We are living through one of the most profound changes in the nature of communications since the time of Gutenberg. The rise of digital technologies and the Internet have sparked a revolution that is affecting almost every aspect of our daily lives.

For people who were traditionally consumers of content—whether they were called readers, listeners, or viewers—the new-media revolution has been empowering. But for those who create and distribute content—whether journalists, performers, publishers, or broadcasters—it has more often been profoundly disorienting. There's no reason, however, why content creators shouldn't feel equally empowered by new media.

The premise of the New-Media Survival Guide is that you don't need to be a digital native to thrive in the digital era. No matter how long you've worked in legacy media, you can find exciting opportunities for your talents and your career in the new-media arena—if you make the effort to understand and experiment with it. The New-Media Survival Guide can help you find your way through this challenging but exciting process of discovery.

My primary intended audience comprises people trained in traditional publishing media. In the first rank of this group as I imagine it are journalists. Behind them, however, I envision marketers, public relations professionals, and others who have participated in publishing, whether as producers, intermediaries, or clients.

Although I expect many of my readers to be full-time employees, the advice here applies equally well to freelancers and independent content producers. (Indeed, one of the core assumptions of this book is that as the new-media era evolves, journalists will become increasingly independent, whether by freelancing or by starting their own businesses.)

Given that my own career has been largely within business-to-business publishing, some of my examples and suggestions will be related to trade journalism, but my intended scope is broader. No matter what business you are in, if you are a content creator trying to master the transition from traditional to new media, this guide can help.

What can you hope to gain from The New-Media Survival Guide? First, a way to look at the changes in the media business and what your role can and should be. You may be familiar with all the social media tools and trends discussed here, but have you thought critically about them all and how you can best use them? If not, this book can give you a basis for doing so, even if—or perhaps especially if—you disagree with my views.

Second, if you’re new to social media, this book will give you an overview of the most important new-media platforms and the key issues involved in using them. You’ll find plenty of references to sources that can help you further explore any that intrigue or worry you.

You'll also learn not just how to do your job better, but how to use social media to position yourself for your next job. The journalistic discipline is becoming increasingly entrepreneurial and freelance. Fewer and fewer journalists will devote a career, or even a decade, to any one employer. For this reason, much of the focus here will be on ways to market yourself and your new-media talents and to build up a network of friends, colleagues, and potential clients.

Though it may look like it here and there, I'm not trying to create hostility between you and your employer. In fact, you and your boss share a common interest in furthering your new-media literacy. As Ellie Behling of eMedia Vitals puts it, "Smart editors are adapting by learning new skills and taking initiative—and smart publishers are encouraging them to do so." [1] Realistically, though, your interests and those of your employer will not always be aligned. When it's time for you to part ways, you should be prepared.

If you are currently employed in a traditional media operation, you may already be benefitting from a new-media training program. But if not, don't wait for your employer. Do it on your own. Even if your company does offer training, there's no guarantee that the skills they are teaching you are the ones you will need in the future. Mastering the complex requirements of a custom content management system can serve you well within your company, but might do less for your marketability than learning WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla. Stay aware of the trends in new media and at the very least, try dabbling in them yourself.

Finally, don't expect too much from training. Learning a technical skill is not equivalent to understanding the values and culture of social media. Yes, it can be helpful to know some CSS and to master content management systems. But by themselves, those skills are mere commodities. If you can't also understand and adopt as your own the values and ideals that are driving the new-media revolution, you will never thrive in it. What will ultimately determine the extent of your success in new media is not your training in it, but your attitude towards it.

For that reason, my emphasis in this guide is not on how to use the tools of new media, but how to think about new media itself. For veteran journalists, the biggest challenges are not technical, but attitudinal. Adapting to new-media ways is not a matter of learning programming or other binary esoterica. To survive in the new-media world, you don't need to be a technical expert. Rather, you need to understand the ideas and forces behind new media, and how they are changing not just your industry, but the world.

Principles of New Media

While this guide covers the most prominent aspects of new media, such as blogging, social networks, aggregation, and content marketing, it isn't with the idea of teaching you how to engage in them. That's better left to others, many of whom will be cited here. Moreover, new media is evolving so rapidly that any attempt to offer training in this guide would quickly become outdated.

