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April 14, 2006
MSM Getting On the Stick
I have had long conversations with reporters and editors from the Financial Times, Forbes.com and the Wall Street Journal in the past week. Here are some important facts for PR people to keep in mind about the evolution of Mainstream Media in the digital age:
* MSM on-line is now acting as aggregators, such as Andrew Ross Sorkin's Deal Book under the NY Times.com banner, which takes content on M&A from multiple media sources, or Forbes.com which has 125 media partners including CNET, AFX and Variety.com. This is a way to retain readers in the fold beyond the eight minutes average spent on average, for example, on nytimes.com.
* MSM on-line is now trying to crowd the vertical trade media. Forbes.com has organized sub-sites in logistics, infrastructure, and digital entertainment. The idea is to move beyond the traditional agenda setting of MSM, a horizontal approach to educating opinion leaders across a broad spectrum of industries and interests, toward a more vertical approach that may appeal to the specialized interests and shorter attention spans of the on-line reader.
* MSM on-line is more hard news oriented than feature oriented. Reporters are getting better about filing high quality work immediately on-line--there is less iteration of the story content than two years ago. Video is being appended to stories on the on-line MSM. An example would be an MPEG file showing a new ad campaign running alongside the story.
* MSM on-line believes in the concept of "entwined media" (this per Jim Spanfeller, boss man at Forbes.com who hopes to write a book on this topic), where the same story content is used across platforms (video, audio, data bases, analysis, print on-line). He describes consumer control not in terms of time shifting (the DVR concept) but in terms of media selection appropriate to need. An example would be an investor who sees a story on line, wants to hear or see the CEO interviewed by the Forbes reporter, then can dig into the analytics to see competitive performance.
* The demographics of MSM on-line are changing and becoming more like the MSM itself. An example is Forbes.com, where the average reader of the magazine is only three or four years older than the on-line entry. The on-line products are drawing younger readers to the mainstream entries. The growth is stunning--note that in the month of March, Forbes.com had 19 million unique visitors, up from 8 million a year ago.
* The on-line MSM entries try to stay true to the style of their MSM siblings. So Forbes.com tries to be edgy, contrarian, pointed, and provide information that you can trade on.
* MSM and on-line MSM staffs are being merged, most recently at Dow Jones. This is making for a very long and difficult work day for reporters. They are being asked to file for Asian edition by 10 am to noon, for Europe by 2 pm, for the US between 4-6 pm, with fling in between for wire services and the Web.
Here are the implications for PR folks:
1) Reporters expect PR folks to send ready to use digitized content or to arrange for CEOs to make the time for a sit-down video interview. Pictures matter more than ever.
2) Don't count on getting thrust of story amended so easily just because it is on-line--we have to work with reporters to get it right from the start
3) MSM on line reporters are ambivalent about bloggers as a news source. Don't count on the bloggers being the on-ramp to stories in MSM on line. Most of the MSM on line reporters are not bloggers and are operating in walled gardens.
4) Don't be disappointed with a placement in the MSM on line version and persuade your client that in fact you may get more traction with this approach as first choice.
As always, I want your views on my post.
Posted by Edelman at April 14, 2006 8:40 AM
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Comments
I would add, monitor globally. A story on line in Africa is still seen by folks in your back yard. In these past people did not see buy the international media.
Posted by: David Phillips at April 17, 2006 7:02 AM
I think you are right on the money. As the time between release and broadcast, or print, decreases in time -- it becomes much more imperative to position the release with more information than just the text. Pictures, audio, video and background links all will help the journalist finish your story.
The PR industry is stuck in the mud with what we are providing journalists. Plain text press releases are meaningless. We need to start to tell the story before the journalist gets the release.
I think www.enr-corp.com is starting to put this together -- including global media monitoring. Check them out. They also just pulled together a deal with Business Wire -- should be interesting.
Posted by: Chris McTague at April 17, 2006 10:10 AM
PR Education: Your "implications for PR folks" parallel the implications for PR education. Even if the practitioner is not the one handling the technical aspects of digital content production, it will behoove them to understand the demands of a journalist needing various digitized content. Sensitivity to new demands on journalists in merged production environments must be explicitly taught to PR students.
Aggregators: Hopefully MSM or "branded" aggregators will provide some small balancing influence to the myopic side effects on a media consumer's worldview that personalized news subscriptions can cause. Or will they make it worse? The burden would seem to rely on the interest of the MSM's aggregating staff member(s) to present objective/diverse sets of perspectives.
Posted by: Eric Hansen at April 17, 2006 2:31 PM
Thanks for writing to me. Think about how we are all assimilating the plethora of information that confronts us each day. I retain visuals often better than words. My mentor Mike Deaver tells me that impressions are critical--if so, visuals along side the words make a huge difference.
Posted by: Richard Edelman at April 18, 2006 9:46 AM
EH
The usual wise commentary from you--thanks. We are trying to do our part on PR education front. We will be offering each month to PR educators and their students a 1 hour best of Edelman in new media starting in September. So the XBOX case, the Starbucks case etc. Stay tuned.
Posted by: Richard Edelman at April 18, 2006 9:47 AM
Richard,
What would you recommend to the PR industry to incorporate more of the visual in our efforts. It seems that the entire PR world is still dealing with PRN and BW with text releases -- struggling over any distribution of video -- and overall not engaging journalists at all.
If you are correct, and I agree, that most people retain visuals better than words -- why do we keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result?
Posted by: Chris McTague at April 21, 2006 8:55 AM
I seek a diverse work force because we will be able to serve our clients better Simply stated a white suburban middle aged person's view of the world is not especially creative or edgy. I know that blogging has helped me stay relevant but I need smart people who are living in modern culture to push me and others to excellence
Posted by: Richard Edelman at April 25, 2006 2:06 PM
Just as mainstream media is now learning to develop cross platform content so we must adapt our pr techniques. We should be facile with camera cwell phones or mini cams for video. We should be able to post photos to flickr where they can be downloaded by interested parties. More later I need to get on a plane
Posted by: Richard Edelman at April 25, 2006 2:07 PM