Channeled correctly, fear can be a very productive thing and when one listens to two senior media managers speak recently, it is clear that fear of New Media is causing ripples in the fraternity.

The best advice is not “don’t panic” or “don’t fear” because there is in fact something to panic about and there is something to fear – if left unchecked. The advances of New Media should not just be causing ripples, it should be causing tsunamis. The media should therefore not be treated as children by being told “don’t panic” or “don’t fear”.

New Media is the term used for cyber-journalism or publishing of news on the Internet. It is the convergence of print, radio, television, telephone, and computer technologies all wrapped up into a single package.

Speaking on CBC’s TV Current Affairs Programme First Response (but read on www.cbc.bb and www.caribbean360.com) Dr. Allyson Leacock of CBC suggested that traditional or mainstream media are becoming “a bit of an anachronism ... the reality is that I don’t need to turn on my radio or TV to see what I want to see. If I am at my computer I can do all (two). The broadcast industry in the Caribbean is up against a no-win situation almost in that we are being asked to compete against some really big fish.”

At the same time the fear of Patrick Cozier of the Caribbean Broadcasting was that change was taking place quicker in the market place than inside the traditional media house.

“If we don’t speed up our response to change we are going to find ourselves in a scenario of almost planned obsolescence,” he said, hitting the nail on the head.

The fact is that traditional media need not compete with New Media. The two ought to complement each other. However, with the exception of two sites (www.caribbean360.com and www.caribbeannetnews.com) Caribbean media houses have largely used their websites to mirror what is reported in their newspaper or on their major newscast which is not the correct way to practice cyber-journalism.

In the same way that a tabloid story and a broadsheet story are structurally different, and in the same way that the style of a newspaper article differs from that of a radio news script which differs from that of a television news script, the New Media news script is also vastly different.

Therefore to cut and paste the story from the pages of the newspaper or the airwaves of the radio station to the webpage does an injustice to the audience. A cyber-newsroom has to operate differently to a mainstream newsroom. To start with, each must have its own editor.

Unlike the mainstream editor, the cyber-editor is required to be multi-skilled with the ability to not just write and edit copy but also produce graphics and update the website. It is the job of the editor – not the job of the Webmaster or the Information Technologist, or the Systems Analyst – to update the site.

This scenario drives stakes of fear into the hearts of mainstream news editors. Numerous questions spring to the fore. There is no way, for example, that the editor wants his story on a webpage before the newspaper prints tomorrow morning or before the newscast is broadcast tonight. Why not?

Who broke the story on the Panday verdict on April 24? For the first time in Caribbean history, a newspaper - the Trinidad Express - broke the story on their website www.trinidadexpress.com. When US Vice-President Dick Cheney accidentally shot his fellow hunter around 5 pm Saturday February 12, 2006, it was when the local paper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times (www.caller.com) broke the story at 3:45 pm on Sunday on its Web site when the information was made public.

The first dilemma is that news editors don’t want to compete against themselves and this was something which other mainstream media faced and dealt with in this 24-hour news culture of the 21st Century in which various technologies are converging at a clip.

For example, on February 6, 2006 when MSNBC reporter Bob Sullivan broke a story about a nationwide credit-card identity theft, www.msnbc.com/ posted it at 1:56 p.m. ET. Four hours later, NBC News correspondent George Lewis told the story on Nightly News. This is not how Caribbean media houses would ordinarily handle such breaking news.

NBC’s position is “not to hold back”. “This is a day and age where you need to get news out there.

People expect it,” explained NBC News chief Steve Capus. Mark Lukasiewicz, who runs NBC News’ digital media, explained that the “public expects to know things rapidly. They know they have many places to get that information, so they are less tolerant of being told to wait for the evening news.”
From the newspaper perspective, they too have taken a decision not to wait until the following morning. Case in point is the daily News-Tribune in Atlanta.

“When we have breaking news, we break it online,” says Charlotte Atkins, the News-Tribune editor. “We use our print edition to paint a more thorough picture of what has happened in photos and storytelling.”

Atkins said that newspapers that wait 12 to 24 hours to tell their readers what’s happening in their community are doing a disservice.

