Mark Blevis

…continued from Hot and Cold Media (part 2): celebrity and personality…

Issue #2: focus on content, not delivery, in the “Age of Niche”

It’s not fun when “your” industry finds itself under huge external pressures that are well beyond your control.  The music industry has been struggling with this in several stages; first with MP3 files and then when Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks made file sharing simple.  If you consider the reasons for this shift, you realize it had more to do with portability and ease of distribution — both of which came with simplified user interfaces — than it did with the product and the price.

Niche interests in news and entertainment is nothing new.  Music, movies and the media have organized their content by categories for years.  The distribution, though, has been largely about targeting the masses, not the specific audience that would most appreciate the specific product.  That’s the difference between a garden hose on spray or stream — there’s a lot of wasted water in the former.

These new technologies have made it easier for individuals to make choices specific to their own tastes.  In many respects this means further segmentation of the news.  More importantly, this means ensuring the delivery is structured so that each audience receives only the content it wants.

It takes more to reach the audience on its terms than just organizing the content by subject, it takes genuine knowledge of human interface and user experience — be that online, in broadcast media or print publications.

Suddenly the media organizations need to think a lot more about availability, accessibility and design in a variety of media channels, each of which has its unique features and challenges.

Suggestion: Spend the time to design your website and produce your media (traditional and digital) in a way that appeals, individually, to a large number of diversely focused interests. Pay special attention to the interface and the way you engage each audience — if it’s ugly, confusing or not engaging, noone will be interested.