My aim instead is to explain what I see as the basic principles of new media, and show how they work in the various platforms discussed here. Like Jaiku and Google Wave before them, LinkedIn or Tumblr might soon become passé. But the principles that animated them will be unchanged. You'll be better able to appreciate and adapt to their successors if you understand those principles.

The first thing to understand about new versus old media is how much both have in common. Their shared concern is communication, and they involve many of the same concepts. But what differentiates them is where they place their emphasis. Though not the only ones, the following six new-media preferences are to my mind the most significant:

• Dialogue over monologue

• Collaboration over control

• The personal over the corporate

• The open over the closed

• The transparent over the opaque

• The process over the product

As I'll suggest in the rest of this guide, these principles lie behind many of the practices of new media that may by turns confuse, anger, or enchant you.

Dialogue vs. Monologue: Journalism as Conversation

In 1999, when Doc Searls and David Weinberger wrote in The Cluetrain Manifesto that “markets are conversations,” it was a fresh, radically new idea. Today, for anyone who’s thought much about social media, it verges dangerously on being trite. But however obvious the idea may seem, it remains a powerful, foundational concept for new media. We ignore it at our peril.

Searls and Weinberger were addressing their comments above all to public relations and marketing people. In the beginning of their chapter, in fact, they point to magazines as a “form of market conversation.” But the publishing industry’s advantage is only relative; it too has tended either to ignore or to dominate the conversation.

Before the Internet, journalism was largely a one-way form of communication. Publishers talked to their readers, but few readers could talk back, and in only limited ways. Digital technologies have dramatically changed the balance. Now, readers can easily and immediately comment on stories by commenting on blogs. What’s more, they can now be publishers themselves, whether through their own blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or other forms of social media. Not only can they talk back to publications, but they can also compete against those publications by talking to other readers directly.

This change means that traditional distinctions between the journalist, the reader, and the news source are breaking down. Journalists can no longer rely on the idea of professionalism as separating them in a meaningful way from “amateur” bloggers and other kinds of citizen journalists. Now, as Storyful’s David Clinch told Mashable, “journalists must be able to pivot quickly between the idea of using the community as a source of news and as the audience for news, because they are both.” [2]

As a result, the nature of journalistic discourse is transforming. The journalist’s role is no longer to dominate or control the conversation, but to participate in the conversation, support it, and help a variety of other voices to be heard.

For producers of traditional media, this can be a difficult lesson. We tend to forget that a conversation is not simply one person talking, then the other. For any participant in a communication, the most important elements are first, truly listening to what others say, and then meaningfully responding to them. As their use of a social-media platform like Twitter shows, even today journalists tend to think of their primary media role as talking. But true dialogue demands an equal emphasis on those other conversational skills: listening and responding.

Collaboration vs. Control: User-Generated Content

The notion of giving up editorial control can be a challenging concept. Many print veterans have difficulty accepting the idea that good editorial content can be provided by readers volunteering their work. As one prominent business-to-business publisher recently put it, "People who write for free will give you exactly what you pay for in the long run." (Ironically, he made this statement in a presentation he was giving for free.) Behind this perspective is a bias to professionalism. In this view, journalism is a complex product that can only be produced by trained career journalists who are paid for their work. It's their job to write, the readers' to read, and the advertisers' to pay for it all.

But in the social media era, roles and responsibilities are not so clear-cut. When journalism's role is seen as enabling conversation in a community, the journalist's voice is no longer privileged. Others may speak with as much or more authority and insight, and without needing payment to do so.

The print veteran's tendency to discount contributions from users is amplified by the form of those contributions. In keeping with the nature of online media, user-generated content tends to be decidedly unprofessional: incomplete, unpolished, and personal—in other words, conversational.

To survive in the new-media era, journalists must not simply accept such content, but aid and abet it; they must aim to collaborate in the conversation, not to control it.

