Content will be more important than its container

I can’t claim credit for what I think is a fairly lucid, if not brilliant, corollary of “content is king.” Thanks to Jay Rosen, author of the pressthink blog. Rosen is a journalism professor at NYU and I’m indebted to Kari Chisholm for alerting me to his blog.

Rosen’s thesis is that we’re evolving to the point where what is important is the content. Not the form-the containerthe medium-in which it happens to be encapsulated at the moment.

Once people understand that the web is the centerpiece of communications, we’ll see content moving from web to print instead of the other way around. We won’t have editors “publishing” alumni magazines online as PDFs—their print versions will echo, and expand, on content published online and will link to expanded photo, interview, and expository gallerys on the web. Admissions content from the web will be repurposed, and reprinted, on paper, with glorious photos that evoke the spirit of the campus.

Why aren’t we doing these things now? Like newspaper reporters, we’re mired in the old paradigms, the old media, clinging to forms instead of recognizing that the link between the old and the new is the content, and we need to rethink how it is packaged so that we can reach our intended audiences most effectively.

So: is the alumni magazine dead? I say no. Should we sound the death knell of the viewbook? Not yet. But if we aren’t reshaping these communications in response to the primacy of the Internet, we’re being stupid and arrogant.