If there is one thing that we have taken from Journalism 201 with Uncle Rick, Amelia, and Simran, it’s that the whole media landscape is changing, and as journalism majors and future media professionals, we’d better get used to it. We should have known from the name of this class – YouTubers, Bloggers, and Comedy News and the End of Mass Media as We Knew It – that we would be in for an educational experience about how media would look in the future. I guess we just weren’t prepared for how much we would learn. For that, we say thank you – because of this class, we feel ready for what’s ahead, and that is exactly what we should leave a college class saying.
In the future, we see the content of media shifting to the entertainment medium. With the advent of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report, it seems that more people want to be entertained than be informed. Our content will have shorter sentences and will be compact to keep up with the fast pace of the world around us. Does this mean goodbye newspapers and NBC Nightly News? Maybe not immediately, but we do see their popularity continue to fall in favor of comedy news and dot com startups.
To distribute this media, we will be using new technology, technology that hasn’t even been invented yet – wild thought, huh? We do predict that this new technology will make communication even more concise than it is now, and even more impersonal. Whereas before communication was a well thought out letter or a phone call, now it’s a quick Twitter post, requiring no direct connection with the outside world. We see this trend continuing and getting even more impersonal.
Public relations, marketing, and sales will have to resort to putting advertising everywhere in people’s daily lives to simply catch up with them – we’re talking ads on cell phone screens, all over personal blogs, and anywhere where a target audience doesn’t have to look to find it. The less work the public has to do, the better.
The media landscape is changing as we know it, and we’re thankful to have taken this class so that we can be a step ahead in being abreast for these changes – changes that will affect every part of our career as media professionals. Media 3.0, here we come!
- Rachel Burchfield and Adam McGonigle