Media today

I was reading a copy of AlwaysOn, a business-technology pub, this week, and I found myself nodding several times as I read editor Tony Perkins' intro letter. Here's an excerpt:

". . . In 1994 it became clear to me that the Internet was, in the words of Jim Clark, “the real information superhighway!” What wasn’t exactly clear was what the Internet’s distinguishing characteristic would be over the long run. AlwaysOn has seen the light, and the Internet’s true raison d’être can be summed up in two simple statistics. The first one: 62% of the content that the average member of the IM Generation reads online is produced by someone they know. Think about that for a moment (especially with your media-and-entertainment-executive hat on). The second stat: 72 million kids have joined the global MySpace community. The “to see and be seen on the Internet” genie is officially out of the bottle, and there is no turning back. I’ve never had as much fun in the media business as in the almost four years AO has been at this (or in my preceding years at Red Herring). We have truly entered an era of media participation—this is what the kids want, and this is what they’re going to get. Even Rupert Murdoch, king of Big Media, confessed that “young readers don’t want to rely on a godlike figure from above to tell them what is important, and they certainly do not want news presented as gospel. The media world can no longer lecture, it must become a place for conversation . . . ”

Perkins goes on to note that "Ironically, just when we thought that the media business was becoming concentrated in the hands of a few conglomerates, the world is instead exploding into millions of media brands." I remember having discussions in graduate school about how fewer companies were owning more and more media outlets, while the FCC just twiddled its thumbs. We worried about a dearth of unbiased content. But the Internet is serving as such a fail-safe for that, because so many people can instantly become their own publisher, their own brand. While I still have concerns about more outlets being concentrated in fewer hands, I'm also seeing the splintering that Perkins talks about, which shows that, no matter who is producing media, users still want to consume their own self-selected media in their own way.

Read the whole intro here. Interesting stuff.