Sometimes when you work in a professional media business you have to wonder how they are going to survive. There's a core ingredient in any business's sustainability DNA that says it must stay in business. That means paying attention to its core business.
On a magazine that means keeping the pot boiling with new ideas. Media means nothing if it can't keep planting new slants and interpretations in the minds of users. They are the ones who attract advertisers, which is where the real money is, or used to be, made.
The editor of a title with which I have become familiar, however, recently put out a call to her staff calling for new ideas. The publication is becoming stale and must work harder to retain its readers against the emerging competition. But, when a freelancer with a justifiable case came forward to submit her own ideas, she was told there was no budget for freelance commissions and that the reason the staff were employed was to produce the content - and come up with the ideas for it.
Therein lay the problem. Without fresh thinking, the magazine is unlikely, to paraphrase Einstein, to solve its problems with the same mind that created them. To keep a flow of ideas happening, new minds and new perspectives must be brought to old problems, and currently this isn't happening. Nor, given the nature of a parent organisation struggling against the forces of the new yet battling them with the thinking of the old is it ever likely to.
Media has enough challenges facing it already that to sacrifice the possibility of new thinking emerging for what are really quite inconsequential budgetary savings in the longer term scheme of things is really the last thing likely to help its cause. There was an opposition parliamentary quote aired last week in the wake of the death of former United Kingdom Labour Party leader Michael Foot that his election manifesto had been the "longest suicide note in history". One wonders if the traditional media is getting busy on writing a longer one.
