One mans junk is another man’s treasure.  That’s how I feel about this news - it’s inevidable and they should have seen it coming.

The “big beasts” of the pre-digital media age are in big trouble, the Guardian tells us. In the last year, they have faced, not only structural challenges but the worst recession for a generation:

“As advertising revenues dried up, newspaper, television and radio owners – especially those in local media – faced a stark challenge: adapt or die. The result was tens of thousands of job losses and unprecedented uncertainty over how the media landscape will look in just a few years’ time. How many national newspapers will survive? Can commercial radio avoid complete meltdown? How much are people prepared to pay for content online – if at all?”

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jul/10/overview-mediaguardian-100-2009)

At the heart of the uncertainty lies the internet and how to make it pay.

For 100 years the corporate mass media has flourished thanks to its monopoly of the means of mass communication. Reviewing the history of the British media, James Curran and Jean Seaton write that the industrialisation of the press in the early twentieth century triggered “a progressive transfer of power from the working class to wealthy businessmen, while dependence on advertising encouraged the absorption or elimination of the early radical press and stunted its subsequent development before the First World War.”

The effect of advertising was dramatic: “one of four things happened to national radical papers that failed to meet the requirements of advertisers. They either closed down; accommodated to advertising pressure by moving up-market; stayed in a small audience ghetto with manageable losses; or accepted an alternative source of institutional patronage.”

It’s happening quietly all over but the flood is just beginning.

“Announcing that workers nationwide will be forced to take more time off without pay, the chief executive of the largest media chain in the U.S. told employees there is no foreseeable end to the crisis facing the news business. Craig Dubow, president and CEO of Gannett Co., sent a memo to staffers today saying the company’s income remains on what called a “downward slide.”

http://www.heatcity.org/2009/03/gannett-ceo-no-relief-in-sight.html

“It says much about the confidence and wit of the pink paper of business that it not only published the letter but also headlined it “How FT leads from the front”. That rise was the third since June 2007, when the FT was selling for £1, yet the increases appear to have had no deleterious effect on the paper’s British circulation, which has run at about 125,000 copies throughout the past year. Newsprint sales revenue is only one side of a newspaper’s income equation. Advertising, as with every title, national or regional, big or small, has fallen away during the economic downturn. The FT’s chief executive, John Ridding, hinted as much in a memo to staff saying that “with our customers and advertisers being affected, we need to prepare for difficult times”.

Read more here

But let’s get real - the media bosses are blaming the ‘economic downturn’ instead of the real culprit - the adoption of digital and social media.

One cannot dismiss that, according to a recent Forrester study, digital and social media is expected to reach $55 billion and represent 21 percent of all marketing dollars spent in 2014 as advertisers shift money away from traditional media to search marketing, display advertising, e-mail marketing, social media and mobile promotions.

How this helps non-profits is the inherent characteristic new media - content tone. New media uses a conversational style, in contrast to the approach of traditional communications and early corporate blog experimentation, which emphasizes messaging and sanitized talking points.

Nik Gowing, in a new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism also discusses the way in which the ‘new media channels’ are having such a considerable effect on the structures of power.

Exponential changes in portable digital technology are redefining, broadening and fragmenting the nature of the media in a crisis by way of a new omnipresent breed of ‘information doers’.

New ‘media players’ have an unprecedented mass ability to bear witness leading to a proliferation of instant impressions in a crisis that get wide and immediate distribution.

The resulting new matrix of real-time information flows is highlighting the inadequacy of the structures of power to respond both with effective impact and in a timely way.

Interesting times ahead?  Definately - I can’t wait!