New Media Open New Doors for Communicators.

Welcome to the world of the new media, and hold on tight if you're past age 35! There is culture shock no matter how communicators make the shift from traditional workspace to cyberspace.

Sharon WoodsonBryant is a consummate professional communicator.

Although satisfied for the moment with her media relations manager's position with a California-based bank, Bryant answers occasional headhunter calls and takes occasional interviews to keep her options open. This spring she found herself agreeing to an interview with a four-year-old dot-coin retail firm based in a Los Angeles suburb. As a veteran of the pre-Internet, pre-PC communication days-before the '90s in other words -- she decided to take her first plunge into the world of so-called new media, an online environment with which she deals in her banking job.

She has working news media, corporate communication and governmental PR experience, involving the banking, telecommunication, automobile, utility and transportation sectors. Bryant has a resume that most start-ups or agencies would drool over.

What she found was a definite gaping fissure between her more than two decades of communication experience and the chaotic world of Internet start-ups.

"When I first walked in the office, I was struck by how young everyone looked," says Bryant. "They all looked like they were 17 years old, dressed very casually. I could have been at the beach.

"They had little stuffed pets in the entrance; it was a completely open room like a bullpen: no partitions. Three people were seated having a meeting in the open space; the receptionist had a big bowl of candy, and people from time to time would stop by to get their sugar fix."

The human resources vice president with whom she made the appointment turned Bryant over to his assistant -- an HR professional who had just started with the firm that day. Both the VP and his new hire were Disney refugees. The new HR person and Bryant found space in the only conference room in the firm's quarters, but staffers needing a room kept interrupting, thinking they could use the space.

Part of the interview eventually was conducted by the marketing director, who was Bryant's prospective boss. He was older (about 30) and looking for quick, concise answers. Precisely 30 minutes into the interview, the session was concluded.

"The interview began at a very fast pace: 'hello, how are you, what is your media strategy for us?, what web sites do you visit regularly and why?; how would you make us have a higher profile?' It was like a pop quiz. At that point, I realized that (a) this was not something I was prepared for, and (b) the job was not really something I was interested in.

"Overall, I just saw what I felt was a whole different work environment. I wasn't really prepared to see this 'bullpen'.

No phones, no desks. The things that are important to me--that are old school, like consistent, credible information for news media -- they don't care about," she says.

What Does All This Mean to Communicators?

Communication, promotion, writing, reporting and editing skills are essentially transferable to new media, and that may become more apparent as the pipe or conduit-the bandwidth- increases so video conferencing and downloadable products become more easily accessible. The so-called new media are essentially no different from the old media, other than their focus on real-time, online distribution of the content.

"Currently most video clips are watched after the fact because of bandwidth limits," said Mark Reilly, with Issue Dynamics Inc., to a group of communicators gathered at a Ragan Communication strategic media relations conference in Chicago earlier this year. He predicts that the new media will continue to increase as bandwidth increases, which in turn will increase reporters' and organizational communicators' acceptance.

Reilly and many other early online communication pundits find themselves increasingly talking to groups of traditional communicators who are honing their Internet-based skills so they can be more effective internal and external communicators, and so they can develop new efficient ways to communicate with traditional and online news organizations, all of which increasingly rely on e-mail and web-based information resources.

Newstream.com is an Internet-based resource center for journalists; organizational communicators can have access to it for a fee. Journalists need only register to tap into the resources, which have been developed by organizations seeking to tell their stories online as they have traditionally done through Business Wire and other electronic distribution services.

In a sense, Newstream.com provides virtual press kits and press conferences with information and illustrative materials that can be used by print, electronic and web-based media alike. Even though the channel of communication is the Internet, the content providers and users don't have to be "new media."

I am an example myself: a mid '50s-age energy trade writer and opinion columnist in daily newspapers, I registered in a matter of a minute or two. "New Media" would not accurately categorize my work or me. Only a few of the publications for which I write regularly have online editions, but that promises to change.

Nevertheless the swiftness with which the Internet and online journalism have burst onto the scene tends to make the change in external and internal communication disciplines seem more profound than it really is. Pervasive, yes. Pronounced, too, since the web can't be ignored for anyone staging a "media event" or managing a venue that draws heavy media interest.

The premier examples this year are the two major U.S. political parties quadrennial nominating conventions to officially select the Republican (GOP) and Democratic Party (DNC) presidential candidates and their running mates. In 1996, the Internet made scarcely a murmur on the scenes in Chicago and San Diego. Four years later, the talk is about the nation's first "e-conventions."

In Los Angeles, where I am based, the 2000 Democratic National Convention's staff envisioned the most accessible, truly "open political convention ever held, making anachronisms of the traditional smoke-filled rooms and delegate caucuses. It is too recent to put a perspective on it, but the communication people, who prepared for 15,000 credentialed news media (many of whom were electronic technicians) in Los Angeles, expected a greatly increased percentage to be connected to online-based new media.

And the plans for the convention itself were geared toward having gavel-to-gavel proceedings available on a real-time basis via the Internet. Not even the traditional television and major radio networks worldwide would dare think of "gavel-to-gavel" coverage. The Republican National Committee's chairman, Jim Nicholson, said that as part of a web-based streamed video, the GOP pledged to its 20,000 delegates to hold a convention "logistically and technologically worthy of this great new century.

"The First Union Hall (convention center in Philadelphia) was equipped with state-of-the-art facilities that enabled the media to carry the Republican message to millions of potential voters."

In spring and early summer as the plans took shape for the 2000 Democratic convention in the Los Angeles Staples Center, August 14-17, the DNC staffers were split along at least two communication lines -- one, aimed at the plethora of media, many of which had special communication needs, and another focused on the Internet-based platform for the convention operations to open them up to outsiders, as has never happened in the party's or nation's political history.

