New Media Days 2010-39 by Conference Basics, some rights reserved; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Last Thursday’s business section of the NYTimes included a brief article that spoke volumes about the changing landscape for the news media. The headline in the print edition was innocuous and somewhat opaque: “Journalist at Reuters Joins Fusion in Web Role.” (The online edition’s headline is now a bit different: “Felix Salmon to Take on Web-Based Role at Fusion). In either case, what?
As the article almost explains, a leading journalist is leaving Reuters to join a “multiplatform, digital-first cable network, which is trying to reach an audience that is digital native.” Whatever else this may mean, it’s clear that I’m not sufficiently a member of the “digital native” target audience.
A couple things that are somewhat more clear are Mr. Salmon’s convictions that communicating “in the ways people are going to consume information in the future”–
- won’t include “1,500-word blocks of text”
- but will include “animations, videos, data visualization stuff, ways of using other platforms to convey information and tell stories.”
For better or worse and assuredly different, I suspect he’s right. Now I just have to find some “data visualization stuff” that will say that.