Media education has to converge – just like media is converging.
For as many commentators in broadcasting, there are definitions of convergence. Actually, convergence is quite easy to understand, as long as you don’t listen to equipment salesmen.
It basically means that media companies must have fingers in many pies. Why? Because there is such an explosion of media, that audiences are fragmented, the days of mass media are coming to an end, and niche audiences don’t carry such numbers.
So media owners and broadcasters have to aggregate (another bit of media mumbo-jumbo that means “add together”) their outlets (channels) to get the same mass audience as before.
It also means that there are no pure media, only bastards.
But there has to be a lot more content as each niche audience wants its own content. So, in simple arithmetic: more content, less audiences = price of content has to come down.
It can only come down if it is used over and over again – or rather, if the same old junk appears to be different each time.
You can easily see this as you wait in the queue at Woollies and have to stand next to interminable racks of consumer magazines that contain the same stories under different sensational cover lines.
Try the History Channel – same old material, same (very) few favourite themes, but different (new) programmes.
Same old thing, different wrapping.
To do this (the sort of weekly makeover for stories), you have to be astutely trained, highly experienced and you need an education like no one gets in South Africa.
The journalism schools teach ethics and media law. They teach writing of “integrity”. They don’t teach repurposing, reversioning, dressing up, flexibility, imagination and that genius that continually makes new things out of old. (Like leftovers that look like cordon bleu, and seem to taste different).
The film and television schools teach you how to win an Oscar. That’s because students with dreams want to win Oscars. They don’t want to use their genius making leftovers. The same goes for radio, which is the art of recycling studio guests who are literate and articulate, and who can counter-balance the same old morons that phone in.
The web is the same. That’s why you Google and get 27-million hits for the same information. It’s all the same old thing in a different dressing. Like pictures of Paris Hilton – different skimpy clothes, same wiry body that looks like it’s suspended from a meat-hook.
So if you want to make it in the modern media, you have to understand:
- The repurposing and reversioning that makes new product out of old at 20 percent of the cost.
- All the different media, so that a newspaper article can become a magazine feature, a radio programme and a TV reality series, all from the same theme. (That really gets the bosses’ juices going, to them it’s cross-marketing, and only one cost for the intellectual property).
- Convergence of technology, content and media.
- Niche audiences.
This is a radical departure from the education and training we offer now. Of course, the education on offer now is what the prospective professionals want. So it suits the schools, who charge high prices for that the market wants.
But that’s totally different from what the market needs, and no money-grubbing educationalist is going to provide what people need, but don’t want.
So, the media owners and employers have to train on the job, slow and costly.
What’s the solution? – I don’t know.
Howard Thomas is a media business consultant, trainer and specialist in audience psychology.