The BBC’s Richard Sambrook has some sound advice for the co-founder and CEO of Topix, Rich Skrenta – “Duck and take cover, Rich.”
This is always good advice for most situations. The reason this time is a provocative post by Rich following the WeMedia conference in Miami.
The nub of his argument is that no News 2.0 venture has yet proved it can succeed.
The problem is that the hopes that Dan Gillmor raised for the media industry in his book — which kicked off this whole business — have largely failed. Tremendous excitement followed the publishing of Dan’s We the Media (the conference’s namesake). It accompanied the trumpeting of a new model of media by the newsy press, and the rise of blogs with attendant breathless hype.
He goes on to list the Web 2.0 news initiatives which he dubs “a dog’s breakfast of start-ups.” No doubt his comments are bound to stir up a debate about citizen journalism, user-generated content and all the other buzzwords that trip off the lips of news executives nowadays.
Rich has a point. The media revolution is messy, untidy and no one knows where this is heading. When we look back on this period in 50 or 100 years, we will see a history littered with the wrecks of media ventures.
But we will also see a period which laid the groundwork for a new media world. Disruptive technology like the internet is by its very nature ‘disruptive’. It creates a uncertainty which we should embrace as an opportunity to experiment and, yes, fail.
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