The Challenge Of Corporate Blogging & Podcasting
August 17th, 2007
ZDNet’s David Berlind has published an interesting article on the Twitterization of traditional media. While the focus of the article is on how Twitter will affect big media, Berlind also does a great job of summarizing the challenges facing corporate media as it is forced to compete with bloggers, podcasters and video podcasters:
Although it was not entirely disruptive to our existing efforts the way the Web was to print or blogging was to traditional Web publishing, podcasting (RSS delivered audio) was and still is clearly a disruptive force that all mainstream media will need to reckon with if they haven’t already.
Video blogging wasn’t far behind and while a combination of YouTube and “YouTube-ready” cameras have made child’s play out of putting video on the Web, I’ve spent the last year figuring out the best way to harness that disruptive force for media companies in CNET’s class (or bigger). We’re no stranger to video and in fact, CNET’s roots are in video production dating back to CNET’s television efforts in the mid-90’s. But that effort and some existing video efforts at CNET are about an old school business process strapped to a new antenna: the Internet. Yes, video on the Net is a disruptive force. But for media companies like CNET or even CNN, the real disruption that we need to harness has to do with two vectors: Multi-medium publishing and economics.
On the economic front, I refer to the business process disruption that I’m working on as the “Broadcast quality production on YouTube economics” principle. Once the recipe for that is figured out (and I think we’re very close), it becomes a part of a bigger multi-medium publishing story that sees the Internet as a way to deliver blogged content to our audience members any way they like it — as text, still images, audio (podcasted or streamed), and/or video.
The focus is on broadcast quality production via YouTube economics. The truth is that we’ll probably never get broadcast quality production or YouTube economics. But with those as our goals, the closer we get to both, the more disruptive the underlying business model is to the status quo, especially in the context of multi-medium blogging.
Mainstream media tends to fixate on the often amateurish quality of podcasts. Doing this, though, can blind you to the fact that there are now thousands of bloggers, podcasters and video podcasters doing works that’s not just creative and entertaining, but also professional. Even more significant, they are doing it with extremely low overhead and competing with big media for advertising revenue.
Berlind’s challenge - creating broadcast quality production via YouTube economics is not just a challenge for ZDNet and big media, it’s also the challenge facing PodTech, PodShow, Andrew Baron at Rocketboom, Tim Street at French Maid TV, Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine at Ask a Ninja, and anyone else trying to make a business out of podcasting.
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August 22nd, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Interesting concept worth understanding - the rising of corporate media- worth analizing closer, corporations have much to say these days, challenged by an informed consumer. Whos who doing what in the global market.