Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

What does the future have in store for "traditional media" and journalism?

That's the big question as the last couple of years have really been tough on the industry.  It's particularly been difficult over the last few weeks, as PostMedia has merged newsrooms in a handful of markets, including Calgary, where the Sun and Herald are essentially one and the same now.  It led to a lot of layoffs of some extremely talented people who did some great things for Calgary and for Alberta.

This has led to a number of conversations ranging from the "eventual demise of print" to "how many stories will go untold" to "will the same thing happen to TV and radio."

I don't want to re-open those discussions and I don't pretend to know all the answers.  Make no mistake, I have my ideas and inklings on what could be on the horizon.  Maybe one day I'll share them all.  But I wanted to blog about just how much change I've seen in my fairly short career.

It's actually quite amazing to think how much has changed since I started in radio.  I marked my 10th year in the industry last July (July 15th, 2005) and my 5th year during this second stint in Calgary (August 3rd, 2010, although I did spend 14 months here in 2007-2008).

So to take you back to 2005 in Lloydminster, we have a pretty basic website.  There was no "news" component to it.  You couldn't listen live to the station.  It was essentially a place for us to blog and post biographies.  I don't even think I had the capability of posting stuff on my own.

My first stop in Medicine Hat in 2006-2007 was pretty much the same.  I think we played around on MySpace and a little Facebook at that point but it was still really basic.  For news, we'd update it once a day by emailing the stories to someone upstairs (newsroom was downstairs).

In Calgary in 2007-2008, it was a little more involved.  We still weren't pushing anything on social networks (or we were just starting) and the web was starting to become a more regular thing.  But it wasn't really a major part of the day-to-day operations.

It wasn't until my next stop in Medicine Hat from 2008-2010 that I noticed a monumental shift.  We were actually considered to be "cutting edge" in the 'Hat, as we were pumping stories out on the web as fast as we were putting them on-air.  We were pushing those stories onto Facebook and Twitter by 2009.  The web was quickly becoming the place to go for news.

Then I came back to Calgary in 2010.  I remember helping launch new Twitter and Facebook accounts in early-2011.  By 2012, the website and those two mediums had almost eclipsed the on-air side when it comes to "what's important" for a newsroom.

This has led to a few challenges, to say the least.  As mentioned in a previous post, spelling and grammar of the written word suddenly became important again.  For a radio guy, I've only ever really known it as "if I can say it, that's all that matters."  Now punctuation matters.  You need to make sure past, present and future tenses are consistent through a story (I'm still bad for that).  And then there's the more-obvious challenges, like trying to focus on what actually makes the station money (radio) versus where many people are going to get their news (online) and how you strike that balance to make sure you're making everyone happy.

The most interesting part of this is when I look at where I am in my career now.  I've had this discussion with a few friends, as we've debated what's next for our industry.  We've actually been witness and been a part of that shift from on-air only to on-air & online.  We understand the importance of the platform we have with the traditional media outlets, in terms of making voices heard and providing a place for discussion you can read, see or hear.  We also understand that the online portion can supplement that discussion, or act as a completely different arm of that discussion.  I went to a conference in 2014 where some young broadcast students admitted to not having cable.  How do these wanna-be TV stars expect to understand the on-air portion when they don't even watch the evening news?  On the flipside, there are those in the industry who think the web is an inconvenience and they shouldn't have to bother with it.  In what world does it make sense to completely write-off a possible generation of readers/listeners/viewers, only because you don't want to deal with the big, bad internet?

And that's where we get to the crossroads of this industry.  I talked about this a bit on my last post.  But how do you successfully integrate online into your already-established platform?  And how do you make sure that already-established platform stays relevant in an ever-increasing online world?  Will the readers/viewers/listeners be okay with the growing pains or will they turn to other avenues (if they haven't already) to get their information?  And if the already-established local platform does die off, will the online be close behind (because where do you think many of those "sites with some local news" actually get their local news from?)

Having seen as much change as I have in the last few years, I can only imagine what more is on the way.  I wish I could predict even a fraction of it, just so that I knew what we were getting ourselves into.