Interesting Peek At What Real "New Media" Might Look Like

You can call things like Facebook and Twitter "social media" all you want, and they are certainly an interesting new societal development, but they aren't professional media. There will always be professional intermediaries, storytellers if you will, who will seek to get paid to tell you what's going on in our world.

Will the media continue to look like the New York Times or local TV news? Obviously not. But what will it look like? I don't think we've seen a proven example of the future yet. A lot of "new media" looks to me to be either old media in new online clothes (most if not all MSM media web sites) or unproven business models that may be here today but will not necessarily be here tomorrow. We've already seen a slew of these would-be new media outlets, such as Citysearch, Yahoo Finance and others, and they've all gone bust.

But I was very intrigued reading about the site EveryBlock in the good 'ol New York Times (here's the online link to their story), in a story about "hyper-local" web sites. I read the story with some skepticism because this isn't the first time this idea has been tried. But what's different about Every Block is that it isn't trying to put reporters on the street in neighborhoods to report on the meeting at the library. Instead, it's harnessing the power of the web to gather information that's geographically tagged, such as police reports and other government information, restaurant reviews, photos, and blogs. THIS strikes me as a plausible new media model, particularly if they can get a little traction, figure out some decent revenue streams, and hire a few young reporters to add some bulk to the content.

Every Block is funded in part by a private foundation, and this is another trend that bears watching. Private foundations are starting to step up to fund journalism, and it makes perfect sense. No one ever said that department store ads and classifieds were the God-given funding sources for investigative journalism, though they were for more than half a century. That's over now. But if journalists want to investigate, and rich people want to pay them to, that may be how it gets done in the coming years. And foundations may have to fund sites like EveryBlock until they figure out how to survive.

This post is mainly about the media, not PR, but here's the PR lesson du jour: where there are professional storytellers, there's a need for professional media relations people to help them, provide information, and represent their client or company's interest.