Content Is King...Right?

In the Bulldog Reporter a few days ago, Alice Marshall, the founder of Presto Vivace, Inc., argues that content is not king - and she says PR practitioners (in particular) should be praying for a successful new business model. As she says, "Very few gold prospectors made money in the gold rush of 1849; the people who got rich were those who sold Levi's, buckets, shovels and related equipment."

While I think there's some validity to her argument - in particular, as she says, I agree that quality journalism takes money, and that good journalism plays a vital role in our free information flow within our society - I have to respectfully disagree with some of her conclusions.

I would argue that content, as opposed to "technology," remains king. Very few people visit information websites solely because they have the latest technology. They visit the site because it uses that new technology to present content.

More than a decade ago, when my boss was convincing our employer, a major TV network, to get active on the Internet, they asked her for a 10-year business plan, as in, "what will the Internet business be like in ten years". She replied, quite sensibly, "Look. I have no idea what kind of technology will be around ten years from now. What I do know is, whatever the technology may be, there will be a need for content to be distributed by that technology - and we're in the content business."

Whether we are talking about professionally produced content or user-generated content, that hasn't changed, even if the underlying technology has changed rapidly and drastically. I think the content companies which have survived and will survive in the future are those which are able to take the new technologies, whether "web 2.0," mobile, or whatever may come down the pike tomorrow, and use them intelligently and creatively to push their content out.