The “New” Media Cycle

This post is a response to a post by Lauren Fernandez where she argues that there’s no point in having “traditional media” and “new media” square off against each other. I agree, but this would be my shortest blog post ever if I kept it at that.

Instead, I’d like to focus on what the true relation is between various media. First of all, I don’t want to distinguish between “traditional media” and “new media” much–and as Lauren pointed out, they influence each other–but there are some clarifications needed that help set up the framework:

• Traditional Media Television, radio, newspapers, et cetera. The relationship between these media and their consumers is mostly uni-directional, they send, you receive.
• New Media Blogs, social bookmarking sites, video websites, et cetera. The relationship between these media and their consumers is mostly bi-directional or even multi-directional. They send, you reply or you send and they publish.
• Reach This is not significantly different between either “traditional media” or “new media”. Whether it’s circulation, RSS readers, followers, fans or ratings, media has reach.
• Distribution This is a similar story to Reach, where the first-degree consumers are able to distribute the content from the media source to second-degree consumers–and second-degree consumers can pass it on to third-degree consumers and so on–regardless of which type of media we’re talking about. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a retweet, an email forward or a mention of “Have you read today’s headline?” or “Did you watch the 8 o’clock news last night?” at the water cooler.

As a result, I’d like to argue that media contribution and dissemination doesn’t rely on a directional pattern but more of a cyclical pattern consisting of four stages:

1. Media Source This is the original piece of content.
2. Media Consumption The content is consumed by first-degree consumers.
3. Media Distribution The content is spread.
4. Media Community This consists of everyone involved in the content creation process, e.g. journalists, news organizations, bloggers and PR professionals. Here they collect news, data, ideas/inspiration and feedback that they need to produce new content.

The image below illustrates this “new” media cycle:

The media cycle doesn’t make a distinction between “traditional media” and “new media”, because it doesn’t have to. And because it shouldn’t. And–I agree with Lauren–neither should the Media Community. The Media Community should be free and sensible about selecting and using which tools give them the best chance to succeed in each phase of the cycle.

I leave the consumption, distribution, feedback and other further creation to you.