Media, 2010: Shake Your Foundations

When Mark Lyndersay wrote Journalism 2010, I'm fairly certain that he was unaware that Inc. Magazine did an issue with everyone outside of the office at the time of his writing. Both articles demonstrate new methodologies of journalism and citizen/social media in the coming decade.

That Inc. Magazine did an entire issue without stepping into the office demonstrates that the brick and mortar associated with mainstream journalism isn't as necessary as people might think. This is mainly a cultural issue that doesn't resolve only to media but to many other things - as a software developer, I've been free and clear of brick and mortar for over 10 years. As a writer, a citizen journalist, a blogger, a silicon-based life form... I have never had that dependency to brick and mortar in the last 10 years. I've enjoyed it, but as far as writing itself I have no frame of reference for working in an office. Because of that I am sure I take it for granted.

And I know a lot of people, especially in Trinidad and Tobago, find my lack of 'office' peculiar. No, I'm not referring to fellow bloggers, writers and consumers of the Internet. I'm referring to the uncounted majority who still live in a culture of brick and mortar. In the United States it isn't as different as one would think but it is more socially understood that we who don't work in brick and mortar offices aren't necessarily aberrations. Likely we are the future or are helping define the future. The trick is to find the best mix of positives and negatives to move forward with.

That Inc. Magazine has been able to demonstrate the lack of need for brick and mortar means that they used social media to work together to produce the issue. Further reading on this is where Inc. Magazine eats their own dog food in the article The Case, and the Plan, for the Virtual Company.

Traditional media can be done outside the office. But, as Mark Lyndersay points out in Journalism, 2010, there's something that aspiring journalists and other writers on the web must consider:

...Be entrepreneurial. The days of working as an employee for creators of journalistic content are running out. An employee takes direction, provides what is required and collects a paycheck. In the world of media of today, the entrepreneurial journalist is the one who not only sees the story, but evaluates its permutations, the extensibility of the content and the capture points for reporting.

In 2010, the print-based journalism entrepreneur captures extended audio in an interview, camera phone footage and stills in situations where there is no other support, and builds this extended media into a definitive online resource. There is no “that’s not my job” in media as it’s evolving...

Sure, you can toss the office. For a business, this can mean lower overhead. For employees, this can mean less transit time and more - but it comes with a few problems as well. Working at home requires a shift in the way one thinks, especially if you're used to working elsewhere. And distractions are more prevalent at home - so you need to build your own work culture. When I started, I would actually leave home and go back to fool myself into 'being at the office'. I should probably write up some of my lessons learned on this.

You can be your own boss. I've been doing it with mixed success for 10 years as of July 5th, 2010. I wouldn't call the majority of what I write as 'journalism', though I have jumped the line from blogging/writing into journalism on occasion. I don't know the intrinsics of a newspaper office (I have a clue about a magazine office) - but what I do know is that there is less need for brick and mortar and that technology permits people, journalists or otherwise, to create the content closer to the actual stories.

You can do it on your own. You can do it in a group. You can do it under a formal business name or you can do it informally and experiment with new business models, as I have done with Your2ndPlace.com and KnowTnT.com. It's all possible.

The new media, citizen, traditional and hybrid, is our oyster. Shake the foundations.

Image at top by Doing Media Studies, shared with the Creative Commons Generic 2.0 license.