BACK-END: A Legacy Media in Retreat as Described by their Trade Publications
If new media is ever going to completely replace the legacy, we need to understand how the legacy views itself, its role & its competition. Here's 8 online publications reflecting this self image.
Here’s a useful overview of a legacy media in retreat.
It’s a short list of online and mostly free to access publications focused on legacy media, its business models and how it perceives of itself from a political, philosophical and especially from a business perspective.
The list includes:
AdAge (Advertising Age): The grand-daddy of every other publication on this list, having originated as a “broadsheet” newspaper in Chicago in 1930. It’s current version is pretty “woke,” as noted in posts like the November 20th, 2024 “Why brands may lose billions of dollars by dropping DEI programs.“ Its still useful to read, providing news and analysis on advertising, media, and marketing from a for-profit, corporate perspective, focusing on business models and audience engagement.
Campaign: One of the few outlets on this list with a Canadian based office and Canadian specific content, although it’s published by the Haymarket Media Group, a UK based international marketing company focused on business and consumer publications. Campaign focuses on topics of interest to large corporate advertising, media and marketing managers, offering insights into media business models and audience engagement strategies.
Digiday: Covers the business of media marketing from a legacy perspective, providing news on media companies, techniques to track online audience engagement, and monetization strategies. It’s annual “Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit,” provides a good venue for networking, benchmarking and comparing notes with so called “experts” in this area.
The Drum: Calls itself “a leading global publisher for the marketing and media industries,” providing “actionable insights, guidance, inspiration and solutions.” It’s an industry trade publication with a EU focus, published by the UK based Carnyx Group, a leading independent publisher focused on “connecting marketing agencies and clients.” That’s media speak for what is essentially a sales funnel for an advertising agency. It’s still useful.
The Fix: A trade publications for small independent and online media professionals, focused on the business issues relating to media organization building, media business models, audience engagement and news media financing platforms. Some articles, like the November 19th, The Fix post, “SEO’s next frontier: optimizing news content for AI search,” are particularly useful for small new-media outlets looking to bypass increasing censorship.
MediaBrief: Offers news and analysis on media, marketing, and advertising, including audience engagement and business models. The stories on media startups are interesting although the rest of the site is pretty basic, legacy media focused press releases.
MediaPost: Corporate journalism from a large, legacy perspective. Offers insights and analysis on audience engagement strategies and business for large advertisers, agencies and media buyers in TV, cable, radio and print. It’s compilation of yearly marketing events and conferences, most of which were created in-house, is unparalleled.
Nieman Journalism Lab: An academically oriented, mostly “woke” attempt to “help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age,” with stories on media business models, mobile apps, “social aggregation,” news reporting & production techniques. Some of the stories are great (the November 18th, 2024 post, “Two-thirds of news influencers are men — and most have never worked for a news organization“ which notes the obvious fact that the legacy media is bring replaced) while some, such as the November 14th, 2024 post, “The Onion adds a new layer, buying Alex Jones’ Infowars and turning it into a parody of itself,” seem lazy and based on a biased single sourced, press release from one of the parties involved. The lab is part of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, which administers the oldest fellowship program for journalists in the world.
These publications provide valuable insights and analysis for media professionals looking to stay updated on industry trends and best practices. They also show their bias, and provide insight into how the new media can effectively compete and eventually surpass legacy media influence and accomplishments.
At the very least, its worth noting the massive amounts of time and effort the legacy outlets spend on discussing business models, financing and money.
It’s the true core of their operations and philosophy, not the public platitudes explaining how “democracy dies in darkness” without their input. Once the cash flow goes away, legacy media will finish its collapse, no matter what stories still need to be told.
The new media, focused on providing useful and actionable information at a fraction of the cost, will then completely supersede them.