Media giants speak about the future of the profession
Deborah Wilson and Graham Woodlief speak about the future of media
By Scott Van Dorn
Imagine sitting at home, watching The Weather Channel, when to your surprise the anchor says, “And you can Twitter us!”
It even surprised Deborah J. Wilson, and she’s the former CEO of weather.com.
Wilson and Woodlief speak about the future of media
The situation shows how engaged and multifaceted media corporations have become. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are now sought after by large media companies in order to obtain user-generated content and reach a broad spectrum of people.
Wilson and Graham Woodlief, vice president of Media General, Inc., came to Elon today to speak to a reporting class about some of the new roles of the media in the future.
Woodlief, who is also president of the publishing division, oversees 25 daily and about 100 non-daily newspapers. In his speech, he said that many steps have been taken by the company in order to adapt to the times and changing enviroment.
“Were creating a market-based system now,” he said. “We’re streamlined. It will add new customers and create new opportunities to help us through these tough times.”
Wilson thinks her company did a great job anticipating.
“We did a full-frontal attack with the Internet,” she said. “We were one of the first media companies to go online and now are the number one content-based site.”
Wilson later added when asked about what media companies need to do to cope with change.
“You have to make the right strategic choices,” she said. “Too many companies try to control where the consumers go.”
Whether is be user-generated material, a paying consumer or a hard-working employee, both speakers stressed the power of the people. It is understanding these people that is one of the major challenges of the media heading into the future.
“It’s like turning a battleship around in a creek,” Woodlief said. “It’s tough but we’re getting there. It’s going to take awhile.”
Tags: Deborah Wilson, Elon, Facebook, Graham Woodlief, Media, Media General, The Weather Channel, Twitter
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April 4, 2009 at 2:27 am
Scott, it’s good to see you got this posted right away. You have a typo in the fifth paragraph that you really need to fix because it winds up misspelling Woodlief’s name – clearly a typo, though. You can see that when you arrive later than everyone else you don’t get the chance to get a good location for shooting the video. Of course, I am sure you have been taught that the lower third of the frame is usually a place for supers/typography and here we have the entire figures of both of the people who are speaking. Not well framed, but I’m sure you are aware of that, and in this case something is better than nothing because it puts your audience there.
I think you will want to go through and rework some of the transitions here. You’ll see that in your hurry you might have left some rather disjointed passages.
April 4, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I forgot to mention in that earlier note that you spelled Debora Wilson’s name wrong as well. No “h.”