Business Need

The real cost of Digital Music on-line is the licensing by the record companies that "own" the music. The music publishers own rights which one day expire and by milking their herd digitally online legal alternatives to the overcrowded field of content providers of digital music - both the licensed and the devil may care varieties plus of course that growing source of content, you and me.

The media moguls do not get it. It is not just eyeballs but evolution driving the technology markets. It is not just evolution, but advancing and holding together software platforms that can safely evolve new methods and ideas in heavy competition with other. Hence there are two type of universe on the internet. Those that speak due to semantically meaningful threads, I think we call it writing.

The other platform is the all embracing experience. Often these are provide less connective depth of interest or that new buzz word - engagement with users because they become the new mobile phone craze or method of dealing with the wrenching agonies of boredom and aloneness. In this vast mess we call the internet, do we focus on a certain provider or "channel" like we were so carefully rationed in TV universe thinking, channels providing content flavours in the very successful British model also created that content - providing real work for real people who are great at their job, entertainment.

Media mashups provide an assult to the senses or eat so much time that without an engagement that the punter is prepared to front cash for, the organisation is left to harvest advertising dollars. For that, there is a business need.

When thinking is driven by business needs, the ideas of creatives are limited to what can be done when, more time is spent measuring the cloth than cutting it. When the thinking is driven by the creatives - there are costs overruns, misalignment of budgeted costs, expectations and results. Combining raw capital and intellectual capital takes someone to hold the cloth.

Journalism.org- The State of the News Media 2008

Journalism.org- The State of the News Media 2008

The challenge for online media is to involve the reader. And it has always been this way. A newspaper is valued by its audience because it talks to them. In their language.

Online news seeks to attract the advertising dollar and errs by:

a) limiting the news so physical newspapers still sell

and
b) satisfying the urge to know without effort, i.e. using rss feeds as info sources rather than links

By delivery of a better newspaper - that uses the full capabilities of the DOM and XML rendering, you can allow readers to not just keep up with the latest piece of celebrity trivia. It is by capturing an international audience that The Guardian has a larger slice of the media pie than most other British news papers. Analyse that against the dominance of reactionary tabloid "The Sun" that sells 3 million copies but there is little online engagement. The future of media is, increasingly, is engaging our minds.