Hello, my name is Megan and I am addicted to media.
There, I said it. I am and have been addicted to media for
quite some time. I amassed mountains of books in my youth, going so far as to
create my own card catalog to keep track of them (for those of you younger than
25, ask your older colleagues what that means). In second grade, I pretended to
edit a magazine, recruiting an editorial board and holding "story"
meetings. Our magazines were actually blank pages full of scribbles stapled
into manilla folders, but hey, we were generating some good content.
When I got older, I started to appreciate other types of media, namely newspaper. There was always a newspaper in our house on the weekends when I was growing up, I was used to the smudgy fingers and ad circulars, the horoscopes and the crosswords, and especially the comics. During my "Garfield" phase I cut out every strip that was in the paper and saved them. Yup, every one.
In college, I was lucky enough to
work for the campus newspaper. I applied for the job partly because I liked to
write and partly because I was a little enamored of my mass communications
teacher who was an old-time newspaper/media guy. He said, "You want to be
the person who stays until the end of the credits at a movie," and
"You want to be the person who reads the paper," so I became both.
I loved working in the newsroom -
loved the camaraderie of the other reporters and editors, how much we all knew
about current events and the fact that we all had an opinion we weren't afraid
to share. It was awesome.
After college, I worked for an
advertising agency, which my favorite professor viewed as a form of betrayal,
but what could I do? They were hiring. During those years I learned about media
from the other side and started to really explore the depth and breadth of this
new tool called "the World Wide Web."
Now, ten years later, after having
worked for three interactive advertising agencies, and getting my master's
degree in professional writing, I seemed to have brought everything full
circle. I'm working at a newspaper once again, a major daily in one of the Top
20 DMAs in the U.S. Not as a writer, but as a marketer. And if you think
newspaper marketing is an oxymoron, you haven't been paying attention.
I firmly believe via the research
I've done and the current state of my working environment, that the day of
reckoning between digital and traditional media is upon us. Until now, they
have been barely coexisting, pretending to work in tandem, when really, they're
working at cross purposes. It's mostly due to the fact that there is still an
old guard in traditional media who is scared out of their minds at the rate at
which digital media changes and can't believe how fast it's grown into a
legitimate competitor. It's also due to the fact that digital media proponents
don't really understand or value traditional media. They see it as a roadblock
to growth and innovation.
Neither side is right and
continuing to butt heads will only result in an implosion that will take the
print world down in a blaze of glory. Newsprint burns hot.
Throughout 2013, my goal will be
to examine this day of reckoning and the factors leading up to it. Just as wars
are fought for a variety of reasons, this battle will be waged from many
different angles. Will there be an inciting incident like the assassination of
Archduke Ferdinand or the invasion of Poland? It's hard to say; things have
been simmering for so long a rolling boil can't be far behind.
Some of the topics I plan to
address include:
- RIP: Original Content
- New Consumers are your Lifeblood
- Advertising isn't the only answer
- Don't reinvent the microchip - What New Media can learn from Old
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