Page 18 - Convergent Journalism an Introduction Writing and Producing Across Media

WHAT IS CONVERGENCE AND HOW WILL IT AFFECT MY LIFE?

fragmenting of audiences, the availability of relatively cheap digital
technology, and changes in social and legal structures that make cross-
media ownership more possible. Media companies hope they can reach
fragmented audiences through multiple media, recognizing that con-
sumers have already embraced convergence, in the sense that they use
a multitude of media. Let’s look at each of these drivers.

Fragmenting Audiences

As well as being exposed to a lot more media nowadays, people
are using media in multiple forms to fit everything into their busy
lives. The 2004 Communications Industry Forecast showed that in the
United States, the average consumer spent 3,663 hours a year in 2003
using all forms of media. That’s an average of more than 10 hours a day
reading, listening, watching, and surfing for any combination of profes-
sional and personal reasons. It represented an increase of almost an hour
a day since 1998. James Rutherford, executive vice president of the
8 company that published the 2004 Communications Industry Forecast,
pointed out that consumers were using two or more media simulta-
neously to cope with the range of media choices and the competition
for attention. “The result is a media generation consuming more infor-
mation in less time than ever. Time is the most precious commodity.”
Analysts at Rutherford’s company, Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS),
predicted the time an average American spent with media would
increase by another hour a day by 2008. Tampa Tribune publisher
Gil Thelen has pointed out that people’s information-seeking behav-
iors are changing and media organizations need to adapt to respond
to that need. Howard Tyner, a former editor of The Chicago Tribune
who became a senior vice president of the Tribune Company, has
long maintained that the business of journalism is about “eyeballs”—
getting as many people as possible to look at media products. “A media
company’s game is to deliver content to consumers,” he said. “The
newspaper is and will be for a long time the engine to gather and edit
news. But it won’t be enough to just deliver that information to news-
paper readers. We [also] need for our news and information to go to
the eyeballs of Web consumers and TV viewers and cable customers
and even radio listeners, although they aren’t using their eyes” (Tyner,
2004). Convergence increases an organization’s chances of reaching
the largest number of eyeballs.