Mike Butcher on How Digital Media Screwed the Media Business at the PSFK Conference London

This 20 minute video from the PSFK Conference London 2007 presents journalist Mike Butcher as he talks about how media owners are on a race for survival against technology companies that put the power to publish in the hands of the ‘audience.’

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A full transcript of this speech can be found here on Mike’s site.Main Notes (by Lynette Webb)

Mike spoke at the beginning about industrial revolution uprisings and how the initial ones (eg: Pentridge uprising of 300 people) failed because people didn’t have ways to communicate and organise fast. Then the printing press was developed leading to Pamphlets which were read out to people in reading groups… a cheaper, faster means for information exchange & social discourse, with the result that 60k people turned up at Peterloo protest. Now that enough people are online we have “Digital Pamphlets”, blogs etc which is yet another improvement in making cheaper/faster
Classified ads are becoming self organising - eg: craigslist, freecycle, facebook marketplace
Not only Google going after traditional classified market of newspapers, but new startups- Nestoria, wayn etc.
Old media is growing but not leading anymore. Old media does not have a god given right to survive, it has to earn it’s audience… BUT politics and culture are always better when people are infomed… ???Is the future smaller publishing houses / A-list bloggers being distributed via new old media incarnations???
Nice chart showing falling revenues from traditional media (line on top sloping down) and rising revenues of new media (line underneath sloping up), with a Black Hole where the two meet, because no-one knows yet whether new media revs will be enough to offset losses from old media.

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