By Dan Callahan
For the past ten years, I have been in the chorus of people who have been predicting the end of traditional media and the printed word.
And, for the past ten years, I have had to pay off my bets to reporters and co-workers as my bold predictions have failed to materialize.
I’ve been close on a couple of these sky-is-falling cries, but the printed word and local media industries, like movie zombies staggering on through kill shot after kill shot, have somehow survived to terrorize another town.
But, the biggest challenge is yet to come and its name is “local.”
Local has been the hottest online space for the past year – Yelp, Foursquare, Groupon and a whole lot more have siphoned off attention and advertising dollars.
The irony is that local has been traditional media’s homecourt: newspapers, TV and radio have worked hard to cultivate the image of the “hometown team,” even as ad money it thrived on has deserted it for places like Craigslist, Monster and hundreds of individual sites.
More importantly, the brands local media had built in their towns faded in the face of the disaggregation of online information – search for a story about your town and you are more likely to get an individual blog than your local paper’s coverage.
And, with the loss of monopoly on news many of these properties held, a generation of readers has been lost to local news outlets.
Unfortunately, in the words of Randy Bachman, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
The reason local may be the final battleground is that it is about an enormous shift in technology. Don’t think of local as just a deal at a restaurant down the street. Local is mobile, those devices we all carry around with us that have the potential to provide instant connections with consumers and instant decisions to buy.
Local is also technology and those Internet-connected players, game machines and TVs are the harbinger of a new way of watching TV, iPod-style, never having to touch your local station if you don’t want to.
What is about to happen is that the big boys know the potential here and are going to put their resources behind it. Google, for instance, already has a team of local ad salesmen in cities across America. This is where the loss of the connection to local consumers really hurts.
Traditional media, still reeling from the changes the Internet delivered in the last ten years, is now going to get hit again with these changes.
If these media outlets are as prepared for this wave as they were for the last one, I may finally – and mirthlessly - be collecting on those bets I made.
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Dan Callahan is managing partner at Elasticity in St. Louis. |