The final talk of the first day of conference sessions was held in the Atlas Center at the University of Colorado. The panel was moderated by Mike Edelhart, CEO of LiveDeal and consisted of Laura Kornish, an assistant professor of Marketing at the university; Dr J. Richard Stevens, assistant professor of Journalism and Mass Media at CU; Daliah Singer, a soon-to-be graduate of Denver University and editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, The Clarion; and Lynn Schofield Clark, an associate professor and Director of the Estow Center of Journalism and New Media at DU.
Lynn Schofield Clark began the talk with an overview of her findings in a recent study researching how families incorporate digital media into their lives. She stated that 89% of families with children under 18 had more than one cell phone. She went on to explain how this rise in the use of technology was not limited to cell phone use, but that social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn were also becoming more widely used and were attracting more cross-generational interest than ever before. Surprisingly, her findings suggested that television viewing had declined, whilst the use of these other forms of media and communication were on the rise. In particular, her findings suggested that moms that have moments of free time will productively utilize these new technologies to correspond with friends and share information and content that they consider entertaining and/or pertinent. She was, therefore, optimistic that magazines could benefit from the increased use of technology to spread their content over text, Facebook or email with little or no cost to themselves. Overall, she believed that this was a great opportunity for magazine publishers to reach a larger audience, and echoed the previous talks of the day by emphasizing the need for magazines to embrace new technologies.
The talk progressed with the examination of the needs of different generations, specifically of Baby Boomers and Millenials. Daliah Singer gave us an insight into the relationship between youth and new media where she explained the desire of youths to have instant access to short, informative snippets of news and entertainment that would give them a general overview of a subject rather than an in-depth examination. Dr Stevens added that whilst Boomers considered sports and entertainment a distraction from work, Millenials wanted to see the two integrated rather than mutually exclusive. He also suggested that Millenials see media as an opportunity to produce as well as consume and that allowing interaction and the sharing of ideas was key to infiltrating this market.
Laura Kornish concluded the talks in expressing her view that magazines were the original mobile content, but added that we were about to see a boom in the production and adoption of new electronic reading devices, such as The Kindle. Her tone and line of argument was similar to the other speakers, stressing that the integration of new technology is of paramount importance, but without suggestion that print is, or soon will be, obsolete.
The talk was generally uplifting. The speakers explained that although the use of new media is being increasingly adopted by all generations, they were convinced that magazines could create their own unique space in this market through adaptation and innovation.
Speakers: right to left, Mike Edelhart, Lynn Schofield Clark, Daliah Singer, Dr J. Richard Stevens, Laura Kornish.
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