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The Media is Dying: An Interview With the People Behind the Twitter Account

The Media is Dying: An Interview With the People Behind the Twitter Account

The Media is DyingThere’s no doubt that media is in a time of change. Magazines and newspapers are hard pressed to save money, journalists are let go, there’s restructoring, and so on. All of this isn’t because of the financial crisis, but it sure speeds things up. So where do we turn for information about these things? To the blogosphere, of course, because that’s where we can read about the people that were let go, without having to filter out everything the hidden agenda of the so called old media. They are partial, you know. Of course, so is a disgruntled journo just sacked from his newspaper, but at least we expect him to be pissed.

Enter a group of anonymous people that tweet about who’s fired, who’s in trouble, and who stays. The Media is Dying Twitter account is a phenomenom, an excellent source for anxious and curious journalists and media enthusiasts altogether. And there’s plenty of them, the account’s got over 9,000 followers. The mysterious media professionals were kind enough to participate in an interview.

I’m sure people are wondering who’s behind The Media is Dying Twitter account. What can you tell us about yourselves?

We’re best described as a collection of concerned pr professionals who are trying to help in a bad situation. We come from a variety of backgrounds and are a 8 or-so mix of agency people and in-house people. We started the free service on the November 19th and it’s been incredibly successful ever since. There is a big misconception out there about us with people saying we like reporting bad news which couldn’t be further from the truth. We welcome all good news and hope one day the service won’t be needed.

Why are you doing this?

Originally it was protected for just for a small group of pros but word spread and more and more people asked to added so we opened it up. This makes sense because Twitter is really about sharing and spreading information quickly. We’ve even been nominated for a Shorty Award (Twitter Oscars) that we’d like to win (vote here!)

How come you went with Twitter, wouldn’t a full-sized blog be better suited?

We really thought long and hard about what would work and since we aren’t editorializing or offering commentary on the events we felt the 140 characters would suit the “news” pretty well. It would however be easy to advertise through – that’s one thing we’re interested in pursuing if it doesn’t affect the feed/flow. We’ve been astounded how word spread to the 9,000+ followers. We’re grateful for every tip/forwarded memo – without the tipsters there would be fewer tweets for sure.

What is your take on media today? Is the old media doomed, where does blogs fit in, and what will be the trends of 2009?

Old media is not doomed but it certainly is changing, and fast. There will always be news outlets and big names but in 3-5 years they won’t look the same a they do now. Sure, there will always be people who want to read/touch “the paper” but as big news corporations are finding new generations are growing up with a myriad of technologies and options to get their news. The problem is fixed costs – newspapers have a lot and new media has very few. Fair or unfair, it’s changing and people need to keep up. 2009? Social media will continue to thrive and evolve so people get their news faster, easier and more personalized than ever before. Open Social and OpenID etc. Twitter will find a business model and will figure out a way to make all stakeholders happy. We also think video creation may go down because of the costs involved but this may lead to more “citizen journalism” coming to the forefront. We also expect to see a couple of large purchases happening in 2009 along with big cuts cross the board – we’re seeing these already but we fear some will be too little many more outlets/beats will go under.

And what’s in store for you in 2009? Any ideas on how to expand and/or evolve the service?

2009 looks set to be a lot more of the same (we did some research and people don’t want to see much changing!) and some new things – we have over 9,000 followers and have been approached by people to help them with projects such as recruitment etc – there’s also talk of creating spinoff for Europe and we’re looking for people to start that with us.

View Comments (6)
  • People are always going to want to hear news, good or bad. I don’t see newspapers dying completely but they are going to have some serious competition against the internet.

  • Do a google search for sadbastards and you’ll come up with some so-called Citizen Journalist who calls his blog The End of the Elite Media Empires or some-such drivel. Guy can’t even spell, ffs. If that’s what blogging has produced to replace newspapers, then I’m not too worried about “the media.”
    There will always be a market for well-researched, well-written, trusted journalism, and paid work for those who produce it. Whether it comes out on paper or via another medium is beside the point.
    The media ARE not dying, they’re just going through the same tech change process every industry has to endure to grow and thrive.

  • The media are definately dying. they do anything to get a story,far from the truth. They try to make it more exciting to watch and read which I think is so discriminating to anyone. they are so bias. They think people love commercials. Not true. People like shows that donot have all those commercials. That is why Twitter,. facebook and all the blogs will be around much longer. We get to know the real story.

  • It should read, “The Media Are Dying: An Interview With the People Behind the Twitter Account.” “Medium” is singular, “Media” is plural.

  • Like to see how all the companies will advertise once newspapers are gone . We operate under the internet is free concept. When these ISP’s start restricting bandwidth or start charging for every email sent then things will change . I myeself don’t want to look at a screen to read the news , would rather have a paper that I can read in my lazyboy . I get to stare at a screen all day as it is . Don’t even get me started on e-readers !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • The media has been dead for a long time.
    They pay no attention whatsoever to verification of what they
    print. They are in such a hurry to get the lies to print that when
    they get the truth….that’s often by mistake!

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