Print organizations like newspapers and magazines are magnets for creative people who have a passion for telling stories.
They didn’t go to work for the paper of the magazine because they thought it was a good way to make a lot of money. It isn’t. They are driven by a passion to report.
It’s not secret that newspapers and magazines are in trouble, financial trouble. They need revenue, because if there is no revenue, there is no journalism.
As it happens, there is an enormous appetite for the kind of content creation that people who work in papers and magazines do, it’s just not in print. There are more than 40,000 cable, satellite and broadcast channels around the world, and they all have an insatiable appetite for content – video content – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In fact, if you add up all the demand for video just in the United States, you get an astonishing 17 million hours of content (including re-runs). In the UK, 5.25 million hours of content. Newspapers only come out once a day, magazines once a week or once a month. TV and video run all the time.
Newspapers and magazines are filled with people who have a passion for food, clothing, travel, real estate… you name it. All the fare of cable and broadcast TV.
Equip your reporters and writers with iPhones (they have them already), teach them to shoot and cut and a whole new world (and revenue stream ) is yours for the taking. So take it.
Originally published on VJ.
