Future of Media, Print, Publishing: Conversation with Gerd Leonhard
The latest in the Meeting of the Minds series of conversations between fellow-futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself is on the Future of Media, Print, Publishing, produced by Jonathan Marks. The video and some summary notes from the conversation are below.
Some of the things we discuss:
* In just the last few years the few rapidly growing newspaper markets remaining, such as India, have turned around and are now declining.
* Print will survive in pockets, including free, suburban, and rural papers.
* Marketing and advertising budgets will be massively reallocated as what impacts
* Television will be challenged in similar ways to how newspapers have been.
* Advertising is useless if it interrupts.
* We have yet to find the mobile promotion mechanisms that will work, focusing on relevant content rather than interruption.
* We are in a digital first, print second world.
* The attention monopoly of print has gone, taking publishers into a different paradigm.
* The future of the media industry, in its broadest sense, is extremely positive.
* However many incumbent players have tried to hang on to the past rather than seize emerging opportunities, even though they have better capabilities than almost any others to take these.
* Older capital-intensive media models are being supplanted by models that require far less capital.
* Publishers need to shift paradigms to beyond existing silos to broader frames of media organizations.
* If content is king, context is queen, and value must be added through a variety of means including interfaces.
* We don’t know what the successful business models of tomorrow will be, these will be discovered by those that try new possibilities.
* The solutions are unique to the organization, its audience, and its situation so, so multiple experiments with revenue and channels are needed.
* Going beyond the obvious is required to survive and thrive.
