Traditional News Media is Still Relevant

Here I argue that traditional news media (a.k.a. industrial news media) is still and will continue to, play a critical role in how we consume our news and share it. Only now citizens can participate in the story.

Internet memes or stories are a key part of the mix, but often the big online memes or stories don’t become so until they are covered by industrial news media. Industrial media still has 1) mass reach and 2) credibility (maybe that is declining in some ways, but they still have credibility over the average citizen.)

Let’s look at just a few of examples;

Rogers iPhone Launch in Canada: We posted an article on the research we did while this was happening. Not until the online petition had attention from mainstream news media did it take off.

United Broke My Guitar: While it was raging across the Web as a meme, only 600+K people had viewed the story until CNN and a few other mainstream newsmedia outlets reported it. Then within 2 days the video on YouTube had surpassed 2 million views.

Motrin Moms: While the story simmered over the web through Social Media channels, it wasn’t until newspapers, radio and television news picked it up that it went truly viral. Motrin pulled the ads within 72 hours and no doubt their marketing department was taking a lot of Tylenol.

These are just 3 examples that point to the proof of how mainstream, industrial news media still plays a relevant role in spurring on a story. So while some may say traditional media is dead, I beg to differ. We still look towards these sources for actual news.

Traditional news media does face challenges though. The story of Gordon Lightfoot being dead was broken by a traditional radio news station. It was false. They didn’t do a fact check beforehand. It’s the fact checking and source analysis that citizens expect news media to do. Validating the back story. This factor will feature prominently in the future over who grows as a news source and who doesn’t. What we can say is that traditional news media is still very much alive, well and relevant.