In the 1950s, neighbours shut their windows or yelled out. In today's Face book neighbourhood such a performance would have brought out people cheering both couples.
Entrepreneurial journalism, self-employed, freelancer, media tart.
It's never been so good.The point of working is to make a living, and that depends upon consumers buying your product, which in turn means you're able to attract a constituent in the first place.
The classical approach was join an institution, a brand - if you were lucky. It already has an existing consumer base e.g. Saatchi and Saatchi, BBC etc. And it has become increasingly aggressive at protecting it.
The BBC is set to launch a new show called The Voice, which threatens ITV's fan base for Britain's Got Talent, so the latter has gone on the offensive.
Audiences and for that matter consumers are dynamic, they shift and flow, yet are susceptible to becoming loyal. And irrespective of the generation from Modernism onwards being young is at odds with an older generation. It's a perennial semantic field.
In a Street Car Named Desire, (above), Brandon's brooding love call, as much as 50s Icon James Dean's petulance in Rebel Without a Cause, or West Side Story, the cult of youth and misunderstanding by an older generation is shown not to be a new phenomenon.
The issue has always been you had limited means of connecting with someone who shared your values.
For instance, when I lived in Ghana, I had a pen pal in the US (OMG). Pen pal??? What's that you ask? Someone I wrote to via airmail letters, which took about six weeks for us to swap niceties. We sent pics to each other, but never met in person. Think Facebook-in-the-making.
So to recycle the aforementioned thought again. If the nature of making a living is to attract a constituent, then what's changed is how that constituent can now come together, even as a Long Tail (read the book), to become an attractive market.
The university lecturing scenes in Kony 2012 is redolent of this. Students seeking knowledge in which the presumed hypodermic approach of mass media is seen as a failure. Read here why Kony 2012 represents new forms in doc making.
Anyone who has entertained a charismatic speaker able to command the attention of an audience will defacto appreciate that person has a market.
And for those practising new journalism, that's it! What? The audience. Because unlike the paleontologist 1990s, the audience can now connect to you. Question is do you know how to make yourself visible?
 |
| Onliners researching new writing habots |
This I posted on how to get that job Masters students, and where you'd like to be in 4 years time.
We've been looking under the hood of online journalism recently showing how a strong idea, SEO, and good writing, can bring much needed exposure.
I'm due to give a workshop to one of the world's biggest publishers about this. That is how they can share in a more symmetrical way, which is a win win for prosumer as well.
There are new added issues, such as almost everyone wanting to become a prosumer, so who's doing the buying? The lack of either a unique selling point; and that to sell in the market, you need to understand how broadly it works.
In Stephen Covey's epic book 7 ways of highly successful people, or Micahel Hyatt's 7 ways successful creatives think differently, both speak specifically of interdependency. In the networked age, that's more crucial than ever, a sort of interconnecter-dependency.
And there's ample evidence, successful start ups do this.
What's intriguing is this. If the networked generation, as has been amply demonstrated, move collectively, though not blithely, and their values in important areas are at odd with oldies, then the door is still wide open to recreate the new News brands of this millenia.
If you've the tools and interconnecter-dependency thinking you're at a head start.
David Dunkley Gyimah speaks creates in Viewmagazine.tv on new areas in journalism
