models, a key to survival and success. Yes, of course, we will still make content. But content is not the end product. It is only one tool we will use to inform and serve our communities and their members.
Read the rest here.
I’ll be putting the entire book up on Medium. But, of course, you can still make our publishing imprint and my bosses happy by buying the book or the Kindle or you can buy it directly from our friends at OR books.
