Daily Patricia - B.S. Things About the Internet

RSS Mobile

DailyPatricia.com is an online documentary project that follows serial entrepreneur Patricia Handschiegel. Patricia is a serial media and entertainment entrepreneur who founded a pioneering social media site in 2004, which she sold in 2007. She is currently the CEO of 9, a transmedia production and consulting company that builds and consults on franchise projects for traditional and digital media, entertainment and internet business. Her startups and business insight has been heard at events including South by Southwest, the Writer's Guild of America, Blogher, Women 2.0, Girls in Tech, and in mainstream business media/blogs including Mashable, Paid Content, TechCrunch, The Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, TV Week, and others. As founder of Stylediary, her fashion advice has appeared in more than 250 media outlets. She's the co-creator of the popular Huffington Post series The New Power Girls and Thenewpowergirls.com blog, which covers news and profiles of women startups and existing companies in multiple markets. Prior to entrepreneurship, Patricia worked in internet telecom at the engineering level and all facets of consumer sites. She's a social entrepreneur using business for change in empowerment, the elderly and childrens causes. Contact her at patricia@whatis9.com

July 3, 2009

B.S. Things About the Internet

Last night I met a newspaper photojournalist who has been with major dailies for the past twenty years. As she sat with us, two hybrid girls who grew up with both the web and print media, her stories were so incredible. All I could think about is what a shame that ignorance and immaturity is killing off the reporting business. Ignorance on the part of print media itself (and those leading them) for not knowing what to do, and immaturity that people don’t understand the web is supposed to replace print. The non stop “print is dead! print is dead!” chants from bloggers (and journalists) is ridiculous. Yes, print media is going to be replaced by digital. There is nothing to see here. It’s what the internet has intended to do all along because it is smart. Nobody ushered this in - no person, blog, etc. It’s simple evolution.

Print is passing away, but reporting is not — and the confusion of the two is unnecessarily killing reporting. It doesn’t make sense because more or less, writing and publishing words on the internet is no different than writing and publishing words on a piece of paper: It is all reporting. It is all journalism. You are all essentially media. It’s fine to celebrate and take advantage of barriers lowering in markets disrupted by the web, but we need to replace these things with real, viable businesses then — that means digital media outlets focused on making viable, digital media businesses versus banking on a sale to Hearst, Conde Nast and AOL as a model. I personally think we all benefit more from trying to help old entities also transition to the internet, but if you truly want to see their demise, fine. However, we all better be working to put something in place of it, then. We all lose if we do not.

Other things to note:

— TMZ: Breaking the Michael Jackson stories has nothing to do with digital media being better or good, and everything to do with TMZ obviously having a very good tipster. Do people really think TMZ would get that much insider information without someone leaking to them? This can happen with any media outlet. Lucky for TMZ, they were the one chosen this time.

— I understand that it hit the web before it hit television, but there is plenty of news that is brought by television before it hits the web, and plenty of people who got the news through other forms (including radio). It is a nonsensical discussion.

— Internet TV has nothing to do with declines in broadcast TV audiences.

— “Advertisers spending more money online” does not mean digital media companies are benefitting — particularly independent outlets, blogs, etc.

— The White House itself said that traditional TV and older web technologies (email marketing, etc.) won Obama’s campaign, not social media as many assumed and reported.

— The idea that people “won’t” pay for content, etc. on the internet is false. There are already many examples where people are. If you’re talking about the topic, this should be part of the conversation.

— Branded entertainment is not new, novel or ground breaking in media or entertainment. It makes no sense that media is toting it as a big idea regarding web video.

— It’s been said that internet advertising takes longer and needs to be viewed more in order to be effective.

— Print media can make the transition to digital effectively — All Things Digital, NY Times, and many other examples exist. They may not be making much money, but neither are most blogs.

7:42am | URL: http://patriciahandschiegel.tumblr.com/post/134796781/b-s-things-about-the-internet