Final Words on the Future of the Media Industries

Hamburg.
The final speaker for Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is Gabriele Siegert from the University of Zürich, who summarises the conference. She begins by noting the unwillingness of citizens to continue to pay for media, and suggests that changed orientation in media organisations will necessarily also change the content of the media - product placement, for example, will necessarily affect the content within which products are placed.

There are two key areas here: the structural changes in advertising, for which product placement is one phenomenon - it is a sign of a new logic which is present well beyond television entertainment. However, this new model will not replace more conventional advertising; not least, it has yet to be researched in full.

Additionally, advertisers themselves are becoming media producers (and the division between both sides is becoming less clear - both are involvedin creative storytelling) - how this will change media content still remains to be seen. So, the structural changes in advertising are taking place, but where things are going is still unclear, and there are few clear statistics about these changes emerging from the advertising industry.

The second key areas is the financing of quality content. While 'quality' is difficult to define, it has been applied here largely to journalistic content, defined according to the quality criteria developed by journalists - and the quality of such content remains difficult to assess by audiences, who simply have to place their trust in the work of journalists. The preferences of media users are no more clear here: users have expectations of their media, and rely on the quality of the information they receive in order to make informed choices, but the gratis mentality undermines the production of such content - and if the quality of publication is diminished in the long term by this, then this removes the foundations of the special role of mass media in society.

An interest in optimising content monetisation similarly reduces the quality of content, and leads to lowest common denominator content. Another option would be to make content more scarce (and more expensive) in order to find a funding model, but this also undermines the mass media role of the media - it reduces the possibility of an informed citizenry.

User-generated content cannot fully replace such mass media models. Here, too, financing models remain unclear - so the dilemma for the media industries remains. There are three issues here: differentiation, i.e. different approaches to supporting the production of different forms of content; transparency, not only about the presence of product placement, but disclosure even of the amounts of money that changed hands in the process; and a public, society-wide debate about these issues facing the media industries at this point.

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