"Whether it's new or traditional media, the issues are the same, and a lot of them are the Democratic Party's issues," says Luis Vizcaino, press secretary for the LA convention. "We used both the traditional and the new media to make sure the issues of health care and education were delivered to the various communities. Even though we used high-tech as a channel, it was still a grass roots communication effort on behalf of the DNC." (In fact, one of the early online media to get its press credentials was Grassroots.com.)

For communicators and communication planners for something as big and unwieldy as the 2000 political party conventions, the so-called newsgathering media defy easy categorization or definition. Thus, of the four Congressional Press Gallery groupings, "radio-TV" may prove to be the most fluid, since you have online information services, such as America Online, Inc. (AOL), that have video and audio elements to them through streaming news events and information. In Los Angeles, Vizcaino admits that the political party's convention press staff had to become somewhat like the census takers. Is an AOL "primarily" a newsgathering organization? (Hardly.) There was little or no ambivalence among the GOP convention folks, however, as a 30-minute one-on-one video interview with George W. Bush by a Yahoo! reporter was featured on its web site after Memorial Day weekend.

Nevertheless, some of the earliest credentials supplied to prospective Los Angeles convention media went to AOL, CNSNews.com, along with pseudopolitics.com, etc. Trying to determine which of the more than 6,000 information-disseminating web sites were legitimate newsgathering organizations was a time-consuming exercise for everyone concerned.

Before the August political convention, a Los Angeles communicators' evening meeting in a Marina del Rey hotel drew more than 400 participants to hear a panel of online media and high-tech reporters talk about how they cover news of the dot-com world. To no one's surprise, they all prefer e-mail to faxes, phone calls or mailed news releases, and they also indicated that some of the new media outlets themselves have become "hot" dot-com businesses, such as RedHerring.com, which in a little more than six years of chronicling the successes and failures of Silicon Valley now produces a 600-page monthly magazine that is going to begin publishing twice a month with a 230,000 circulation plus online publications that gain more than 1 million unique visits monthly, a level of web activity that only about four of the traditional media giants' online editions have been able to achieve. (USA Today's web site recorded 2.8 million unique visits last October, for example.)

During the relatively short panel remarks and ensuing Q&A, the moderator--a PR agency professional with a growing list of e-commerce clients--asked how many in the audience worked in communication agencies. More than half of the people in the room raised their hands. Next, he asked how many people worked full-time as in-house communicators for a dot-com company. No more than a half-dozen people raised their hands. The next largest grouping was people working for "high-tech" companies.

A traditional communicator who had been a successful wire service reporter and later a utility communication executive cornered me after the program and immediately began lamenting the big shortage of quality, experienced communicators to join his medium-size Century City PR firm in Los Angeles. That has become a familiar lament in the year 2000--not only among the communication agencies, but also among the dot-coms.

Whether the media outlets are traditional or online, the sheer volume of material being pumped their way via email, faxes, "snail mail" and overnight delivery makes the competition for attention that much tougher--even though overall the Internet is greatly expanding the bandwidth for information. For example, network TV coverage may nor garner high ratings when a program is broadcast, but there is little accurate measurement of how much "follow-up" impact it has in having edited video streamed across hundreds of online media web sites.

In general, online media view the dot-com industry as doing a good job of promoting themselves. As one online veteran editor put it: "They are doing a good job because the dot-coms are what is on the front pages of just about every publication in the world these days."

The distinction between traditional news media and online publishers is being felt in the traditional publishing world, as evidenced by a financial analysis in the May 2000 issue of CFO Magazine examining the Chicago Tribune Co.'s purchase of Los Angeles-based Times Mirror Corp. Even in an $8 billion coupling of publishing giants, the real growth potential is found in merging their Internet publishing properties.

"Snaring a few points of newspaper or local-TV market share creates no excitement in this world of new media," writes CFO's New York bureau chief, S. L. Mintz. "Exploding revenues nationwide, or at least expectations of an explosion--now that's the growth to be coveted in the Internet Age." Mintz went on to note that the Tribune Co. has a long history in "spotting what's next in the media--and investing there," going back to the early days of television when it bought a local Chicago station, WON (standing for "World's Greatest Newspaper").

Eventually, the distinctions between the old and new media will become less apparent and less relevant. For the content providers, professional communicators, the job is basically the same: find the important kernels of information/news, present it in an understandable and entertaining way and then get into as many communication pipelines as possible. Perhaps there is more reason to think from a multimedia perspective, but clear, concise information delivered in as much of a real-time context as possible is what the public and its leaders have come to expect. The "who, what and why" of communication remain unchanged. It is the how-the means of connecting with people-that is continually changing.

Unless they are a dot-com firm engaged in e-commerce exclusively, organizations and organizational communicators still do not think of offline and online communication as part of one overall media strategy and function. Those who did not "grow up" professionally with the Internet tend to think of the two as separate, but complementary. Techies tend to ignore some of the rules and protocols of the old media.

Trying to balance these differences and facilitate this transition are the usual array of development workshops ranging from IABC to Ragan Communication to PRSA offerings. Ragan's workshop, for example, carries programs on "courting journalists in cyberspace" and guarding against "Internet brand assassins" mixed with traditional public relations management, writing and measurement modules. Two separate modules promise to examine "the state of journalism" overall in the midst of the shift in focus to the new media.

What this all underscores is that old and new media eventually will converge. It is already happening in places like this year's political campaigns and in the wave of entertainment and education applications of the web. The merger is inevitable. But will it be a smooth and productive one?

Richard Nemec is a Los Angeles writer and communication consultant.