Let Content Grow

It's pretty clear to see that the media world is changing. You would have to be living in a shack in the woods or on the side out of mountain not to see the seismic shifts in media consumption. As I wrote on Friday, companies must adopt new media models in order to survive.

My hope is that media companies focus on building their reach beyond a myopic insistence on preserving their original platforms. Paper, television, and radio are just devices. Content is fluid. It is participatory. It lives and breathes. By freeing content from the shackles of archaic business models, you give it the opportunity to spread organically.

Content grows by feeding off of the thoughts and ideas of those who encounter it. It need not follow a single path, or take a single shape. It must be given the chance to grow anew each time it is seen, read, or touched; taking on new forms as it reaches across the vastness and diversity of our society. Paper forces us into experiencing content the same way, regardless of the fact that our motivations are often different.

You may read a newspaper article about a new Italian restaurant in your city because you are a fan of the chef, while I, on the other hand, am interested in the piece because of the architectural design of the restaurant itself. The classic newspaper format sets boundaries on how we experience the article, even though we are interested in alternate sides of the story.

When reading an article online, a story has no boundaries. You can shape it in any way that you choose. You have the ability to expand upon a single element within the article (i.e. a restaurant's architectural design)and experience it in a myriad of different ways. In this example, you could access a portfolio of designs that influenced the architect's creation. Or perhaps you would rather navigate to the architect's personal blog or Twitter feed. The opportunities are endless as long as we give people the ability to shape their own media experience.

Rather than dictating the specific images or details that a person sees, as was once the role of old media, companies must embrace the open structure of today's content landscape. The more we feed and nurture content, the more we will have to consume and spread.

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