It was a brilliant moment in the 2011 documentary Page One. A new-media proponent was taking the New York Times to task about how old and irrelevant they are. Times media columnist David Carr holds up a poster of that man’s news-aggregate site and demonstrates that all but just a few of his numerous postings merely shared traditional news stories.
Like I said in a previous post, you can pass around all the content through social media you want to, but someone created that content (story), and you’ll stand out if you can create good stuff.
People 80 years ago said newspapers were dying with the growing popularity of radio. Yet there is still a need for great content to go through the radio, or television, or, now, the Web. What has changed is simply the delivery systems.
Unfortunately, too often organizations make content an afterthought after a delivery system has been set up.
Like former Disney CEO Michael Eisner said (and I quoted in a previous post), there are lots of people who are good at technology and can set up information architecture, but the content creators are even more rare. We need people who can write good, engaging stories. Eisner said we need to focus on people who can write a good narrative that keeps people’s attention, not just creating the delivery system.
People with social media and video cameras only have tools. They still need to be good story-tellers.
It doesn’t matter if you’re publishing or broadcasting on a social network, a blog, a radio station, a TV network, writing on a piece of paper, or chiseling on a clay tablet, it’s the message that is key.
The content creators who write engaging stories and keep a reader's/viewer's attention need support as much as the talented people who set up and maintain delivery systems.
No comments:
Post a Comment