How will the media change in 2010?
I’ve asked some of the most respected thought leaders in the space on what we should expect to see in the media industry in the coming year–and highlighted the most compelling ideas in bold.
Whose prediction is the most likely to come true? Vote in the comments for the best response.
Cody Brown, Founder of Kommons:
- Twitter will get meaningful competition from unlikely places.
- SoHo will start to be known more for Tech Startups and Gawker than Art Galleries and Prada.
- Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, and Dave Winer will go out for drinks one night then come back the next day and push plans for the The New York University Department of Collective Intelligence
- ‘Crowdsourcing’ will largely be considered pejorative.
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Merrill Brown, Principal at MMB Media LLC:
2010 will see a host of media company breakups and divestitures including the sale of Tribune Company assets as the company unwinds its bankruptcy. Other publishing and broadcasting businesses will also shed assets in order to fix, among other things, balance sheet problems. This and other such restructuring moves will create new opportunities to resize media ventures and create new digital businesses.
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Soraya Darabi, Drop.io:
I see some of the smaller social-networks booming in 2010. Community-based web sites with core audiences – such as Meetup and tumblr – are positioned very
 well in the upcoming year. Major media companies are now savvy to social-networking and are more willing to experiment with platforms beyond Facebook and Twitter. I think we’ll see some exciting collaborations with mainstream media and location based mobile applications as well.
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Esther Dyson, Entrepreneur and Web Pioneer:
Online, the buzz will move from searching to filtering. There will be so much content that people will need it filtered, by topic, by whether their friends liked it, by popularity.
Overall: There will be some recognition that filtering by humans–remember them? They used to be called editors–can be a useful function. More high-profile journalists–another form of human quality control; they are people who do not just filter content but actually transform it into meaning–will leave their institutions and become brands themselves. They will have to support themselves by giving speeches and consulting. Only the best will maintain their quality and ultimately their reputations as they get distracted by these new challenges.
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Dina Kaplan, co-founder, blip.tv:
In 2010, sharing links will drive media consumption (text and video) more than ever before, and search will, as a result, become a bit less relevant. The information sites like bit.ly will show important trends about what, and how, people are watching and reading on the Web, and they will begin to make money mining that data.
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David Pakman
, Venrock Digital Media VC:
More terrestrial radio stations head into bankruptcy as ad spending shifts online and to mobile
. 2010 will be the first year total non-internet TV viewing (network + cable) declines in the US as video consumption online continues to explode
. Facebook launches a social ad network on top of Facebook Connect. 
Twitter lists become a useful and curated mechanism for media consumption, as blogs did before.
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Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch Co-Editor:
Where is media going? To the Web.
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Adam Penenberg, Author of Viral Loop:
I see a continuing brand erosion afflicting blue-chip media companies like Washington Post, New York Times and various magazines. They are going to keep getting smaller–and fast–shedding workers just to stay afloat. This will free up a swarm of top notch journalists who have been buried in rigid, hierarchical organizations to set out on their own. The coming year will bring immense creativity in journalism–new ideas, new business models, an emphasis on social media and pressure to include readers into the process. Despite what the doomsayers claim, it’s not the end of history; it’s just the beginning.
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Andrew Rasiej, Entrepreneur and Founder of PdF
- The Apple Tablet is released and a new era for magazine, news, and mobile video content is started.
- Local news sites will proliferate and marry the best of traditional journalism with citizen generated media supported initially by not-for-profit funding and some for profit subscription revenue models.
- The term "Videracy" (Video literacy) will become known to mean people’s ability not only understand complex ideas with video but will also learn to convey them without the use of text.
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Steve Rubel, Edelman PR and AD Age Columnist
The media will find its groove in 2010 as digital curators of information in niches. They will separate art from junk using a mix of editors, automative technologies and the power of the people to help us surface and make sense of high-value content.
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Rachel Sklar, Mediaite Editor-at-Large
I just wrote this but I’ll add one more: We’re going to see a huge rollback on the whole concept of "free" on the Internet. Yes, the current currency of free-flowing content will largely remain, because of all the incentives in place to both produce and provide content for free. But – the concept of getting what you pay for has become more apparent as the Internet has sprouted wildly around us with its SEO-driven search results and spammy linkbait, and killer curators to help cut through that morass will become, I believe, essential – and someone will hit on a model that is so good it’s worth laying down some cash (or swiping your Square!).
The WSJ model still works, and more than that, people are starting to recognize that good content is in danger. (Ooh, Demand Media, scary!). TimesSelect may have been a failure, but it also may have been a failture that was before its time, or a failure of implementation – the web is still very young, and the ways in which it is used commercially is young, too. All it takes is one great model to change the game (iPod? Boxee?). How we pay for things on the web – the psychology and the mechanics – is about to really evolve.
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Brian Stelter, Media Reporter at The New York Times
Despite the breathless talk about tablets and Internet-connected TV sets, shifts in media consumption will continue to take place gradually — far more gradually than the digerati might like. That said, what these innovations will foster are new ways of viewing and displaying the news. More than mere curation, I expect that formatting experiments — tablet-sized summaries of the news, video programming guides, etc. — will flourish.
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Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix.com:
The ongoing particiapatory nature of online media, combined with media at the point of presence – mobile and local – are going to be an increasingly large part of the media landscape in 2010. In 2009, we saw investment and validation of online local in services like Foursquare and yelp, as well as Twitter breaking through to an early mass market. Startups and bigger companies in the media space who can take advantage of these trends, win their piece of this massively fragmented market will do well. In these areas in particular, recognizing that curation, distribution and mechanisms encouraging participation will create content and fulfill the real goal – usage – is what I would be looking for in the market leaders.
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Nate Westheimer, New York Tech Meetup Host
Three words: Hyperdistribution Meets Payments. The media industry has been experiencing major fragmentation, which has affected its ability to charge consumers for its content. I expect smart payments companies will start fixing this issue by providing easier and easier ways to pay for content.
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