Last week the Mercury News reported that because of concern that journalismf's economic problems are reducing Americans' understanding of science, medicine and other research, 35 of the nation's top universities announced that they will supply their own news accounts of their discoveries directly to top news sites on the Internet.
The universities have formed their own non-profit wire service called Futurity to provide articles to popular Web sites such as Yahoo News and Google News, along with MySpace and Twitter.
The schools saw the reduction or elimination of science and technology staff at larger organizations like CNN, Mercury News, Boston Globe and others so they realized that the only group that would ensure their work reached the public was them. With that in mind, I think their is another lesson here for both 'for-profit' and 'non-profit' media, information & content providers.
Not everyone cares about everything.
The power and necessity of targeted, niche delivery, or narrowcasting, is not a new one but it is quickly becoming the rule rather than the exception to viable media business models. Futurity came into being because the broadcast based organizations could not find an audience of enough size to support the operations.
That is not surprising.
In our 'pull-based' world, those who are interested in a topic can find it much more efficiently than a non-specialized source can provide it. There is a reason that Triton bought Ando, that Search dominates advertising growth and that Price Waterhouse Cooper projects a 10% shift in spending from non-digital to digital media that can support "more targeted and tailored models that will differ widely within and across segments and geographies.
With the NAB conference in Philadelphia this week, I am excited to catch up with a lot of people and talk about the growth of niche. We, as consumers, are very demanding and increasingly device and platform agnostic as long as we can get to the information or entertainment content that is most important to us.
Broadcasters have a tremendous opportunity to leverage a large audience and break it down by behavior, location and content and eliminate the barriers between platforms to please both the consumers and advertisers.
The New York Times and the universities in Futurity have learned that lesson and are passing it on.
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