Some Media Predictions

I’m optimistic about media and journalism over the next 5–10 years – and I think we’re in the middle of the biggest shift yet. These are my thoughts on where things are going.

As always, I’d love to spark some discussion – so jump in and respond with any additional predictions, comments, criticism, etc.

One theme across this entire post is power shifts — and it’s the thing I most expect to see in media. Distribution has long been held and gated by corporate interests, and we’re going to a place where content creators hold far more leverage.

Virtual reality journalism? Not yet.

A lot of people are talking about virtual reality journalism right now, but I think it’s at least five years off from really becoming a thing.

The first phase, which I expect to take place over the next 24 months, will be people coming up with ways to tell any sort of story to a mass market using virtual/augmented reality (movies, games, real estate tours, etc.). Once that happens, the tools and network will start to be in place for great VR journalism.

My argument here is based in a pattern we’ve seen with many great journalism platforms. They first become viable entertainment media, and then journalism kicks in. This happened with print, television, radio, the Internet, Snapchat, Podcasts, etc.

People are excited about VR journalism today, but until VR itself is mass-market, VR journalism is going to be a pipe dream.

With companies like Magic Leap, Facebook, and Microsoft working hard on VR/augmented reality, I think we’ll start to get there soon.

Podcasts grow up

I’m obviously too late in the game for a prediction like “podcasts are going to be a big deal.” They are, that much should be obvious by now.

Compared with twentieth century radio, I expect to see a power shift toward the creators who can tell stories that people want to hear — meaning that people like Terry Gross or Rush Limbaugh can have a direct relationship with their audiences instead of leaning on NPR or ClearChannel or anyone else. Established personalities may have good reason to stick with their networks, but up-and-coming personalities will build their own empires.

We might see the space centralize around a platform, like Netflix or iTunes, but I don’t think that will happen soon.

I expect to see the automobile rapidly become a software platform, making traditional radio even more irrelevant and giving podcasts another platform to hit mass market.

I think web video provides a good analogy for what we’ll see happen with podcasts. The first era was nerdy kids figuring out how to tell stories on YouTube, then some brands and personalities started paying attention and jumping in, and now it’s an ecosystem where a group of kids in their basement are playing on the same field as The Tonight Show and ads have the same production value as television ads. We’re somewhere in that middle phase with podcasts today.

Over the next 24 months, we’ll see big brands doubling down on podcast advertising – so anyone building a big audience on this medium today is in a great place. And, as podcasts continue to explode, we’ll see more sophisticated targeting, bundling, and positioning of ads.

Citizen journalism finally catches stride

When I was applying to journalism school in 2010, I wrote this optimistic line as part of an application essay. Ignoring for a moment how application-essay-ish this writing is, I think it’s relevant:

In the future there will be aggressive competition and ultimate accountability leading to a modern form of journalism that will have stronger credibility and will be instantly created and constantly updated. Citizen journalism uses new media to expedite, refine and compliment professional journalism.

In some ways, I’m thoroughly impressed with how far citizen journalism has come in the past five years, and in other ways I’m disappointed. We certainly have the networks in place for a piece of news to reach the entire world in minutes — and even to reach just the audience who cares about it in minutes.

Where we still fall short is in accountability for citizen journalism, and Grasswire is the first formidable solution I’ve seen. Whether it’s Grasswire, Twitter Moments, or something else, I think within a few years our tools for measuring the credibility of viral citizen journalism will be greatly enhanced.

The past 5 years have been about getting information to the masses in real-time. The next 5 years will be about establishing systems for credibility and fact-checking of real-time reporting.

We’ll see an end of this lame stuff:

The cords will be cut sooner than people think

The inevitability of cord-cutting (people moving from traditional cable television to internet-based video) is not a question. But many people see it as a transformation that will take another decade — and I think critical mass will be in sight within 24 months.

I’m not saying cable is dead – I’ve seen this argument for years and it’s just not true. Cable is doing fine. But I think the fact that cable is doing fine while people are claiming it’s dead is exactly the reason the industry will be caught by surprise here.

Here are the common arguments for legacy television holding strong, and why I think they don’t hold up:

1. Live content isn’t online yet

Sports represent one of the key areas of live television, and the latest numbers on ESPN show sports fans cutting the cord in droves (7 million ESPN subscribers in two years).

Live content makes the strongest case for legacy TV holding on, but ESPN is going to need to react quickly to these numbers. The only way to do that is to put live content online, which I think will set more precedent and expectation for live content to stream digitally.

2. Cable’s price bundles still offer the lowest price

As the streaming video ecosystem achieves more liquidity, pricing will solve itself – and streaming will ultimately be cheaper than cable because it requires less infrastructure. We’ll probably see interesting bundling and partnerships, but it won’t require cable.

