News Industry No Longer in Control of its Own Futrure

"The news industry is no longer in control of its own future," a study of U.S. media concludes. That might not seem immediately relevant to other industries facing disruption, but one might argue it is quite germane, indeed. Just about every business touched by the Internet, and that is nearly every business, faces significant stress of the core business business model, the level of competition and new ways of providing the value the older ecosystem provided.

Consider the way the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism paints the situation news organizations face. http://stateofthemedia.org/ "In the digital space, the organizations that produce the news increasingly rely on independent networks to sell their ads," the report says. At a very basic level, that moves functions and "control" out of the hands of content producers that once controlled their own sales processes. The implications extend far beyond the rather simple issues of "who" controls sales of the inventory.

Aggregation firms (such as Google) and social networks (such as Facebook) now bring content producers "a substantial portion of their audience," the report suggests. "And now, as news consumption becomes more mobile, news companies must follow the rules of device makers (such as Apple) and software developers (Google again) to deliver their content."

That means new players in the ecosystem take a share of the revenue and in many cases also control the audience data. Some argue the data may be the most important asset of all. "In a media world where consumers decide what news they want to get and how they want to get it, the future will belong to those who understand the public’s changing behavior and can target content and advertising to snugly fit the interests of each user," Pew researchers say.

Consider that process in the context of retail shopping, video entertainment, music, ticket sales, hotel bookings, airfare purchases and you get the idea. As new ecosystems develop, existing players, in some sense, do not fully control their own destiny.

Overview | State of the Media