What Exactly Is The Media Anymore?

In a battle to call out some services and outlets as the media and others as "fake news," are we missing the point as to who and what persuasion and influence is in the 21st Century networked age?

If you happen to listen to political talk radio, there seems to always be this constant phrase used by all of the hosts when editorializing their point of view.

"The media is saying..."

Even if these on-air personalities are speaking behind the power of a 50,000 watt transmitter owned by an AM or FM radio station that's owned by a radio conglomerate and syndicated nationally over the air or online to millions of people, they always go out of their way to make it known that they are not the media. It appears that label is only to be utilized for a few institutions that fit into a certain bucket of news reporting activity, have legacy names that have become institutionalized over time or report on things from a lens that differs from their own.

This makes me ask the question I've been asking the last decade as power spreads to websites found through search engines or news that is delivered to you via news feeds on platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter based on you liking, following or engaging with those said publishers.

Who and what exactly is the media anymore? Is the tag only to be used for legacy institutions like NPR, NBC, CNN, ABC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and a handful of outlets? What about newer outlets like Mic, Vox, Vice, Breitbart, InfoWars or BuzzFeed? Shouldn't these be under this media umbrella now too?

To these "I am not the media" radio talk show hosts, they don't think they are part of the media. They see themselves as anti-establishment even if a big media corporation sells ad time for their broadcasts.

But how if we threw out all the old labels we have used in the past and started to measure people, institutions, outlets, programs and content all equally? How if we measured it based on persuasion and influence? How if we got rid of names of the institutions and started to use the names of the people creating the news, reporting the news or analyzing the news? What we would find is interesting. Names who tout that they aren't part of "the media" would find they are more influential than some of the legacy institutions they detest. We would even find small names having major influence based on the insights that people spend a lot of time watching their videos (not total video views but average view time per video). We may also find much of the content created by these "I'm not the media" types being shared a ton and giving them even greater reach, engagement, impressions and ultimately persuasion and influence.

In the battle to divide simplistically that there is "the media" and there is "everyone else," what is missing here is who actually holds influence? Is it still the institutions? Is it the journalists and reporters? Is it celebrities? Is it influencers? Or is it a combination hybrid of all of these that didn't exist 20 years ago because social networks as we know them now and the web as we know it now didn't operate and breathe in the manner in which it does today?

While I don't have a definitive answer to this, news publishers, radio, TV, websites, people, brands, celebrities, influencers, content creators or whatever silly title of the moment you would like to use are all behaving like each other and mimicking how they present themselves, how they analyze the world and how they influence it.

If anything, the question isn't who is the media and who isn't, but who is part of the conjoint effect? The conjoint effect is caused by all of this proximity to each other on the web and in the real world across various industries and movements that intersect giving individuals more power within specific spheres of influence almost to the point where we can filter our own realities.

In the brand world we have seen this splinter and fracture into various fragments rapidly over the past ten years. While media buying was important for all brands and their go to market strategy, the bigger question became, "Do any of those outlets really hold persuasion and influence power?" Many brand managers saw this world fading because ad viewing habits gave way to content sharing habits. Even some brands would cut their media spend and witness no difference in customer loyalty.

So brands exploited the conjoint matrix where real people could talk about things on a micro influential level with audiences. This was a world made up of creators who also were consumers, writers, musicians, poets, DJs, broadcasters, developers, analysts, subject matter experts, chefs, philosophers, political pundits, etc.

This is a difficult to define world and thus led to a huge dichotomy where the media mutated into this new conjoined hybrid similar to what is occurring in other industries. Those that didn't see themselves as the media and were quick to point this out, were also sly to point out how many followers they had or how they had gone about influencing people to take actions due to the network effect they had built.

So, what exactly is the media anymore?

Maybe it is all of us.

Geoffrey Colon is author of the book Disruptive Marketing, host of the podcast Disruptive FM and creator of the LinkedIn video series Culture Jamming. He is a senior marketing communications designer at Microsoft, advisor to several side quirks and a proud Ogilvy & Mather and 360i alum. He's working on his second book due out in 2018.