3. Legacy TV is simple — you just turn it on

This is a non-argument. With the latest Apple TV, you can say “Frasier” to your remote and access the entire archive of the show. There’s a learning curve, but everyone can and will climb it.

Smart TVs were a bust, but streaming media players (Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire Stick, Chromecast) are blowing up.

The impact of this shift will be massive, and I’ll just make two predictions here:

Advertising:

When TV moves online, ads will work differently.

In the past, we sat on the couch and watched countless 30-second product anthems in form of TV commercials. In the future, nobody is going to do this unless it’s a live event — and even then they’ll look at Instagram instead of paying attention. I’m looking at recent podcast successes as the harbinger of how TV ads will work in the future:

• They’re seamless with the content you actually want to listen to (albeit clearly marked as ads)
• The quality of the storytelling is high — interviews with customers, employees, etc. instead of product anthems.

I expect to see more of this – Kevin Spacey will be selling us a Tesla in character as Frank Underwood, and we’ll actually want to hear what he has to say. (of course, this will bring up a whole new set of questions about ethics)

Content:

• The whole industry will fall in line behind Netflix in releasing full seasons of shows all at once.
• Everyone is looking at House of Cards and thinking they should be making content. Some will succeed, but this isn’t a problem you can simply throw money at – and some will try just that and fail.
• As it becomes easier to reach a mass market on a variety of platforms, the power will shift away from the networks and toward the people who create good content — meaning we’ll see more creative liberty, more new shows, and more fantastic television.
• Sites like CollegeHumor that create content across a diverse array of channels, sometimes in competition and other times in collaboration with the legacy networks, will thrive — and more examples of this will emerge.
• I’m not sure what will happen with live video, but it certainly isn’t going to come via cable/satellite. This feels like a big opportunity for someone who can navigate the politics of it.

Newspapers

Did you know that print ads still make up 49% of revenue — that’s $18 billion — in the newspaper industry in the United States? (source) Every penny of that is moving online, and I think the bulk of it is going to happen within 5 years.

Much of that revenue will be up for grabs, and some will be seized by the same newspapers that have it now, some by the platforms (Facebook, Apple, etc.), and some by new publishers or ad networks.

I expect to see new tools and platforms emerge that aim to let small publications band together and share some of the benefits that the big publishers have (data, viral content, etc.).

The big newspapers will be fine. The small ones have hurdles but they are telling local stories that will always have at least some audience, so they’ll be ok too.

The mid-size newspapers (e.g. Chicago Tribune) are going to have a tough time if they can’t 1) tell the local stories on a shoestring budget, and 2) differentiate their regional/national/global content.

The newspapers that really thrive over the next ten years will be the ones that double down on two things: high-traffic content and high-quality journalism. That brings us to BuzzFeed:

BuzzFeed FTW

BuzzFeed got so many things right in the past few years.

First, they knew how to create content that people love. Then they knew how to iterate on that content model to stay relevant long after everyone thought their 15 minutes of virality were over. They also were smart enough to not become too dependent on one platform – less than 10% of their traffic comes from Facebook today.

I expect to see BuzzFeed continue to set the bar for fantastic low-brow content, keeping the world engaged and supporting their efforts to deliver fantastic journalism.

Within 5 years, I think BuzzFeed will have earned a spot next to The New York Times as being among the most credible, highest quality storytellers in the world. (for more on this, read Jonah Peretti’s memo to BuzzFeed)

(since this prediction is fawning over a specific company, I should point out that I have no affiliation with them, but I’m a huge fan)

Newsletters keep cranking

There is value anywhere there is attention.

When email became less cool, the idea of an email newsletter became less alluring, but the reality is that we are still incredibly engaged with our inboxes — in fact even more so than 10 years ago because spam is now largely a solved problem. I’m not sure when this will change, but it’s not going to be in the next five years.

Slack (and its enterprise competitors that will no doubt be sprouting up in 2016) will shift significant amounts of attention away from the inbox, but the inbox will remain a great place to meet your audience.

And some Slack-first newsletters are going to show up next year.

Also, it’s important to think about email as simply a channel. TheSkimm got it right by starting a newsletter at the time they did, but they became massive because they deliver a creative, on-point product every single day.

Facebook Instant Articles + Apple News

Facebook and Apple are walking a fine line. They are trying to own the distribution channels for media, but they know they need to keep the publishers happy.

I don’t like this prediction, but it seems inevitable. I think Facebook and Apple are going to win – more people will read a New York Times article directly inside Facebook than on nyt.com itself.

