Compass for an Uncertain Time

By Kathleen Haley

In a time of the breakdown of traditional media, new and constantly changing modes of messaging and hyper information, communicators are struggling to find a foothold. Newhouse faculty members Brian Sheehan, Larry Elin and Steve Masiclat are working to address this new normal in communications through a web-based collaborative project called Navigate New Media (navigatenewmedia.com). By bringing together the best thinking from faculty, students, alumni and professionals in the field, the project seeks to provide a descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analysis of a rapidly changing industry, and to help develop and implement new strategies for success.

"Newhouse has this tremendous and unique balance of people who’ve worked for many years in the business and Ph.D.s who’ve been looking at things from an academic research point of view," says Sheehan, an associate professor of advertising and former advertising executive. "We thought because of this unique balance we could create more than just an academic web site but one that becomes a conversation between professionals and academics."

The Navigate New Media site is intended to be a forum in which to share information and ideas, a rare place where academics who study the media and professionals working in the field can stay current by learning from each other. "Navigate New Media is a gathering place for everybody concerned with the disruptive changes happening in the media," says Elin, an associate professor of television-radio-film. "We hope our research, surveys and writing will help professionals see what might be just around the corner for them, and give them the chance to adapt. Professionals will help us by giving us a glimpse of the industry from within. This is stuff we can take right into the classroom."

The web site will contain articles that Sheehan, Elin and Masiclat, who serve as the editorial board, hope will accomplish three things: describe a change in the media world; predict where that change may lead and what its long-term effects may be; and prescribe how media professionals might adapt to the change. The stories might be accompanied by video or other visual or audio files, and discussion will be generated on Twitter.

Contributions to the web site—including articles, essays, letters and comments—will be solicited from students, academics and professionals, particularly Newhouse alumni, and selected by the editorial board. "We’re going to pick specific subjects and give you a way to think about them with a practical application," Sheehan says. "It’s the best of academia, which is the deep analysis, and the best of the business world, which is a practical application."

The first of the site’s articles include "Is Print Media’s Dark Age Marketing’s Golden Age?" by Sheehan, who presents five ways to make sure a magazine is ready for the multiplatform media environment. He is also working on an article about "crowdsourcing," the practice of seeking help from people on the Internet to solve marketing problems.

Elin has written about generating revenue from online content. In upcoming pieces, he plans to explore the changing nature of consumer behavior, including consumer appetite for video produced by other consumers, and about social networking. "More people spend more time with social networks than with television networks," Elin says. "These shifts among consumers will, in turn, change what kind of media is produced by film and television studios, what business models evolve, how marketers reach us and myriad other adjustments. It will be both a scary and an exhilarating time for media professionals."

Sheehan believes communicators should expect that the changes in new media will only continue to progress faster exponentially, in line with philosopher Raymond Kurzweil’s theory of The Law of Accelerating Returns. "As things accelerate, they continue to accelerate at increasing speeds," Sheehan says. "That’s what’s been happening in communications. Whatever the pace of change is today, I believe it will be faster tomorrow."

Navigate New Media will help communicators sort through the barrage of changes in the industry to get at what’s most important. "We don’t need to figure out everything that’s happening all the time in new media," Sheehan says. "We just need to know in which direction to navigate."