Personal vs. Corporate

The dynamic that raises the reader's voice to the level of the journalist also changes the journalist's relation to his or her employer. The journalist no longer needs a traditional publisher to talk with readers. Formerly, most reporters and editors were, to readers, little more than a name on a page or on a masthead. But in the social media world, they have an increasingly personal and direct connection to their readers. In the terms of commerce, journalists are becoming brands, potentially the equal of their employer's corporate brand.

Having a personal, conversational relationship with an audience inevitably means having a distinctive voice and point of view or, in new-media terms, a personal brand. To traditionally trained journalists, this may seem not simply unfamiliar, but unprofessional. Vadim Lavrusik, Facebook's journalism program manager, puts it this way:

"As journalists, we often squirm at phrases like 'personal branding.' But the reality is that social media, and the social Web in general, have created a shift from the institutional news brand to journalists' personal brands . . . [and] a consumption environment that encourages conversation as much as content, and the personal as much as the professional. It's a shift from the logo to the face."[3]

Increasingly, the context that makes your personal brand and your social interactions meaningful is not the corporation but the network. The network—and we could also call it a community—is both a means to and a result of cultivating those interactions and creating the basis for further exchanges. When you get a helpful or insightful comment on your blog or a retweet on Twitter, for instance, it's the opening for a relationship that develops only if you cultivate it. That process starts with a thoughtful response to each commenter.

But that's only the beginning. Your network should cast a wide net. Don't limit yourself to one platform, like your blog or Facebook. If your relationship begins with a blog comment, look to expand the basis of that relationship to social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Likewise, engage with people in those social networks with the aim of introducing them to your blog or website. And return the favor. Make sure you follow, like, and retweet the people who follow you.

As all forms of media become more personal, the bonds that link media professional to corporate employer become weaker. At the same time, the connections to social networks grow stronger. For journalists the implications of this trend are simple: embrace social networking, or say goodbye to your career.

Open vs. Closed

One of the key distinctions in the digital world is between closed systems and open ones. One example of a closed system, from the early days of the online experience, would be the original America Online or Prodigy of the 1990s. These “walled garden” systems restricted who could participate, and relied on custom-built, proprietary systems that could be difficult to use and impossible to adapt. The internet, by contrast, is an open system, built on published standards and accommodating a wide range of modifications.

Another example of closed and open digital systems comes from software. Proprietary software programs, like Microsoft Windows, are closed. Their source code is hidden and cannot be legally modified. Open-source software like Linux, by contrast, exposes its source code to the world, and not only allows modification by volunteers, but is built on such voluntary involvement.

From the user’s perspective, closed systems are generally expensive to buy and to implement, while open ones are free and can cost less to put in place. In theory, closed, custom-built systems can more directly address the needs of the users who pay for the service. Open systems may be more difficult to adapt to individual use, but allow for interoperability with other systems.

This distinction between open and closed is useful to understanding and participating in new media. In general, old media prefers closed systems, allowing entry to some but excluding others, whether through paid or controlled subscriptions, copyright, or professional restrictions on content creation.

For legacy corporations, acceptance of openness is difficult. But given that new media favors the personal, individuals should find the transition easier. In fact, individual journalists stand to gain much more from open systems than do their employers.

Learning an open-source content management system like WordPress or Joomla, for instance, is more likely to benefit individual content creators as they change jobs than would a proprietary or custom-built system. Similarly, while restrictive paywalls may increase revenues for some publications, editors will often find more value to their reputations and careers in having their content accessible to all.

Media businesses may fear open systems, but individual journalists shouldn’t. Openness is their future.

Transparent or Opaque?

Because one of its foundational ideas is openness, new media encourages and rewards transparency. Traditional media organizations have tended to be opaque, aiming not to reveal much about the people and processes behind their product. But the nature of new media is to reveal everything, to make everything public. If the organizations don’t reveal their own inner workings, the increasing likelihood is that someone else will.

One of the ways new media encourages transparency is ethical, as represented by the popular expression, “transparency is the new objectivity.” Traditional news organizations have wanted individual journalists to hide their subjective feelings and inclinations behind a veil of objectivity. As Mathew Ingram argues, this is an increasingly untenable stance in the new-media era. [4] The only ethical strategy for journalists now is to be open about their biases and conflicts of interest, and to let readers judge their reliability as reporters for themselves.