This might level the playing field for publishers, but it also will make these companies the gatekeepers of the industry. Here’s a bit more, which I wrote about Apple News a few months ago:

There are plenty of ways Apple News might help journalism find sustainability.

But it is crucial for society to have journalists who speak truth to power, and it’s a bit scary to imagine journalism’s paychecks relying directly on the most valuable company in the world.

Of course, the silver lining is that these initiatives only work if the publishers survive, so the platforms have incentive to help them monetize.

Homeless media rises

And that brings us to distributed content.

The media outlets that thrive in the next five years are going to be the ones that embrace this new ecosystem – because it is going to happen regardless.

They’ll be telling stories in creative ways native to the platforms where they’re being distributed – whether that’s Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, or any number of other places.

(related to this, read Francesco Marconi’s post on the rise of ‘homeless media’)

Medium builds a mass-market storytelling network

I think Medium is going to have a bigger impact than many people realize. The opportunity ahead of them if they can seize it is not to ‘be the next Wordpress’, it’s to be the next printing press.

There’s always going to be a long tail of crap on Medium, but there will also be fantastic content that has a far longer shelf-life than a Tweet – much less a Snapchat post. When Medium is a liquid network of storytellers and story-readers at scale, it will be highly influential for a long time to come.

If one thing concerns me about Medium, it’s the challenges they are going to face as a platisher, as they like to say. Building an open publishing platform while running in-house editorial and having a corporate opinion about what content should be successful and what stories people should be telling is going to require tactful execution. It will be interesting to watch.

Other places I expect to see similar tensions between a platform and an editorial opinion are recent initiatives from Apple, Facebook, and Twitter.

The comments section becomes less horrible

Internet commenters are the worst. In the future, I predict that Internet commenters will still be the worst.

But, I think some tools will emerge to improve the quality of discussion around journalism. Perhaps a unified discussion layer — something like Genius is trying to build.

I also expect to see most publications choose one of two paths: either kill their comment section, or double down on building an actual community discussion around their content. Some approaches for the latter might be getting reporters involved in Q+A about their stories, hiring community managers, better rewarding people who add value to the discussion, etc.

Another brick in the paywall

Something many people in media don’t like to acknowledge is the fact that great journalism has never been supported solely by people paying for content.

So, the world is less willing now than ever before to pay for content, but the fact that the content needs to be monetized in ways beyond paywalls is not new.

Most ways content is monetized today and will be monetized for the foreseeable future fall into these buckets:

Hard paywalls, porous paywalls, premium content, metered access, crowdfunding, micropayments, display ads, native advertising, daily deals, newsletters, distribution partnerships, conferences and events, cross-media (i.e. whitepapers, documentaries), audience donations, data exploitation, and philanthropy.

I expect to see media organizations getting smarter about how to leverage a diverse array of these approaches in order to both grow and diversify their revenue streams.

We’ll see more great publications embracing BuzzFeed-eque approaches of driving massive traffic with viral content, so that they can make more money and support good journalism. And we’ll see more BuzzFeed-esque outlets leveraging their massive traffic to build teams that do good journalism.

Streaming music keeps shifting

A few things I expect to see in the next 1–2 years:

Prediction 1: Google will get competitive in this space, and leverage the fact that they are already surprisingly competitive in the amount that people use YouTube to stream audio.

Prediction 2: Live-streamed concerts take off. Taylor Swift could pack movie theaters, music venues, and living rooms around the world to participate in live streams of her shows, and people will pay for live content. This space is mostly only tapped by the jam band scene, but I expect it to be massive.

Prediction 3: We see a major artist top the charts with a digital-only album.

A power shift in politics

Donald Trump is decidedly racist, unprofessional, and unqualified. As a result, he lacks support from the media and the GOP establishment.

The really interesting thing about his campaign, though, is it is showing us a power shift that has taken place. Twenty years ago, a candidate simply could not get to where Trump is without the support of the party establishment. Today, a candidate who captures the attention of the people can steamroll the party, and blow past the candidates who have nepotism and handshake deals from powerful people behind them.

This of course will bring good and bad. On one hand, shock jock candidates will have an easier shot at a strong candidacy. On the other hand, a fantastic candidate who otherwise might have been shut down will have a chance to go around the Washington insider game emerge as the winner.

Messaging

The explosion in messaging is going to continue, and the next phase is the platform-ification of messaging tools.

Slack, Snapchat, WhatsApp, iMessage, etc., are all going to be app platforms, and we’re going to see tons 0f interesting innovation around it.

In media, the winners will be those who 1) tell interesting stories native to these platforms or 2) provide the tools for publishers, authors, and the rest of the world to tell interesting stories native to these platforms.

Big thanks to Francesco Marconi for feedback on this post

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