My thoughts on The Future of Media: Part 1

When I found out my boss was planning to attend her first Toronto Girl Geek Dinner, I jumped at the chance to join her. I’m a girl and a geek; plus, I figured I could use the networking experience and something fun to do on a Monday night.

I was also very interested in attending because the discussion topic was “The Future of Media.”

As a recent journalism graduate and someone who is now working as an editor in what I’d consider to be on the way to the future of media, I’m really interested to hear what others have to say about this and how other young women (a demographic that seemed to dominate my j-skool classes, but which is sometimes scarce in traditional newsrooms) are shaping the future of media as well.

What Lauren and I found ourselves in was a room full of women who mostly work in the areas of media which are so broken that people speculate every day when the mainstream media’s metaphorical “end of days” will come (or if those days are already upon us). They are: radio, television, print and telecommunications, plus the academics who teach those subjects in our colleges and universities.

And that’s fair enough. Why wouldn’t these successful, technologically engaged, intelligent women want to be at the forefront of a huge shift in their industries?

(As an aside, from what I could see, Lauren and I were the only people who raised our hands to indicate we were both content producers and marketers. I’ll bring this up again in the later parts of this series.)

However, as led by these women, the hot topic of conversation was not “The Future of Media,” but the present of mostly social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Connect, hype, digital literacy, privacy concerns, etc. You can read the list here.

At the end of the night, I felt let down and left the dinner thinking that the women driving these debates completely missed the point: social media is not the media we should be talking about.

We should be talking about the media that we all work in; the media that people who don’t know everything turn to in order to find the information they need to know.

The only aspect of “The Future of Media” that was actually discussed was the CBC’s Angela Misri briefly explaining CBC podcasts and switching the livestreams to mp3 format.

I’m a huge fan of CBC Radio One. I listen to the station live in the mornings while I get ready for work, but some of the best shows air during working hours or later on at night, and I miss the live broadcasts.

I also don’t enjoy scheduling my life around my favourite programs, whether on radio or TV. So I think of the CBC podcasts kind of like TiVo or online streaming video – I can listen to the shows when I want to, skip the interruptions (traffic, weather, hourly news, etc.) and pause when I need to.

Yes, the CBC is doing a great job and is potentially ahead of the curve, but it can’t be the future of commercial media because it’s publicly funded. It doesn’t have to make money. There are no ads, just information. Companies and products are often mentioned, and endorsed, because the CBC thinks they’re of interest to its audience, but no money changes hands because it’s a publicly funded media outlet.

To survive and thrive, media outlets will have to become more like the CBC, but advertisers will actually pay the content producers to turn the advertising into content that is relevant to the outlet’s audience.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series on The Future of Media, in which I will discuss what exactly I mean by this statement, how it will work and why content producers won’t have as much trouble avoid corruption as we think they will.