Another mode of transparency is operational. Transparency doesn’t stop with individuals. To be seen as reliable, organizations themselves must practice media transparency in many, if not all, aspects of their operations. By showing how their process works—through methods such as sharing internal policy documents with readers, explaining how news subjects are selected and prioritized, or live-streaming editorial meetings—media producers will give their audience reason to trust them.

To work, transparency must be a committed, conscious choice. But it’s something of a Hobson’s choice. In the new-media era, there’s no long-term alternative to transparency.

Process or Product?

The new-media principles of transparency and openness mean that readers can both see and participate in the process of journalism itself. They are no longer handed the finished product in the form of an article and asked to move along. For both reader and writer the change can be liberating, exciting, and rewarding.

The downside, of course, is that the process is messy and prone to mistakes. Behind every fact-checked and edited story is a tale of false leads, dead ends, and empty promises. Letting their audience in on that ugly and wayward process seems unwise to many traditional journalists.

But the benefits of journalism as a process ultimately outweigh the drawbacks. By turning the process itself into the product, formerly behind-the-scenes editorial judgments can be discussed and validated, news and other information can be shared more rapidly, and inevitable errors can be more quickly identified and corrected.

The controversial aspects of putting process ahead of product are obvious even in older types of online media such as blogs. But they are far more dramatic in real-time formats such as live-blogging or Twitter. Traditionalists might contend that such real-time publishing leads to a fragmentary and confusing picture. But to new-media proponents, it is a truer picture than that painted by a traditional journalistic product like the self-contained and superficially coherent news article. Rather than imposing a neat narrative structure on events, real-time journalism acknowledges that the information is as yet fragmentary and its meaning still unresolved.

As Jeff Jarvis puts it, changes in the nature of media create effective new ways to communicate: "No longer do the means of production and distribution of media necessitate boxing the world into neat, squared-off spaces published once a day and well after the fact. Freed of print's strictures, we are finding many new and sometimes better ways to gather and share information." [5]

The process is not pretty. But hiding it benefits no one. Only by sharing the process as widely as possible can we reach the closest approximation of the truth.

Ways to Use This Guide

Now that you've read about the principles that I believe are driving the new-media revolution, it's time to leap into the thick of this guide. Though reading it straight through is one option, it's not the only way. You may want to read the chapters in a different order than I've laid out, for instance, or you might choose to skip some parts entirely. If you're intimately familiar with Twitter, for example, you might want to jump ahead to the section on Facebook or on Tumblr.

Needless to say, due to its brevity and the constantly changing nature of its subject, this guide can only play a small role in your new-media education. To build your mastery in this field, you should look for new-media publications or personalities that you can follow and learn from.

To help you in that search, I've listed helpful sources for further reading at the end of most chapters in this guide and in an appendix at the end of the book.

In addition, between each chapter I've included a short profile of a new-media thought leader I've found helpful. The eight people I've profiled represent a highly personal and somewhat arbitrary selection. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they look rather like me: They are mostly American, mostly 50-ish, all male, all white. In the appendix, I've listed a more diverse group that you may want to look into on your own.

Finally, in keeping with the new-media principles discussed here, you should regard this guide as I do: as a work in progress, not a finished product. I plan to keep updating this guide as the new-media world evolves. You can help by sharing your comments and suggestions with me and other readers at my website, B2BMemes.com.

Conversation Starter: Jeff Jarvis

For writer and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, engagement in new media arose not from theoretical interest but visceral experience. A passenger on the last train into the World Trade Center station on September 11, 2001, he was a first-hand witness to the horror of that day. His blog, BuzzMachine, grew out of his need to write about his experience. The act of blogging, he says, along with learning the "power of the simple link," changed everything about how he viewed media and the world. [6]

His transformative experiences as a blogger led him in 2009 to write his first book, What Would Google Do?, in which he looked at how the digital revolution as embodied by Google could transform all aspects of society and business, not simply the media. His book is among the best available discussions of key new-media concepts, including abundance, collaboration, transparency, and process.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION