by Alex Spinelli
It’s a Brave, New (Digital) World
There is no longer any question of a battle between “new media” and “old media”. The war — if there ever was one — is over. The soldiers have long since gone home and are, hopefully, beating their typewriters into GUIs.
Of course there are some holdouts, but we know what happens to lone states. They become increasingly isolated, their infrastructure teeters, they become more entrenched in their ways and — blind to the world around them — fruitlessly cling to dwindling power. At last, their monuments topple.
My company is heavily engaged in the news business, so I’m perhaps watching this particular wave of change with a keener interest these days than most.
My life’s work has led me to be directly involved in exactly this sort of technological transformation, so I can say with some confidence that digital media is more than just a fad. It is not simply a new way to deliver bits, sounds or moving pictures: it is a transformative mechanism that fundamentally impacts the content it carries. And that, in turn, has a profound impact on the audience that receives it.
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At TheStreet I saw the power of financial information unleashed; at Comedy Central, I tackled the very problems that those of you reading this primer are now facing. Today, at Reuters News, we are embracing this swing whole-heartedly. A lot of extremely smart folks are trying to understand how this new means of communication — online, on-air and mobile — can impact the temporal, immediate, interactive, connected and collaborative nature of news, information and audiences.
This has had (and will continue to have) a transformative effect of how we tell stories. Marshall McLuhan, one of the great gifts from the North (he was a Canadian), understood this completely; he believed that the characteristics of the medium, not only the information it broadcasts, are critical to how we perceive, understand and interact with that content.
So anyone who has told you that they’ve got it all figured it out is, er, guilty of a gross exaggeration.
Audiences have become complex, global and highly interconnected. The web collapsed distance and, in so doing, made global communications cheap, easy and interactive. This, in turn, means that next generation of media and entertainment will be personal, interactive and collaborative.
All this has already changed how we experience the world: audiences regularly come together with people from far countries and casually consume content that is generated by users we have never heard of and will never meet.
So, if you’re a filmmaker, a television producer or, really, any kind of entertainment executive, let me give you some advice: don’t cling to models that may have worked in the past. They simply no longer apply. People now need to consume content, entertainment and information in highly individualized ways. In fact, as the music industry found out, they will demand it like a god-given right. If you don’t give them a way to do so, they will figure it out for themselves… which would make you kind of irrelevant, right?
No one wants that. Take advantage of what you read in this book, find smart people that you trust, bring them into your network, and apply the same ingenuity to the digital dimension that you would to a traditional script. As you unroll your new digital strategy, you might be surprised to find that your audience is already waiting for you.
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Alex Spinelli is a Senior Vice-President and Global Head of News Technology for Reuters, managing operations for the gathering, creation and distribution of news from around the world. Prior to this, he spent three years with Viacom as Chief Technical Officer for Comedy Central. During what was a defining period for Comedy Central, Alex played a leading role in translating that channel’s edgy programming into cutting-edge digital strategies.