Below the Fold

Looking Ahead: Content is Where You Are

AS BOTH A CHILD OF and practitioner in the modern “we’ve got you surrounded” age of media, nothing should surprise me. I’m used to message bombardment, from traditional sources like television and radio to more non-traditional sources like shopping cart handles, airport security trays and strategically placed tattoos. Even O.J. Simpson getting arrested again isn’t enough to make me blink.

But as the picture here demonstrates, there is always a new way to reach consumers who long ago either tuned out traditional media, or are so inundated by advertising that they tune it all out.

Advertising paradise has been paved and put into a parking lot. It’s as clear as the lines on the asphalt asking us to watch Desperate Housewives on ABC – these are desperate times for television as well.

But this isn’t about TV or anything else being “dead.” It’s about media companies continuing to change and adjust to a modern world that isn’t going away. It’s about embracing people’s busy lives and reaching them where they are, rather than making an appointment and hoping people show up. Unlike its much older media colleague – newspapers – TV is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

ABC has been especially adept at understanding the New Web Order, that your web presence is more important than your web site. As one ABC exec put it, “ABC.com is a platform – and that platform can be distributed anywhere.”

And it is, on mobile phones and iPods (we’re waiting for the inevitable Facebook app, too.) ABC also cracked the code of co-creation, using its Lost message boards to help develop plotlines with the audience.

This is in contrast to NBC’s latest move to remove its shows from Apple’s dominant iTunes store, opting instead to make shows available for free on its web site. The catch? The free shows have commercials while the iTunes shows you pay for are commercial free.

No question NBC’s decision has more to do with money than content distribution. And plenty of people will go to NBC and watch shows for free rather than pay a few dollars not to see car ad after car ad.

I just wonder how long this can last. Ultimately people don’t want to be on your web site, they want to be on their web site, blog, social network, phone, iPod or PDA. The web site is a creature of the ‘90s and is quickly becoming an endangered species, but that’s a topic for another day.

More and more, content today is wherever people are – not where anyone else, including the TV networks, wants them to be.

Intolerance, Not Technology, is Small Newspaper’s Greatest Threat to Survival

"He was trying to teach his two young daughters not to be afraid to buy a newspaper in America." – Peter Katz, Vietnam veteran and small business owner in Little Saigon, Orange County, Calif.

We forget – some of us – that while we lament the decline of news readership or embrace technology and prepare for new roads ahead, that the greatest threat to a free press are people, not computers.

The above example is from an incident not in the Middle East, Russiaor Asia, but in Orange County, Calif., where a small Vietnamese-language weekly paper is fighting for its life. When the above-mentioned man bought a copy from Mr. Katz’s store with his two young children, he had to be escorted back to his car because protesters confronted and berated him.

The Viet Weekly is an alternative news source in a conservative area where freedom of speech is accepted as long as you say the right things.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the weekly is the target of regular protests from demonstrators who accuse the paper of supporting Vietnam’s Communist government and publishing an editorial critical of U.S. foreign policy – in other words, opinions you can find almost every day in any newspaper in America.

Whether the arguments are valid doesn’t matter – nor do the protests, which is also a right protected by the Constitution. What does matter is the growing and disturbing inability for people to accept and respect points of view that diverge from their own.

Perhaps blogs and new media have had some effect. We can funnel our news sources down to content that we already agree with. We don’t need to be bothered with different opinions. We can use e-mail and anonymity as shields for our intolerance.

Yet that logic only goes so far. Someone who watches Fox News, for example, is not going to be swayed by watching CNN or reading the New York Times. People have always surrounded themselves with opinions that make them comfortable; the only difference is now they have a lot more choices.

No, this is about just one thing: Fear.

Why else would the Little Saigon protesters be pressuring local business owners to stop carrying the newspaper? Why are they phoning paper’s landlord telling him to “evict the Communists?” Why are they confronting fathers and kids for the sheer act of buying a newspaper in a free country?

Speaking up and speaking your mind are fine, even honorable – but forcing your beliefs onto others is, well, something Communists would do.