The Three Dimensions of Media

Over the last few years, much has been writ­ten about some of the chal­lenges the media indus­try is fac­ing, par­tic­u­larly news­pa­pers in the United States. I, myself, have cov­ered the area pretty exten­sively and for a while but act­ing as both a reader and a writer of opin­ions about that indus­try, I have yet to see a clear def­i­n­i­tion of what is being dis­placed. To that extent, I’ve started think­ing about what is Media with a cap­i­tal M and what is chang­ing in its nature?

Media as a Mode of Delivery

In most of the con­ver­sa­tions about media, the dis­cus­sions cen­ters on modes of deliv­ery. Peo­ple talk about tele­vi­sion, radio, news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, or the Inter­net as media. Under that def­i­n­i­tion, the way a piece of con­tent is trans­ported appears to define what that piece of con­tent is. It’s an odd approach that seems to put more empha­sis on the how than on the what, that really believes that the enve­lope is more impor­tant that the mes­sage it car­ries and this offer­ing seems like a flawed assump­tion in many ways.

It would seem fool­ish to con­sider the tele­phone a media form so why do we treat the tele­vi­sion or paper as com­po­nents? They are chan­nels and noth­ing more and the hand-wringing around deliv­ery to those chan­nels seems based on the flawed assump­tion that the mode of trans­port is more impor­tant than what is transported.

There is an inher­ent dan­ger in that flawed assump­tion as pre­vi­ous indus­tries which failed to rec­og­nize the busi­ness they were in found them­selves dis­placed and ulti­mately deliv­er­ing value into the hands of a sin­gle player that con­cen­trated its power by offer­ing itself as the pri­mary toll-gate on another form of dis­tri­b­u­tion. The music indus­try circa 2001, for exam­ple, believed that it was in the busi­ness of mov­ing plas­tic goods known as CDs and let Apple take what was writ­ten on those plas­tic goods, the music that is ulti­mately the value cre­ated, and deliv­ered it over the inter­net. To this day, many in the music indus­try still believe that CDs are how music ought to be dis­trib­uted, lead­ing to such high per­for­mance act as Dan­ger Mouse’s deci­sion to just release a blank CD-R when the labels wouldn’t let him release the CD otherwise.

Today, news­pa­pers are focused on find­ing bet­ter ways to move paper; mag­a­zines are focused on increas­ing profit mar­gins against phys­i­cal goods; TV chan­nels are still argu­ing over num­ber of view­ers in a sin­gle sit­ting and radio is partly orga­nized around two com­pet­ing mod­els: one where peo­ple and cor­po­ra­tions pay in a coop form to get some form of pro­gram­ming cre­ated and dis­trib­uted and another where adver­tis­ers count num­bers of ear­lobes they are reach­ing. Even on the inter­net, some peo­ple still believe that the pas­sage of masses by a web site has some level of importance.

In each case, the play­ers are focused on the dis­tri­b­u­tion and not the prod­uct and yet, the dis­tri­b­u­tion medium is only one end of a rela­tion­ship that needs too.

In the Middle

Because if you look at the core def­i­n­i­tion of a medium, it’s some­thing that’s in the middle.

But in the mid­dle of what? Try­ing to assess this becomes a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult. Obvi­ously, a good is pro­duced and it is con­sumed. Focus­ing on that equa­tion may get us closer to estab­lish­ing the right model for media in the future because it forces us to admit that what we know today as media is not a sin­gle thing but a vari­ety of things:

• On one dimen­sion, it could be listed as going from enter­tain­ing to informative
• On another, it could go from being con­sid­ered as pur­chased or subsidized
• On a third axis, it could be treated as mass gen­er­ated or professionalized

In three sim­ple dimen­sion, we can break down most of the known media industry.

For exam­ple, take news­pa­pers: They strive to be mid­dle of the road between enter­tain­ing and infor­ma­tive, with a bias towards the front sec­tion of the news­pa­per being infor­ma­tive and the back sec­tion being enter­tain­ing; They also range from the com­pletely sub­si­dized approach (free adver­tis­ing spon­sored news­pa­per) to the heav­ily sub­si­dized model (most news­pa­pers). And most tend to be more pro­fes­sion­al­ized, with pro­fes­sional edi­tors and reporters build­ing most of the content.

Mag­a­zines run the gamut, but largely focus on enter­tain­ment (the deliv­ery of infor­ma­tion is gen­er­ally left to a much nar­rower por­tion of the mar­ket knows as newslet­ters); they are, for the most part heav­ily sub­si­dized goods and mostly professionalized.

In the TV space, the news chan­nels tend to be mov­ing fur­ther and fur­ther into the enter­tain­ment arena (I would group opin­ion as a form of enter­tain­ment); They are 90+ per­cent sub­si­dized as their main goal is to serve the adver­tis­ers and only a por­tion of their rev­enue is com­ing directly from con­sumers through some of the cable sys­tem car­riage fees.

In radio, NPR is bal­anc­ing between enter­tain­ing and infor­ma­tive; the inter­est­ing thing is that it is the clos­est thing to a pur­chased good as the group tends to attempt to get its con­sumers to ante up for their con­sump­tion; and it mixes mostly pro­fes­sion­al­ized goods with mass-generated con­tent (call-in shows, for exam­ple). Other “news” sta­tion tend to focus on the enter­tain­ment part of the equa­tion (talk radio is focused on keep­ing its audi­ence as engaged as pos­si­ble) and fully sub­si­dized (adver­tis­ing based) and mostly mass gen­er­ated (talk show host merely serve as the forum admin­is­tra­tor ensure that like minds con­firm their own bias or vent to each other).

On the Inter­net, diverse sites can run from pure forms of enter­tain­ment (celebrity or gos­sip blogs, for exam­ple) to heavy infor­ma­tion deliv­ery (gen­er­ally more niche focused pub­li­ca­tion); they are also all over the place in terms of mod­els, rang­ing from the fully sub­si­dized model to the fully pur­chased one; and one could argue that they tend to also run the gamut in terms of mass-generated vs. pro­fes­sional production.

While I have given you a short pre­view of each of the dimen­sions, I would like to focus the dis­cus­sion around par­tic­u­lars so I will delve fur­ther into each of the three dimen­sions in the next few entries.