"Old" Media to "New" or "New to Old"? Yahoo hires Katie, while E! hires Grace

Grace Helbig - youtube vlogger goes to E!

Katie Couric - mainstream anchor yodels

A recent article on Wired highlighted the amazing amount of investment going into news based start ups, such as buzzfeed and vice (coincidentally the writer Mat Honan then left Wired for buzz feed!). While, at the same time, countless articles have been written about the fate of newspaper journalism, as revenues reduce and costs are cut. More recently, TV budgets themselves seem finally to be showing some sign of shifting to digital although it seems more anecdotal than hard fact so far.
As an optimist I am hopeful that great journalism will find a way to prosper in the more complex and creative mediums of today's social, mobile and connected world. But I can only think there will be more carnage on the way, best shown through the creative talent which will have to make career moves too late, too early or just right.
So, perhaps a tried and tested anchor like Katie Couric can find a platform on Yahoo. And/or perhaps youtube vloggers can broaden their reach onto TV, while maintaining the social connections that the digital platform gave them. I think I would bet on the digital natives having more success eventually, when they work out how to ally with and exploit the best that the old school created and developed.
They will also need to learn about the realities of business - the going concern. Articles in Digiday point out the seriousness of running a news organization's talent and revenue generation capabilities. Listicles can create many clicks, but the consumer of that information is in a playful mood and not very willing to pay for it.
I do believe (and hope) consumers are willing to pay for quality, differentiated from their own echo chamber.


Inside the Buzz-Fueled Media Startups Battling for Your Attention | WIRED: We don’t learn about the world from The New York Times, we learn about it from the Times stories that our family and friends share or that show up as push notifications four minutes before one from The Guardian does. Thirty percent of American adults get news from Facebook, according to the Pew Research Center, and more than half of Americans got news from a smartphone within the past week, according to the American Press Institute. And these metrics are just going up, up, up. The question for news publishers is no longer how to draw an audience to their sites, it’s how to implant themselves into their audience’s lives.

Wired’s Mat Honan Hired to Run New BuzzFeed Silicon Valley Bureau | Re/code: Mat Honan, the high-profile Wired writer and editor, has been hired by BuzzFeed to become its new Silicon Valley bureau chief.

Katie Couric: "I'm In This Giant Petri Dish Where Anything Is Possible" | Fast Company | Business Innovation: The ultimate irony in the information age is that people feel woefully uneducated about issues and topics. So, how do you make information memorable, so they have basic knowledge when they hear a story or a development?

With New Show, Grace Helbig, E! Out To Prove That YouTube Stars Can Also Be Big On TV | Fast Company | Business Innovation: The fact that YouTube star Grace Helbig has officially crossed over into traditional media by way of a comedy talk show that will begin airing on E! this April is yet more validation that YouTube is grooming our future stars and has transformed into a legitimate media machine. (As we reported last fall.) And it’s more validation that all those YouTube views actually mean something. Helbig’s YouTube channel, It’s Grace, where the fresh-faced millennial riffs on the banalities and conundrums of being a fresh-faced millennial, has over 2 million subscribers.

Who exactly is PewDiePie? YouTube's most famous vlogger - Gaming Feature - Digital Spy: If you took a handful of your favorite YouTube personalities, combined their number of subscribers and added 10 million, chances are PewDiePie would still blow them out of the water. He may not have a platinum record, but on YouTube he's more popular than Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Katy Perry and One Direction, not to mention fellow vloggers such as Zoella and Ali A.

Palatinate Online Rise of the vloggers: You may or may not have noticed but style vloggers have caused quite the stir recently, especially given darling-of-the-moment, Zoe Sugg’s, recent Vogue editorial.

Fine Brothers Go From YouTube's A-List to Hollywood's B-List - Businessweek (12/15/14): The line between Internet famous and plain old famous has blurred beyond recognition this year, with Nickelodeon becoming the latest old-media stalwart to snap up new-media talent.

5 things we learned about starting a new media company (Digiday): 5 things we learned about building a new media company

Journalists can be hard to manage …
Exhibit A: First Look Media. "made some high-profile hires...but they left after a few months, and First Look’s launch publication The Intercept published an unusual tell-all about conflict between the company’s rigid Silicon Valley management and the anti-authoritarian values of its journalists."

Coming in 2015: reality check for VC-engorged digital media - Digiday: In my opinion, the major narrative in 2015 will be revenue. Everything else will be a function of how publishers thrive or struggle to monetize. It will create the sort of shakeout that did not take place in 2014 — a year defined by huge audience growth and some of the greenest shoots that journalism has seen in a long time.