Disintermediation of the Interview and the Profusion of Media

A small article in the June 11th Newsweek previews an emerging trend in journalism: people who in the past would have been happy to be interviewed are less interested now. Sometimes much less interested.

Instead of telling their story through the medium of journalist, they can simply tell it themselves through any number of channels - via video on YouTube, or a blog, or FaceBook, or a web site, or a self-published book, or .... There are lots of ways to get a story out there, if you have a story to tell.

(Such as Hillary Clinton using a YouTube video to drive traffic to her campaign web site where you can listen to a rather insipid campaign song - oh, and donate money, if you want ....)

Key underlying trends include the profusion of net-enabled media, the erosion of 'traditional' media, and the emerging dynamics of knowledge aggregation on the web. All provide fertile ground for innovation, in a 'media market' where the definition of 'news' is evolving, driven largely by changes in the way people access it.

All of this adds another layer of complexity to the process of using media, but opens huge opportunities for those who aggregate media content, repackage it, and deliver into highly specialized markets.