The news cycle has changed tremendously over the past five years, which has had a direct effect on advertising and how to make your messages stick. It’s about to change again and – as usual – advertisers are not prepared. From the looks of it, the general population might not be ready either.
News used to be controlled by the major outlets. Companies would launch their press releases in the morning on any given weekday in the hopes that they would be picked up by television stations for the six o’clock news and then hit newspapers the following morning. However, TV stations like CNN launched and the public appetite for news was turned on its head. We suddenly ushered in the era of the 24-hour news cycle.
As more and more people got interested in the Internet it also became a secondary channel for these news companies to get the word out. From there, blogging platforms took hold and now we have micro-blogging spaces (such as Twitter and FriendFeed) and the ability to comment on and create content from our mobile devices.
It’s not uncommon to learn about late-breaking news from places like Twitter way before the major news outlets get the chance to update their websites, but what does this all mean?
We no longer have a 24-hour news cycle. Something happens in the world (Panic in Mumbai or a plane crash in the Hudson River) and somebody, somewhere is reporting live through text, images, audio and even video within 60 seconds. Media empires are going to look very different in the coming months as we quickly shift into this 60-second news cycle. It’s no longer about which outlet breaks the news or how fast; it’s going to be about how well they can report on something that everybody has already seen. In the time it takes a news outlet to produce a TV segment, record some audio for radio or draft up a newspaper article, that news item has not only moved on, but it has already been replaced – countless times – by more and more news.
We are inches away from the real-time news cycle.
The flow of the news is only increasing. It is hyper-local and global at the same time. News from your backyard is at your fingertips at the exact same speed as news from across the globe. How advertising is bought, sold and displayed is going to have to adjust. People think publishers sell content: they don’t. They sell advertising. They use their content to sell more advertising. If news is going to be more relevant to people by grabbing it online or on their iPhones, advertisers have only one option: get better at creating engaging and relevant messaging on these platforms.
How ready are you – really – for the 60-second news cycle?
- Mitch Joel
- Guest Contributor
Mitch Joel is President of digital marketing and communications agency Twist Image, with offices in Toronto and Montreal. Mitch’s first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his blog and podcast, will be published in the fall of 2009 by Grand Central Publishing. He can be reached at mitch@twistimage.com.
Tags: feb2009, mitch joel, news, twist image
