It is the miSinai, conventional wisdom in media that the future is in convergence. Convergence is the idea that you produce content that can be repackaged in a variety of media.
For instance, let’s imagine that we at New Voices still have our print edition, but we also have a podcast and regular video pieces. Then, take that together with the fact that we actually do have a Facebook page and a twitter. What convergence would mean for us in this scenario is that we would put the exact same stories in print and on our website, we would link to all of them on Facebook, we would tweet their headlines with links to them, all of our video content would be designed to go with one of our print stories and our podcasts would be audio rehashes of the same material.
This is received wisdom in newspapers. The theory is that it allows you to produce content for many forms of media with minimal effort.
However, the Student Press Law Center’s Adam Goldstein is here to tell you that this is a red herring. What we really need, he says, is divergence. In this interview at College Media Matters, Goldstein discusses his views–which I think I already shared, but was unable to articulate:
The problem is that, once you’ve decided that content has to live in places other than the platform for which it’s created, you’re losing any of the benefits unique to that medium; and consumers choose the medium where they consume news primarily for those unique benefits. For example, newspaper readers like newspapers because the stories are longer and more in-depth. If you make the stories shorter so you can “converge” them with the website, you’ll make a newspaper nobody wants to read.
In essence, if you try to please everyone, you’ll please no one.
He gives a concrete example of how this would be done:
Take a simple example. You want to impart information to the audience about a candidate for public office. The convergent way of doing it would be to put together a video package with a script that can be published as text online with the video next to it; read on the radio and podcasts; included in a video podcast; and printed in the newspaper with a screen grab of the video as an image.
The divergent way of doing it would be to tell the story of the candidate’s life with period song clips for radio and podcast; do an in-depth news analysis for newspaper and online; and then add an additional interactive package showing where the candidate stands in the political spectrum against other opponents.
Clever stuff. Although, it occurs to me that most news organizations have already figured this out, to some extent. Take a look at this blog, for instance. Or the excellent selection of blogs at fellow Jewish media conspiracy members JTA and The Forward. Or, you know, The Times or whatever. We all know that followers of blogs and readers of newspapers–even when those populations overlap, which they often do–are looking for different types of content. So we create a different sort of content for our blogs than we do for our print editions or for our online repositories of articles.
I’m also reminded of the way that news organizations use twitter to engage their “citizen journalists” and report news in a very different way than they otherwise would. The case study that springs to mind is my hometown paper, The Austin American-Statesman (@statesman), and their twitterific handling of that time when that guy crashed a plane into the IRS building. The Buttry Diary, the blog of local DC news outlet TBD‘s Director of Community Engagement Steve Buttry, has a great piece on that particular instance of what I’m talking about.
Another thing that I’ve noticed, certainly about my personal blog, is that hyper-niche-oriented content is successful. These days, my blog is almost entirely about Jewish ritual and liturgy. By far, the most popular posts I write–the posts that get the most traffic and have the most lively discussions in the comments–are my insanely detailed, minutiae-obsessed reviews of services I attend and new siddurim I encounter. When the topics on my blog were more general a couple of years ago, there was less interest. There are only (!) about 200 people on the internet who are interested in reading angry progressive-oriented reviews of liturgy and ritual, but all 200 of them have found my blog because they can’t get it anywhere else.
The organizations I cited above–JTA, The Forward, The Times, etc.–know this too. They don’t each have one blog. Rather, they all have many blogs with specific–divergent, you might say (watch as I tie this back to the original point of this post!)–topics that draw different groups of people to their sites and to their other content.
As I was reading the interview with Goldstein that prompted all of this, I found myself thinking that he was really just rephrasing and deepening the old saying, “The medium is the message.”
Then I got to the end of the interview, where Goldstein says, “Convergence is the theory that Marshall McLuhan was an idiot. As it happens, he was not.”
And I was like, who is Marshall McLuhan? So I Wikipediaed him. According to Wikipedia:
McLuhan’s work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.
McLuhan is known for coining the expressions “the medium is the message” and “the global village” and predicted the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented.
Word. Shabbat Shalom, blogosphites.
