Picture taken from http://www.textually.org/ I remember last year when the bridge in Minneapolis fell apart, my friend who lives in the same state, told me that a very interesting phenomenon took place there. It wasn't only newpapers and TV journalists. Everyone there was taking photos and videos to share with the world. The "citizen media" phenomenon was born (at least in my mind back then :-)).
I think what this means to media companies is that they have to rethink their tradional methods of top-down distribution becuase people who used to be at the consuming end of the channel are now shifting towards to production end. Smart newsmakers can use the eruption of this phenomenon to gain better communication with their customers and increase the shared circle of understanding with this "used-to-be" audience.
The tools are exploding! It's not just blogs and media sharing websites, there are the wikis (from which the most famous user-generated website, wikipedia, emerged) and mashups that take data or services from more than one place and combine them, and much more on its way to see the light. The key is to ride with the wave and understand what's in this inevitable transition.
"Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or a greater Benefit.” ~Napoleon Hill
I think what this means to media companies is that they have to rethink their tradional methods of top-down distribution becuase people who used to be at the consuming end of the channel are now shifting towards to production end. Smart newsmakers can use the eruption of this phenomenon to gain better communication with their customers and increase the shared circle of understanding with this "used-to-be" audience.
The tools are exploding! It's not just blogs and media sharing websites, there are the wikis (from which the most famous user-generated website, wikipedia, emerged) and mashups that take data or services from more than one place and combine them, and much more on its way to see the light. The key is to ride with the wave and understand what's in this inevitable transition.
"Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or a greater Benefit.” ~Napoleon Hill
2 comments:
I think it's really cool that we are able to find out news much faster. We can see better pictures and movies than the newscasters can show. But someone I like to see the censored clips. I get scared when I watch 'real people' film news events because you never know how gruesome and graphic the footage will be. I think there is something to be said for a news company to review to footage before releasing it.
CNN is one company that is trying to take full advantage of "citizen media" with their iReport website. Its a YouTube-like site for users to post and watch user-created news videos.
It'll be interesting to see how CNN uses this. I would assume of the site's purposes is to provide content for the cable channel. We will have to see I guess.
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