There are 11 criteria that determine what turns an event into news. One of the criteria of newsworthiness is “frequency”, that is, the event must be completed within the publication cycle of the news organisation reporting it. In the “olden days” astute politicians and newsmakers would time their release in such a way as to fall outside of the production cycle and ensure that by the time the next production cycle comes along, it becomes stale news or other events overtake it making it less newsworthy. Not so today.

The news production cycle on the super information highway on which we live, work, and play is around the clock. The newsroom never closes.

One major fear, I’ve heard articulated, is that the Board of Directors wants to see a profit. However, unless the same Board of Director so direct that New Media be positioned just like mainstream media then they are missing out, big time, on the bottom-line.

In 2004 and 2005 online advertising has been gaining mainstream momentum. Put in plain language online advertising growth has outpaced growth of the ad industry overall, with advertisers coming to regard the Web as an essential brand-building component to their media campaigns.

The Online Publishers Associations research shows that phenomenal growth started in 2004 and has continued as advertisers shift from television and newspaper to websites.

All 2004 records were eclipsed in 2005. Final figures are yet to come in but the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) estimate that Internet advertising revenues for 2005 are estimated to exceed $12.5 billion, a 30 per cent increase over the previous revenue record of $9.6 billion in 2004.

The 2005 fourth quarter revenues totaled a record $3.6 billion; making it the second consecutive quarter to surpass the $3 billion mark and the highest quarter reported. Fourth quarter revenues represent a 35 percent increase over the same period in 2004 and a 17 percent increase over the third quarter of 2005.

The counter-argument is “so how many homes in the Caribbean have Internet”? As at 2000, the International Telecommunications Union estimated an Internet penetration in the CARICOM Caribbean of about 4.7 per cent. That has since changed as bandwidth increased and prices fell.

In Barbados, for example, there are more than 22,000 Internet accounts. One account in one household could serve an average of four people while one ADSL connection in one business establishment could serve anywhere from a single person to 200 or more.

Barbados is well covered and so too are many other Caribbean islands, however the audience of the New Media is scattered to the four corners of the earth – the Bajan in Abu Dhabi, the Jamaican in Alaska, the Vincentian in Australia, the Guyanese in Ouagadougou and the tens of thousands in the more populated metropolis of Toronto, New York, Boston, and London.

Some media houses recognise the value and aim for an overseas edition. Radio stations try to stream via the Internet to reach the same audience. If Internet penetration is so good and getting better, in the Caribbean how much better is it in the overseas markets of the developed countries?

The North American or European advertiser who is trying to reach Caribbean audiences in those countries can, in one fell swoop through a Caribbean news website, reach not just the audience resident in the Caribbean but also nationals from many Caribbean countries living in the overseas market.

An advertiser like Courts (Belize) Limited, for example, advertising on a Belize news website is actually targeting the Belizean who lives in North America, who can use his/her credit card, purchase furnishings and have them delivered to his/her relative homes in Belize.

Thirdly, on this point of audiences and Internet penetration, the convergence of technology means that you no longer have to be at your computer and logged into the Internet. As an example, using a wireless such as a cell phone or PDA with WAP enabled browser, anyone, any part of the world could access Caribbean news by going to wap.caribbean360.com.

Now the Caribbean news follows you … you don’t have to follow the news.

Technology is converging at an alarming rate and while Caribbean media are still in the era of the static HTML webpage sites or using modest Content Management Systems considering their next move, the previously conservative BCC plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including Blogs and home videos; put a searchable database of the corporation’s entire program catalogue online; and post 7 days of television programming online in BBC’s iPlayer.

In St Lucia, one will no longer need satellite television to watch the BBC programming. The New York Times and Microsoft will unveil in a few months a new solution to download the entire newspaper and read it from the desktop using special software with the look and feel of the NY Times and not the look and feel of a website. Others are planning Wiki sites for community reporting (a whole new – and dangerous - subject).

Unless Caribbean media get on board – quickly - Patrick Cozier’s comments may well prove prophetic; they may in fact, unwittingly, be planning their own obsolescence.

Terry Ally is a journalist, cyber-journalist, and a Web Content Developer