December 15, 2005, 12.40pm • 3 comments » • 645 Views

Audience relationships: threat or opportunity?

Ethan Kaplan is still frustrated at the short-sightedness of some some sections of the news media in approaching close audience relationships.

I responded to his post thusly…

Yes, it’s all part fo the tension/dichotomy that exists in the news business thanks to interactivity/two-way/participatory/many-to-/many media. News, by default, is founded on telling people what they *don’t* know (else, why buy news, other than for shared-consumption kinship?)

The arrival of interactive media presents the audience with the capacity to speak to the producers, but then you sometimes have to stop and ask “why”? Why? What is to be gained by having the _audience_ tell the _producers_ something _they_ didn’t know? Well, the benefit is the feedback loop that sends better content back the way of the audience at the end of the day. There’s no point informing a producer just for the hell of it; there has to be a tangible benefit for the consumers. What many media producers are only now catching on to is that, by letting the consumers speak, the power of the more-knowledgeable audience is input to the production process and back out to the audience at the consumption end. ie. _better content_.

If there’s a blockage point here it’s where some arrogant media producers are affronted by what they see as a challenge to their traditional role as sole arbiter of current knowledgem, that they don’t grasp the opportunity to _enrich_ their product. But even the Gray Lady has made moves toward more reader input. And The Guardian is already there.

We all knew the potential in ‘98; sometimes it just takes seven years to turn around an industry?