Media's Future, According to Millennials

I'm constantly challenged in my "old" thinking by my own Millennials (5 of them, including 3 still at home). They know about new songs but don't listen to radio. They know about TV programs but don't watch TV. They know about the latest terrorist attacks or whether it'll snow tomorrow.

But all they every look at is their smartphones. Which leads me to wonder: Are Millennials really shaping our media future, or just ruining it?

To understand the future of media, talk to Merrill Brown. He witnesses it up close every week, observing the Millennials who will actually mold and control it.

But brace yourself, because the future ain’t what it used to be.

One big revelation: Snapchat might be a bigger part of the media future than we think.

Yes, Snapchat. “It’s incredibly important” to those who will create our media future, according to Merrill. (I asked my 14-year-old daughter to explain this to me, and got this explanation).

Merrill frequently sits with a classroom of those people. He helps prep them for jobs at newspaper companies, TV and radio stations, and elsewhere in the news, information and entertainment businesses. What he’s learning is both enlightening and challenging. He sees Millennials forging an environment where old delivery mechanisms vanish and new ones emerge, requiring entirely new training, products and business models to support them.

Printed newspapers? Toast. Traditional broadcast TV? Same. Big-bundle cable packages? Gone.

The medium of choice? Anything mobile, especially smartphones.

Merrill is director of the school of communication & media at Montclair State University, just across the Hudson from New York City. I’m so impressed by the work being done at Montclair on sustainable business models for news media that I’ve asked him to bring a five of his brightest students to the 2017 Local Online Advertising Conference in New York on March 7. (See the agenda here.)

If what Merrill’s Millennials think is anything like what we learned from a similar panel we had three years ago, we’re in for a shock. That panel yielded two of the most enlightening comments about media that I’ve ever heard. The first comment came from a 20-something panelist who had doodled a picture of how he saw the future of media. It had an Xbox at the center (as an access mechanism), with “movies,” “radio,” “TV,” “Internet,” and “videos” emanating from it. (See picture above this column.) The second student, when asked whether she watched television, blurted, “I don’t watch TV. TV has commercials, and commercials are annoying.”

Gulp.

Yet, according to Merrill, it appears that while Millennials are rarely watching a television set, they ARE watching TV programming. “They really do like the traditional video formats,” he told me in a recent phone interview. “To them, the half-hour sitcom or hourlong drama is still relevant. The students gravitate to that when I ask them about favorite shows. The difference is that they’re watching on YouTube or Spotify or Amazon Prime. The basic concept of TV programming as it was invented 50 years ago is incredibly viable today. All of them have favorite conventional TV shows.”

The same phenomenon is basically true of newspapers. “There’s no support whatsoever among these students for the printed newspaper,” Merrill said. “None. The paper thing is no longer viable.” But they will indeed buy subscriptions to an information source that isn’t in print form, he said. “I have no problem saying these kids will buy digital subscriptions to The New York Times, The Washington Post or other valuable sources of information at the same rate their predecessors did.”

Many of his past students have already matriculated into media companies. They feel appreciated at those companies, Merrill told me, but they also feel a bit challenged by existing delivery mechanisms and supporting cost structures.

“I think they want to believe in the historic value of news and media, but see it as a big challenge.” he said. “I think they’re going to demand a level of customization that’s different than we might think.….  The new way is through social media – customization by following certain people or following certain topics.”

I’m looking forward to hearing more from this panel. Having five Millennials of my own, I can tell you they sure have wildly different expectations when it comes to accessing today’s news and information.

For more information on the conference, visit www.borrellassociates.com/loac2017.