Blockbusters for innovation

Self-censorship is the great enemy of content providers. Self-doubt is the great foe of innovators. Self-help is the antidote, but it helps to have a partner, a provocateur, a push.

The resource enemy is no excuse. The Information Industry interprets its Convergence Age too narrowly. Don’t limit the concept to one company operating on multiple platforms – broadcast, print, Internet simulcasts. The other convergence raging right now is the meeting of content providers, professional associations, journalism institutes, universities, start-up companies, communications corporations, publications, online operations and ever on and on. It’s harder to think of someone NOT working on the problem of moving content user and content provider into the digital future together. Well, government might be one example, but who cares?

Chip Scanlon, the writing coach at Poynter Institute, tells of a voice deep inside us that likes to whisper in our mind that we are not creative and shouldn’t try. That inner, instant messenger is writer’s block personified. But you can enlarge Chip’s demon to account for the reticence to innovate in all of us. As the coach helps writers overcome, his Poynter is one of many sources that provoke self-helpers to become interactive via multiple venues at www.poynter.org. The Media Center at the American Press Institute is another, which sponsored the transformational movement this and related papers are part of.

The Center’s Mediamorphosis conference was invitational and priced beyond the means of heartland news providers. But there’s free scripture for modern thinking in, “How audiences are shaping the future of news and information.” That’s the subtitle for the paper We Media, available just for the downloading at www.mediacenter.org or at www.hypergene.net, Web site of authors Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. Those New Media extroverts are typical of the proselyters who gladly suffer fools like us with questions about how to get going in interactivity.

Mass communication is crawling with help. A major segment of the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention will be on blogging and related topics. ASNE’s March edition of The American Editor accentuates innovation on editorial pages, the mother lode of opportunities for “participatory journalism.” That’s a phrase worthy of saving all media from destructive old-think. The National Conference of Editorial Writers – www.NCEW.org – offers a useful list-serve. The appendix of We Media is chockablock with such free or low cost resources.

The editor or broadcaster needs ongoing support, however. So turn to universities, which are already looking for partners. Journalism at the University of South Carolina craves a name in new tech. The University of Alabama uses the term “client supported” media services in new media, audience sampling and analysis, for instance, servicing Southern Living and sister maga-zines for Time-Warner. Every market enjoys at least one campus looking for a media partner.

The big corporations simply start a new division, hire another VP and write a business plan, floating in big bucks. The smaller Information Company really can be more nimble, lever-aging low-cost or free resources to dance before their audiences underfoot of behemoth competi-tors. Less corporate bureaucracy means more ease at using new tools to expand market share. Community content providers merely have to overcome that inner voice that quashes creativity.

Get past the phase of treating the future with threat response. The digital-mobile-information-on-demand era grows with every cell phone and wi-fi laptop in the hands of the ever-growing youth segment driving demands on the media marketplace. Fight and lose or join and win. Change before you absolutely, absolutely have to, and you can enjoy added value up front for your community information product with greater profitability now, not later.

The convergence of research and development with content providers now means you only have yourself to blame for not getting in front of the digital revolution.

By Team Change members:

Chris Waddle, President, The Ayers Family Institute for Community Journalism
VP/News, Consolidated Publishing Co., publishers of The Anniston Star