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June 8, 2007
New Media Academic Summit Day One
Edelman and PRWeek Magazine have organized a day long conference for US professors of journalism and mass communications. Last night I joined a distinguished group of media executives, including Gordon Crovitz, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Pat Mitchell, CEO of the Paley Museum of Media, Nick Lemann, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School and David Kirkpatrick (moderator), senior editor of FORTUNE, to discuss the changing media environment. You can see the full discussion via streaming video by going here (www.edelman.com/summit07/). Here are some highlights from the discussion:
Crovitz—Digital changes the print product. Newspapers have been great repositories of events that occurred the day before but this cannot work in the digital world. Our readers of the print product want more understanding and interpretation. They want what were second day stories on the first day. Commodity news will be reported by our news service, Dow Jones, and taken up by our on-line reporters. Our reporters have a better chance than ever to tell the full story because we have no space constraints on-line. We are trying to become more vertically targeted. Our blogs in specific industries such as health give us a chance to target the younger readers who are more specialized. We are now doing co-ventures with certain journalists, such as the D conference with Walt Mossberg. There is tremendous value in established brands such as the Wall Street Journal. The most popular recent piece of video on wsj.com was from Toyota; it was a Lexus that parallel parks itself.
Lemann—Citizen journalists contribute snippets to the larger matrix of a story. They are an additional element to reporting by trusted news organizations. The editing function of mainstream media is the key difference. The Web actually allows mainstream media to be more trustworthy because it allows you to annotate, to show the underlying data, to offer the uncut TV footage and to use links. The future of newspapers is to deep local reporting and to use citizen journalists to fill holes in permanent staffing, while magazines will continue to dominate affinity verticals. Traffic is bunching up around mainstream media web sites based on reporting, not opinion. We are experimenting with new non-linear ways to present journalism. Non-profit entities will be increasing their participation in media (example is PBS). The job of our recent graduates in many large media companies is to post eight times, use a camera and a microphone, to be like a wire service reporter.
Mitchell—Radio is having a quiet heyday. It has surmounted its key barrier to distribution, which was geographic license, via the internet. The content is being repurposed for use on IPODs and other platforms. The best radio stories have rich context and sound. This is a format pioneered by National Public Radio. We have now reached the point where if you are in old media and not in new media, you will soon be in dead media. Media literacy is not being taught in schools.
Kirkpatrick—The copy we write for the web is much less intensely edited than the printed product. This will change over time as the web product generates more advertising. There is still a great deal of TV viewing in Western nations, especially by middle aged people. The ratio of TV to web use in the developed world is still 4 to 1.
I made a strong case for an evolved form of public relations, which I termed open advocacy. We cannot claim to be fair and impartial. As my friend David Weinberger has said, while markets are conversations, it is not clear that marketing can be a conversation. There is a role for PR to act as advocates on the basis of total transparency, in fact authentic PR. There can be no effective PR without clear identification of the client, the client’s interest, and funding of spokespeople or institutions. The best PR is straightforward, accurate and respectful. We are paid advocates, whose primary task is to promote the virtues of a product or company. But for us to be credible, we need to acknowledge side effects of a drug or environmental trade offs. We must find credible third party sources to provide factual backdrop for our work. We should make easily available a set of supporting documents that offer a detailed review of the data. There needs to be a place for the community to contribute its own experiences and views, providing real context. We should also be a bridge to multiple stakeholders, listening to their views and presenting options to our clients, who in the end must make the decisions.
Please feel free to post your comments, reactions, contributions on-line at www.edelman.com/summit07.
It was a fascinating first evening. I am off to the event right now for Round 2.
Posted by Edelman at June 8, 2007 8:40 AM
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Comments
Richard:
How were your comments received? Did these heavy duty journalists agree that PR has a role here, or do they shake their heads and tolerate the PR guy who believes that PR can achieve parity with journalism? Won't PR always be a mettlesome necessary evil to journalists?
Mark
Posted by: Mark Rose at June 11, 2007 10:38 AM