The Great Mashup of 2011

[Source: The New York Times, by David Carr, January 2, 2011]

For years, those of us who toiled in the backwater of media reporting — covering people who cover other people — were left to trace the slow-motion decline of mainstream media and the inconsequential pratfalls of nascent digital efforts.

Click through a few years and suddenly the media landscape looks profoundly altered and punished, like a place where a serious earthquake was followed by a tsunami. News about the news business, once a rare commodity, now comes out of a fire hose, with many days bringing yet another shift in old paradigms.

Two-year-old Web sites are worth more than 50-year-old magazines, storied newspapers are now owned by their lenders, cable news has been upended by partisan shouters, social media now preoccupies attention that used to be owned by mainstream producers, and that television screen in the family den is just one of the numerous screens people are staring at.

So let’s stipulate that the sky is falling and will continue to do so. Rather than look back at the creative destruction that has taken place, I thought it would be worthwhile to click on the future. Here, in no particular order — because the way forward is paved with chaos — are some of the developments you and I will be talking about in the coming year.

THE END OF VERTICALS What if there were no such thing as television, print, Web and radio? What if they were all just one big blob of media? Well, if you are staring at an iPad or some other tablet, that future seems to have already shown up.

On a Web-enabled, back-lit device, the difference between the BBC, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and ABC News are tough to discern. Each has video, audio, text, social media and pictures. All can be navigated effortlessly by the swipe of a finger. I helped my 87-year-old father set up the iPad that Santa brought, and as he looked over my shoulder he said, “Everything sort of looks the same.” My point exactly.

And even beyond the four corners of the iPad, things are beginning to look mighty mashed up. Gawker, the influential media blog, is being redesigned and looks a lot like television. The Web and application world will grow to look like TV because consumers and advertisers find things to love in the format.

As the Web increasingly shows up in the living room (more on that in a second), Web sites will want to be ready for prime time. Ad staffs of various media enterprises are always reminded that they “compete with everyone,” but as traditional media verticals disappear it may become more than rhetoric.

HYBRIDS FOR THE NEWS HIGHWAY As the ad models that traditionally paid for news disappear, various hybrids of news gathering and publishing are emerging.

ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative site, is sharing content with many print publications that have lost reporting muscle.

Comcast, in part to get past some of the regulatory overhang shadowing its acquisition of NBC Universal, is creating partnerships between local news nonprofits and a number of the NBC stations that are part of the deal.

In order to increase its national footprint, The New York Times has partnerships with a variety of organizations in Chicago, San Francisco and New York. NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are building Project Argo, a Knight Foundation effort to work with and help build local news sites. The list goes on, but the days when news organizations only competed and never co-operated are over.

TELEVISED SOCIAL MEDIA Right now, people tune in to “Jersey Shore” on television and then use another device and screen at their fingertips to crack wise on Facebook and Twitter about what they are watching. But what if their big TV screen were also embedded with commentary from trusted friends and people they follow?

If the main screen included both a program and annotation, it would become a third product, one that has a tent-pole ability to gather large audiences and real-time elements of social media. And to take it a step further, right now people “check in” at various physical locations on services like Foursquare. What if check-ins began to occur around not just physical objects, but cultural ones like “Mad Men” as well? Look for a developing fight over who owns and programs the crawl at the bottom of the television screen.

THE NONLINEAR GRID Right now, families all over the land are figuring out how to hook up their Web-enabled televisions (good luck with that, by the way), and as the biggest screen in the house becomes tied to the Internet, the whole concept of a broadcast-and-cable universe is up for grabs.

If you thought the 500-channel universe changed things, wait until you get a load of the infinite-channel one. So called “linear television,” programming from both broadcast and cable on a channel-certain location, is in for significant disruption, and the habit of tuning in at a specific time for a favorite program will seem pretty last century.

Because 2011 is a nonelection and non-Olympic year, it will be up to mainstream broadcasters to come up with live or must-see appointment television to try and build a ledge under their business model. In that context, professional sports franchises like football will only become more important, but there are a whole lot of other hours to program.

Fox will be pushing back with event television like Simon Cowell’s “X Factor,” but other networks may find that the usual fall schedule of sitcoms and police procedurals may get lost as consumers can increasingly dial up anything they want exactly when they want it.

PRINT LOOKS FOR A PAYDAY Early in the year, The New York Times will begin a metered model on the Web. Most visitors to NYTimes.com will not notice a difference, but frequent visitors will be asked to subscribe.

That effort and others to draw more revenue out of consumers at a time when print advertising revenue is tough to come by — online advertising revenue surpassed newspaper revenue for the first time last year — will be watched closely by the rest of the industry.

The News Corporation took a different approach in Britain, putting up a solid wall around The Sunday Times and The Times of London last year and the results were brutal — an 86 percent decline in traffic to the site.

In the instance of The New York Times, executives are hoping that the site’s most loyal users will be willing to pay for convenience, ease and access — a number of tiers of service are reportedly being contemplated — while the company continues to reap the benefits and visibility of large numbers of drive-by, nonpaying users.

At the same time, the iPad and other tablets, which move print out of the nomenclature of “subscriptions” and into “applications,” could be something of a do-over.

That option, however, comes with a threat: many people have found newspaper Web sites, tethered as they are to a mouse and computer screen, to be a poor substitute for the printed product. But a tablet offers a scannable, leaned-back format for newspapers, one that can be passed back and forth at the breakfast table just like its dead tree ancestors.

Look for paid print subscriptions to drop as tablet sales grow. (The News Corporation’s tablet-only newspaper, The Daily, will be introduced soon, and could point to one way forward.)

TRENDS TOO NUMEROUS TO ELUCIDATE Will Google, with big forays into television and books, continue to pretend it is not a media company? Will the book business do the math and realize that in three years — which is when any book conceived right now would be published — there will probably be more than 100 million e-readers capable of rendering books in new ways?

As the number, size and portability of screens multiply, will dominant media companies continue to retain hegemony? Will the DVD go the way of the CD and VHS as streaming and downloading of video content grows? Will movie exhibition spaces further customize beyond Imax, offering new kinds of communal viewing that keep people showing up at the box office?

And finally, will Angry Birds eventually eat away so much mindshare — people currently spend 200 million minutes a day playing the game — that no one has any time for plain old media?