David Kluskiewicz

Jason Calacanis posted the full audio of his conversation with “On the Media” host Brook Gladstone. It provided an amazing insight into the inner workings of the media and suggested that people’s intelligence has eclipsed the narrow formats that news has adopted. They’ve outgrown them.

I accept that the radio or the newspaper has space limitations (i.e. as much as advertisers, subscribers or sponsors are willing to pay for) and that editing will be necessary. But what was revealed in this interview was that too many nuances are getting lost. There’s useful detail, passion, insight, etc. in the source - the original conversation. It might be impractical to publish all of this, but when it’s a topic that is important to you, having it available enables much more productive conversations. Active listening instead of passive consumption. Individuals are taking control of their own PR and that’s a good thing.

Organizing all this source data is a huge undertaking, but at least the low cost of storage is helping people get started on archiving their “public” interactions and putting them together as a coherent body of work.

Like the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto argued that people are too smart to mindlessly consume advertising, Calacanis proves that they’re also too smart to mindlessly consume news. Moving away from the “Gotcha” moment is going to infuse new life into the media.

What should the media section of a web site provide? Most are simply a list of press releases. Although every company should have its official releases cataloged for the media and the public, there are many third-party sources that are worth including. Organizations should at least be scanning these sources anyway. Why not organize them and share them with the world?

PR Squared blogger Todd Defren created a solid example of how social media and a few interesting pieces of syndicated information can turn a media page into a rich experience.

With the rise of social media, there are at least a half dozen web sites whose primary purpose is to persistently index pages related to search terms. Want to know what bloggers are saying about your organization or its executives? Set up a search in Technorati. Want to know who’s bookmarking your site’s pages? Set up a del.icio.us search.

There’s also little reason to spend precious time writing executive bios. They probably have a LinkedIn profile, so if they’re current, why not point the media or the public there? It only illustrates more connections.

Defren’s mock up includes all the necessary components to provide information to a site visitor. It won’t work for a lot of companies who want to tightly control their image. But for those whose reputation precedes them (and who aren’t afraid of a little variation in their image) this model press room provides more than enough third party validation and interesting fodder to start a conversation.