In the January of 1996, Bill Gates published an article on Microsoft website called “Content is King”. No doubt, this phrase has a tremendous impact on the traditional media industry. However, the media landscape has changed rapidly due to new technologies which have also led to globalization as well as culture homogenization. Recent years argues about “does content and culture matters” never comes to an end, nonetheless, time and facts have already and will continue to prove us the answer, content will always matter, so as the culture.
Content matters in old days
Almost all media professionals whoever worked for decades missed the old time when traditional media has the strongest right of discourse. Back to the time when communication was following the “one to all” model and media ecology was relatively simple, good content is the cornerstone. In case of the newspaper, good content brings larger circulation which means greater influence and market share and thus attract more advertising. Few people would question the content of traditional media, content was born to be king.
Content matters nowadays
Media has become democratized, we are now in an era that everybody could get involved. With social media platforms, one can create their own blogs and become a “journalist” without any professional training. It is worth mentioning that whether platforms can survive or not is still based on the quality of the contents on it. What cannot be ignored now is media ecology, audience media usage pattern, content production, and information dissemination channels have dramatically changed. Instead of newspaper and television, our mobile phone has become the main source of information. However, the information we received every day is overloaded now. What audience need is not the information explosion rather is the content relative to them. The importance of contents thus should be reemphasized. What we need is authoritative and original content which we really care. A revolution within “content is king” is happening. For the newspaper, the advantages of content production in old days and that of information dissemination in new media era should be combined. HuffingtonPost.com is a news and opinion website and blog launched in 2005 and has long been seen as a revolutionary starter in the news industry. In the May of 2011, the traffic of it has passed the NYTimes.com and such success was generally believed that contribute to the high-quality articles provided by authority and the mobility of the website. Content is still the start point and the destination of the communication.
Content now need reliability as well as original thoughts. In this all-to-all communication environment, it is foreseeable that fake news is given a seat at the table. Besides speed, the authenticity is also desirable. In the perspective of the psychology of the audience, the credibility of news media is hard to established and the authority of new media, especially the social media has been weakened. Therefore, the traditional media should stick to the high-quality content production and keep on digging the news value.
Content now need the audience first. The legacy terms have also changed to adapt the new media era. Readers are now users, newspaper is now product, distribute is now marketing and selling the newspaper is now selling the service. What new media values most is individual. In 2015, BBC’s research and development department launched a project named visual perceptive media which devote to “inspire everybody with more personal, unique content which reflects the diversity of the audience.”. By collecting data via an app, content is personalized and can be “tailored to many individual users”. The second question is raised at this point, does culture matter? The answer is yes as well. In their research, Choi et al found that users from Korea and the United States showed different behavior while using mobile twitter. (Choi et al, 2016) Culture is the root of the society and the influence of culture is more than psychologically and may apply physically. In consideration of personalization, culture does matter and weigh a large scale.
Matthew Gentzkow stated that in the 1950s，though television provided a new medium for political information, it also gave audience opportunities to consume their leisure time and thus he though television has been “bad”. Except for political news, television also provides educational information for people of all ages. As we all know, sesame street is the first and a successful television educational show in the history of United States. Admittedly, television is a solution for it distance learning and experiencing. Just like both Postman and Huxley argued, entertainment is the nature of human, we cannot define television is “good” or “bad” based on how people use it for and things always have two sides, none of them will be too extreme. As for the newspaper, few people would consider it as “bad” and the reason is the content on it always tell us the world we live in.
By Yanni Chen, BU Emerging Media Studies Master’s Student
Gencarelli, T. F. (2006), Perspectives on culture, technology, and communication: The media ecology tradition, Gencarelli: NJ: Hampton, 201–225.
Choi, K., Im, I., & Hofstede, G. (2016). A cross-cultural comparative analysis of small group collaboration using mobile twitter. Computers in Human Behavior, 65, 308.
The Huffington Post Passes The New York Times in Traffic https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/huffington-post-passes-new-york-times-traffic/351611/