Don't be digitally dozy - Guy Berger
By: Issa Sikiti da Silva
As the rise of digital revolution reaches a tipping point, breaking up existing business models (information gathering, editing, packaging, dissemination and loyal audience) and reshaping journalism, traditional media organisations must start a quest for new business models suitable to the new business environment, Prof Guy Berger, head of Rhodes University's School of Journalism, told delegates yesterday, Tuesday, 9 September 2008, at Highway Africa 2008 in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape.
According to Prof Berger, the above-mentioned stages have been unbundled, disarticulated and dispersed, and fairly replaced by ‘import' and embedded links, global outsourcing and user editing, multi-proposed platforms and third party aggregators, RSS and links, recommendation and search engine based, respectively.
“As audiences shift, ad revenue does not parallel, paving a way to a serious crisis in journalism, which may not strictly be the loss of audience, but more fundamentally, the decoupling of news and advertising,” he explained.
New society of informationHe said that all these processes have given way to a new architecture of information society brought by open source, the internetisation and mediatisation.
“Put these three processes together and it means the end of the world as we know it.
“As a result, information is no longer a scarce commodity, but what is scarce is the human attention - especially on making sense of it. And the solution to this is social network recommendations because you need more information to control the overload of information. So, don't be digitally dozy.”
'Know your users'Matthew Buckland, 24.com GM of publishing and social media, had this advice for publishers and media business leaders: “Know your users (you will deliver a fantastic content), develop multiple media platforms (including mobile - a key platform) and use social network layers (connect users with each other), and aggregate.”
Buckland added: “Use multiple formats (embrace them, not just text, and they must have the same quality as text production), embrace the community (get your readers to write, copy-taste and gather news for you, incentivise by paying them and elevate readers from comments and open up columnists), and use multiple brands (don't be afraid to create multiple online brands).”
He also urged publishers to niche their content (focus on ways of creating niche content areas, ask users to help you), and to tag their content (because online content does not die unlike newspaper content: bloggers do it better than media), and go the open source way and develop pre-existing open sources.
Digital Journalism AwardsLater in the evening, the SABC-Highway Africa Digital Journalism Awards live TV ceremony was held at the Grahamstown Settlers Monument Hall, where the following winners were announced:
Tadegnon, who is based in Lome, Togo's capital city, is also the Togo correspondent for La Voix de l'Allemagne (the Voice of Germany).
For more information, go to
www.matthewbuckland.com and
www.mediatogo.info.
For daily conference highlights, latest news, podcasts, pictures, video and audio, go to
http://highwayafrica.com. Also go to
www.zoopy.com/bizcommunity.
For more:More by Issa Sikiti da Silva
More...ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Issa Sikiti da Silva is a freelance journalist and short stories writer whose work has been published in local and foreign publications, both in English and French. He contributes to Bizcommunity.com as a news writer. Email him at
issa@bizcommunity.com.
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