Somebody has decided that we need to stop referring to media forms as radio, television and newspapers. They are now audio, video and text. I feel like I did when my daughter informed me that “cool” wasn’t “cool” anymore and that the proper term was “fly.” Fly?

Joe Mandese at Media Daily News writes today that one media shop is now officially calling radio “audio.”

MediaVest has adopted the position that terrestrial broadcast radio should no longer be looked at as a discrete medium in communications plans, but as part of a greater array of audio media–including satellite, online, mobile and a variety of personal media device technologies, such as iPods, other MP3 players, and even television, which increasingly is being used as an audio-only medium.

But there’s more. Joe goes on to tell us about a growing industry shift away from defining media based on their distribution platforms and toward understanding how consumers interact with the essential nature of their content and formats.

That argument is at the heart of “StrADegy: Advertising In The Digital Age,” authored by TNS Media Intelligence President-CEO Steven Fredericks. In it, he argues that in the future, “Content is defined not by its old media name, but by its core property: text, video and audio. All content, clarified and freed, can be distributed via any converged technology.”

The web is what’s doing this, folks, and this notion ought to send a collective chill down the spine of anybody in an incumbent media business. Video bloggers, for example, don’t do “television,” but they sure as heck do “video.” Same “nature of content.” Same level in the this new-speak language.

This doesn’t change the professional/amateur distinction, but it further blurs the line. Yikes!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Media 2.0, Disruptions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.