I spent this morning in a great little training session looking at preparing for and being interviewed by the media. One of the things that struck me was how tech companies have been responsible for seismic change in the media industry in the past two decades.
My first experience of Media Training was in the last year of my degree, back in the early 1990s, when I was lucky enough to sit in on a session run for police officers at Bramshill College – at the time the main training establishment for senior law enforcers in the UK. My degree dissertation examined the relationship between the police and the media, and I’d been invited to sit in on their day-long course. The media, in those days, was a much simpler beast – newspapers (national and local), radio (national BBC and local BBC and commercial) and TV (four channels with some local news coverage). Media organisations were either advertising and/or cover price funded or public funded via the licence fee. Advertising was a matter of selling space (column inches or pages) or time (seconds in an ad slot). Journalism was an established career, and their was a pyramid of training, usually starting in local media and, for those with the aptitude or ambition, a career progression up through to Fleet Street or National Broadcasting. Computers were strange things that geeks used to play games or, occasionally, do a bit of word processing.
Look at the media landscape today, at it starts with the browser, the app, and the connection to the network. Services like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have, in a very short space of time, provided entirely new media channels. Advertising has become a matter of selling sales leads (the search model) or of selling brand association opportunities (from TV programme sponsorship through to product placement). Channels are no longer operated by specialists – every big football club these days seems to have its own TV channel – and there is a remarkable blurring between journalism, “citizen journalism”, blogging and social networking.
In all of that change, actually training people in “media” is so much more of a challenge because so many of the knowns of how the media works have changed (and continue to mutate) in such as short space of time…
mmitII 