The internet is having a profound political impact - both on voters and campaigns, as Mark McKinnon has explained at Internet Evolution. But the New York Times says the media is also aggressively responding to the new culture of the internet, embracing new approaches to content distribution...
Shortly after 9 a.m. on Oct. 19, Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for president during the taping of "Meet the Press" on NBC. Within minutes, the video was on the Web. The 2008 race has blurred online and offline media. But the clip was not rushed onto YouTube; it was MSNBC.com, the network's sister entity online, that showed the video hours before television viewers on the West Coast could watch the interview for themselves. [...] But as NBC's decision to release the Powell clip early shows, the networks and their newspaper counterparts have not simply waited to be overtaken. Instead, they have made specific efforts to engage audiences with interactive features, allowing their content to be used in unanticipated ways, and in many efforts, breaking out of the boundaries of the morning paper and the evening newscast.
In the past, there has been a conflict of incentives for creators between "allowing their content to be used in unanticipated ways" and protecting the content they spend a great deal of money to produce. While virtually everybody acknowledges that creators should own, and benefit from, the fruit of their labor, many also acknowledge that people should be able to excerpt content in order to report - or, yes, remix - the original content in non-commercial ways. But where is the line between protecting the rights of creators and giving consumers more access to, and freedom to use, content?
It's an extraordinarily difficult question, and many have wrestled with how and where to draw the line.
However, that knot may finally be untangling and in some rather unexpected ways. Instead of having to choose between the rights of creators and more open content distribution, creators are embracing technology to allow both goals to be achieved. The New York Times describes how NBC is embracing internet distribution, but they're far from alone.
- Viacom, another Arts+Labs member, is also exploring ways to accomplish both goals with MTV.com, "embrac[ing] the consumer-led digital revolution".
- Google, the Authors Guild and the American Association of Publishers are creating a Registry for authors and expand access to books "in ways Google never could have done alone."
- WashingtonPost.com's most popular video programming recently has been its live coverage of this year's political conventions and election night, and The Wall Street Journal is aggressively rolling out new bite-sized video documentaries accompanying their news articles.
These are all entirely new initiatives, new models of distribution and in many cases are blurring the lines between what we've traditionally thought of as separate and distinct industries. Who would have thought for instance that yesterday's newsprint would graduate to online print, video documentaries and live video coverage.
The bottom line is that surprising and positive effects are emerging out of the laboratories of these new distribution models. Creators are developing better content, better methods of content delivery, and engaging internet consumers in entirely new and unique ways.
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