Traditional Media Created Social Media

Before conglomeration, there was a time when radio, television, and print were local community outlets. The big three were locally owned and focused on the local community. Most decisions for communities regarding their major media are made thousands of miles away. What music to play, what programming to air, and cuts made in print to the journalism staff create fewer local articles being written. Having worked in radio for so many years and sold against TV and radio, it’s always easy for me to talk about the big three, and it’s sad to see their demise, although most of it is self-inflicted. Radio and TV worry too much about ratings than the audience. Print has always had too big of an ego and lost when it didn’t embrace the internet in the mid-90s. Most of the content today in traditional media is just not very awe-inspiring. With social media, it is “you” who creates the programming. We allow the individuals, groups, businesses, and brands we know and like into our programming. We make our Facebook community to entertain and inform us. We choose whose tweets to follow to update us on technology, news, inspiration, and events. With social media, you have no one to blame for the poor programming but yourself. Every season, I find fewer TV shows that are Tivo-worthy. I stopped my subscription to the newspaper, as it’s mostly news from yesterday. Radio, once the rebel of the big three, is now just a corporate suit. It’s no wonder that social media has exploded. People will always gather where they’re entertained; most quality information and entertainment is online. It’s not that more time has been invented in the day for people to spend time playing in social networks, the time is coming from somewhere. Most of the time, it seems at the expense of traditional media. Facebook seems to be replacing the local newspaper. Hulu, YouTube, and Twitter seem to replace the hours spent watching TV. Then you have iPods, Slacker, and Pandora, which have created better alternatives than most local radio stations. If the Big three were more concerned with the consumer than the bottom line, would social media be as big as today? We do have short attention spans today, but if the content coming from the Big Three was worthy, would we step away from the tweets and FB posts and listen to more radio stations than our iPod?