Missing media serendipity

By Michael Fraase

Tuesday, 23 December 2008 01:13PM CST

Section: Publishing

Leonardo notebookOh lordy, I hope John Byrne, BusinessWeek executive editor, is wrong in his “The changing truths of journalism.” Citing a Bivings Group study, Byrne reports that magazines are even further behind the Web curve than newspapers.

Byrne appears to break the future of magazines into five possible scenarios, each bleaker than the last:

  1. Aggregation (what, drive eyeballs away? No way)
  2. Curation (there’s no curation; report, file, and move on)
  3. Verticals (massive traffic is the goal, remember?)
  4. User-generated content (eww, just eww)
  5. Automated story placement (robots are the future)

Context is now as important as content, according to Byrne. And the mediasphere has been exploded into pieces of niches, “organized around individual interests and passions.”

Let’s parse this. First of all, context has always been as important as content. Information without context is worse than useless: it can be dangerous. Glad to hear the corporate types are finally starting to figure this out.

Next, I suspect niches are wearing thin and that we as a population don’t crave more specialization at all. I know I’m spending more and more of my media diet foraging for information in which I didn’t know I was interested. I love accidentally stumbling upon an interesting story—in a field in which I have no abiding interest—serendipitously. Like this one in the New York Times by Michael Kimmelman on how Italy is considering consolidating management of the country’s museums with the guy who ran McDonald’s in Italy.

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