A case study: American Media and what it means for us South Africans

For three weeks I travelled through the United States of America on an International Visitor Leadership Programme sponsored by the US Government. The goal was to discuss media in the 21st century and understanding and improving the merge of traditional media and new media.

It's very interesting to see how many news services in the United States of America lays out a variety of offerings to its audience with most media houses taking a far different business approach to running a news organisation,  with freedom of speech being at their utmost advantage.

This approach is almost forced after trial and error method of putting a news product out there and the realisation of the success and failure based on their product. Small print publications that offers a generic news service have a greater chance of dying out while niche news services climbs up against all odds and succeed greatly. Of course, much like in a dog-eat-dog world, print media is struggling to cope, some more than others and much a many has been swallowed by it's more aggressive canines of the media industry.

Media serving its American population:

Bear in mind the country is broken down into 50 states and comprises of a diverse population of 310 million people, it's easy to adopt the do or die method where you take time off to understand your audience and offer a product accordingly or take a chance spewing out generic national interest and die.

Publications like the Wall Street Journal offer a niche service and targets specific audiences, find themselves beating the odds and pushing forward with a circulation of 2.1million.

Publications like New America Media reaches out and targets a specific audience, the ethnic groups and the youth of the ethnic groups. Their approach is to tackle downtown / township issues. The logic behind ethnic media, is to bridge the gap between communities and mainstream media - to put "the local in the global and the global in the local".

Another interesting approach taken by US media, is that fully investigative reporting type media heads like Pro Publica run as a non-profit organisation. This news service revolves around journalism that makes an impact. Stories are dished out in a way that forces government or the people to take action. Pro Publica's succession comes from them running as a non-profit organisation. They receive funding from various people so for them it's not an approach taken from a business perspective. Pro Publica is there to dish out the facts, tackle issues and make a change – not to make money while giving us the news.

DIGITAL MEDIA

Americans are no further ahead or behind than South Africans - even though some Americans are under the perception that South Africans live under a rock and assume that we don't know what 3G, smart phones and Wi-Fi is.

I suspect that the difference in population figures have something to do with the perception that Americans are more advanced in technology than us...  because the internet is more widely distributed in the US than here in South Africa. Adding to that,  Americans seem to have a better understanding of technology than the average South African. As someone said, "technology is easy, people are hard."

Statistically speaking, South Africa has a 10.8% internet penetration and the US has just over 50% penetration. With that being said, the average household in the States can afford to access the internet even though there's a distinct note of internet monopoly.

Meanwhile, South Africans access to the mobile platform is much higher than the internet itself with 56% having access to mobile in the urban areas and 31% in rural areas - according to growinginclusivemarkets.org. And like someone else said.. "technology is here.. it's just not evenly distributed".

With that being said, Americans got the balll rolling with reaching out to mobile users, South Africa needs to jump on the bandwagon, if haven't already. Mobile is here, and here to stay - for a long, long time at least.

SOCIAL MEDIA

With social media being the forefront of most breaking news these days, and the portal for cheap and effective marketing – and distribution of content to the outer limits, it is not surprising that the media world is nervous on approaching this subject. What is clear, is that nobody knows the right and wrong to this – but most agree that interactive media is the way to go on these social sites. Don’t be afraid to talk to your audience, and don’t be afraid to receive feedback from them.

In conclusion after interacting with several news institutions, I've learned that social media is quicker and more about 'news bites', but people will always look to traditional media for confirmation.

So traditional media will lose some ground to new media but will always in my opinion be the backbone of news reporting.

On the other hand, without using new media, companies will fall behind and lose market share to the competition that is advancing in new technical ways.