Nearly 90% of my work involves some form of writing to service my clients’ business needs. PR requires a solid writing ability and a very specific skill set of intuitively knowing who will be interested in reading your content and why.
Part of my work also involves monitoring the news environment, which has almost completely moved to online from the traditional print pubs. It used to be where online content would supplement print. The publishing crisis changed all of that, and now I would safely say that it’s the other way around. In today’s world, print articles are outdated the minute they are published, and therefore they have become pretty showpieces of a nostalgic past where flipping pages was more satisfying than scrolling down to “read more” on a screen. The need and the capability to immediately comment on articles sealed the deal for print pubs. Period.
Clearly, the publishing crisis has impacted all of the IMC components, with a particular emphasis on PR. Nowadays, I scan so many websites for content, I’m baffled with how many “experts” there are posting articles such as, “5 key points to…,” or ”7 trends to monitor…” and so on. Everyone has become a reporter of some kind, but the ability and the skill to write is absent in too many of these mainstream, mislabeled, yet keyword-rich articles. There’s so much to sift through, and absorb, it makes me wonder: what will content look like by 2020?
In 2010, we know that social media will drive content, and social networks are likely to continue dictating what is actually being read and absorbed, versus simply skimmed and shared.
Big questions to ask:
1) Is quality of content gradually becoming more important in the face of the infinite amount of regurgitated content that just reads a little differently than the previous post?
2) If content is closely tied to social media, what does that say about the future of the fickle three: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn? Can we get enough quality content through these social networks so that they continue to be credible sources of information, as much as they have become marketing tools?
3) What is the next step once we reach the point of content saturation? We all love informative articles that can help us shape opinions, and start conversations. What happens when the online content world becomes too cluttered to make a real impact?
I think that one of the issues is that too much content is free. We’re noticing that some news sites are planning to start charging for readership in the next year or so. If charging for content becomes mainstream, then it will be interesting to see how that will change the content world as we know it today.