There will be none of that here at Media Scrum, because we're all about the situation here and now in the year 2017. Rest assured, any self-styled media expert who confidently predicts what is going to happen in the next few years is usually talking a huge amount of complete fucking shit, because nobody really knows where this mad merry-go-round is going, and most of it is being worked out as we go along.
The news media is going through such a huge change, and it's doing it on a 50-year cycle that we're still right in the middle of. It was brewing for decades, and all really kicked in with the rolling news of 24-hour coverage on TV, which was more than 30 years ago now. The media was only just dealing with that shift when the internet fucked things up for fucking everybody all over again.
Today's media is still struggling with some of the decisions made at the dawn of the internet age, and has, in general, spent most of the time since breathlessly chasing trends instead of setting them, and are totally making it up as they go along.
We've come such a long way – just recently, one of the small ways the 15th anniversary of the September 11 attacks was commemorated was to show what the websites that broke the news looked like on the day, and it was startling how primitive they still were at that stage. In the last decade, video has become an integral part of many media organisation's growth plans, and most of them are still trying out how to get people to watch their shit without forcing them to with damnable auto-play functions.
There is so much to work out here, and so many lessons that have been learned (and some lessons that are still being learned, four times over), and so much further to go. We're only in the middle of this shit, and where it all ends up, nobody really knows, no matter how confident they sound about it.
It's that strange mix of unexpected technologies and the fickle will of the general public, and if you can predict which way those two things are really going, we'd also love to have the Lotto numbers for this week's Powerball.
Maybe it's a world of paywalls and targeted subscriptions and micropayments, or maybe it's a world where you get the latest celebrity gossip in liquid form and inject it into your ears. It's going to be a ride seeing where it goes, and will probably be as painful as you expect.
- Ron Troupe
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