A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste – Taking Back New Media

What happened? Why YouTube and not ABC, CBS, or NBC? Why is Google the world’s largest advertising agency (market cap of $137.70B) over 13 times bigger than WPP (market cap $10.47B)? Why with a billion downloads is iTunes killing every other record labels? Why do newspaper publishers seem like the blacksmiths of the information age? And why is Facebook Generation Next’s favorite book -- that they don’t even have to buy?

I have been thinking about it all during the holiday break as I have watched traditional media players implode (check out my delicious on Media Downturn for the articles -- http://delicious.com/sshamp/mediadownturn). Old media had the experience and expertise. It should have provided the pathfinders in this new media wilderness. But instead of writing their shareholders about their successes, old media titans are signing pink slips. And the new media moguls care more about Charlie the Unicorn (33 million views, go figure http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5im0Ssyyus) than community responsibility.

As the students we handed mass communication degrees report back being laid-off, I wonder if I/we have done a good enough job as a media educator(s).

We didn’t focus enough on the technology. We believed that the content skills we taught our students would beat the channel savy technowledge start-ups offered. Sensible enough. People were still going to read, listen, and watch. The content production skills would be relevant no matter what the medium, right? Unfortunately, technology radically changed the patterns of consumption. Technological capability morphed traditional industry structure into something today’s media professionals barely recognize.

We teach our students to be great videographers. But one kid with camcorder in the back of an auditorium tapes a guy dancing and over 100 million people watch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg) – that is more viewers than last year’s Superbowl. Newspaper layout is meaningless when RSS feeds bring us news from every newspaper we don’t want to subscribe to in a single browser window. Google takes ad buying to eBay with automated bidding. Forget radio programming strategy. Pandora makes a radio channel just for me with just the type of music I want to hear – and it pushes it to my cell phone! And why worry about Nielsen ratings when the video I watch on my cell phone reports back exactly what I watch along with all my demographics.

The centrifugal force of technology change is spinning to the periphery the very skills we used to consider core. I am afraid our students are the best at what doesn’t matter anymore.

We nodded our head when told “the medium is the message,” but we didn’t really get it. Gutenberg started the whole mass communication thing by mastering the technology. But we forgot his lesson. Technology matters. And only those who understand the intricacies of the technology will be able to lead the companies making content in the future.

But a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. So we are starting a discussion in the Grady College. How much and what type of technology do we need to teach our students? Tell us what you think.

LinkedIn Group for New Media Alum

OK, I am officially a moron. For years, I have been preaching the power of social networking. There is even a portion of my “Jobs Lecture” – many of you remember that – that deals with LinkedIn. But I missed the point. My bad.

For years, I have been trying to devise a way to keep up with all my former new media students. Since I started teaching the web back in 1994, there are a lot of you guys out there. And I miss you! But it was an impossible task. I tried listservs (you must be on one now to be reading this) but I always had the old emails – the one from two jobs ago. And Facebook was a free-for-all. The pictures students sent me in their “friend requests” made me want to call their parents. It seemed hopeless.

And then I remembered that some of you had been harping at me to create a Linkedin group. During some downtime this holiday break, I looked into it. Snap! It is exactly what we need.
LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com) is a professional networking site. No “relationship status,” photo albums, or apps. Just a way to keep up with who you know. And, more importantly, who they know.

If you are a new media alum (that means someone that I taught new media to in any our locales – Megalab, Dowden Center, or NMI), create a Linkedin profile (quick, easy, free) and request to join the “New Media Institute Alumni – UGA” group (http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/1658507). I will clear you to join. This group is only for alum so if you have been gone a long time, jumpstart my fading memory by giving me something to remember – like the project you worked on.

I started the group last Sunday and we are already up to 58 members. But I am greedy! I want 100 by next Monday.

Special thanks to Jennifer Maldonado and Eddie Garrett for keeping on me about this. See it takes a while, but I catch on.

Student Only DBB this week (1/13/09)

This week is a student-only Digital Brown Bag -- we are covering the logistics of what students need to do. But we crank up our real sessions next week. And we will be meeting in Room 401 in Journalism this semester. With over 60 students enrolled in the class, we had to get a bigger room!