Audiences are like (they are) our students.

Posted on | May 20, 2010 | No Comments

As a media educator I spend a lot of time pondering 3 things.

1. how do we get the next generation of media professionals trained for an unknown environment

2. what is happening to the old media

3. how do we engage the audience

I was happy to read in Forbes.com that I am not alone!

I wonder if the problem with media, and as it would happen media education, is that we are desperately trying to recreate new version of our old selves, the teacher/practitioner?

Here is a piece of the Forbes article that really struck a nerve for me.

Hiring young fogeys is about replicating you rather than your reader. Pace Huey Lewis and the News, it’s not hip to be square. It’s not hip to be Walter Isaacson or Jon Meacham or their blogger-manqués outside the narrow confines of Washington, D.C., or the slim corridor reaching up through New York to Boston. But if you keep replicating this genus in the elite media, how do you expect to connect with a broader, younger audience?

And this is in itself the problem with media today!

The media is not connecting with the audience of today and has little chance of getting onto the app list of the audience of tomorrow.

So what do we do? Back to Forbes.

As Mike Molloy, editor in chief of Mirror Group Newspapers, put it back in the 1990s, the job of the editor is to reach out to new readers and “make them part of the loyal army of readers who want to take his paper every day. To do that he must instinctively know the men and women out there, what they love, hate, dream about, are indifferent to, the prejudices they cherish and the passions he must now articulate.”

If you want young readers, there’s your recipe.

Put the word education in there and you get where this is all going!

We need to pay special attention to the audience and give them what they need and what they want in the same sandwich!

Tough? Yes.

Possible? Yes.

Are we ready? It is hard to let go of the idea that we turned out ok so the next batch will also if we follow the old script!

The reality is if we do not listen now the connection to the audience and content creators of tomorrow my be irreparably severed, are we willing to roll the dice?

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