It's Change Or Die Time For Media Companies

When publishers first went online, and when new online publishers set
up, they basically recreated magazines and newspapers online – they
didn’t create anything that was fundementally tailored to the new
medium. In fact, it’s much like the early days of the printing press,
when many of the first books to roll off the presses were editions of
the same books that monks had been busy outputtting from their
scriptorums. It’s just a symptom of thought processes that are mired in the technology of a rapidly passing age.

We’re
passed that stage. The new forms of publishing online are starting to
emerge. Two things are happening – existing publishers are busy bolting
on blogs and social media to the site of their printing press-inspired
sites (guilty!) and new publishers are building sites based on new
technology that really don’t look much like the old style sites at all.

And I bet you something right now. The winners in this battle won’t emerge with sites that look like existing big media sites at all. They’ll be those who use the current and developing technologies to build media enterprises that interact with the communities they serve in fundementally different ways. That’s why this is an exciting time to be in media companies.

But it’s also a scary time. Arrington again:

What I’d like to see, and even be a part of, is the blogger equivalent to the 1992 U.S. Mens Basketball Dream Team. That team could take CNET apart in a year, hire the best of the survivors there, and then move on to bigger prey.

If you don’t thrive on competition, now’s a good time to contemplate a career change.