A roundup of media predictions for 2010

Besides offering my own 2010 predictions and revisiting my 2009 predictions to see how I scored, I've gathered (as I did last year) a set of media predictions for 2010 from bloggers and others. Here's what came up in their crystal balls:

From Folio, a set of 115 mostly magazine-related predictions gathered from magazine and ad agency pundits.  A prevailing theme there is that 2010 will be the year of the tablet.

Social media guru Chris Brogan says, "2010 will see consolidations and foldups."

Newser's Michael Wolff says, "Newsweek dies." (He doesn't say precisely when, or whether it's in 2010. But it dies.)

Millenial Media (a mobile advertising network) says 2010 will not be the "Year of Mobile," because that was 2009. They've got 10 predictions for mobile's development in 2010, and (you have to download the PDF linked to at the MMAGlobal link to see this) a very interesting bonus prediction: "There will be content categories, particularly news, weather, travel and real estate only accessed via a mobile device. The advertiser imperative: understand the shifts in content consumption of your consumers."  Surely that shift won't be completed in 2010, but it's one that journalists and publishers should take very seriously.

Emarketer's Geoff Ramsey limits himself to seven predictions.  Read all of them, particularly the seventh:  

The classic interruption/disruption model of advertising, whereby marketers insert unwanted, usually irrelevant ads as a price the consumer must pay to view desired content, will erode, if not fade away. Consumers in the digital age simply have too much control over their media environments these days for marketers to be pushing unwanted banners, buttons or videos. This raises the bar for marketers and their agencies to develop new forms of messages that are not even perceived as ads, but rather as welcome content.

Julia Boorstin at CNBC says control over distribution will shift to consumers, the dominance of social media will continue to grow, and the proliferation of content will force more changes on media giants.

Pat Kitano of Mediatransparent has the right take on local, I think, suggesting that:

Portals believe they can scale and develop the website traffic required to support a local advertisement model. However, communities may develop their own home grown commercial systems for the same reasons why “buy local” is becoming a mantra; and the portals aren’t entitling ownership of their local media systems to the community. For that reason, a community may rather spend its local advertising dollars with an on-the-ground local publisher like Minnpost or OaklandLocal, or even a Chamber of Commerce sponsored local media resource than CNN Local.

She has lots of other good food for thought including:

The stream is more important than website.  Anybody immersed in the social media already knows this. The content stream constitutes a conversation, and can be perceived as far more “real” than a calculated marketing-focused website presentation. The same new paradigm that makes an advertisement seem  promotional applies to websites. Yes, conversations can happen on websites but there are likely many more occurring on Twitter, Yelp, Facebook and other blogs that are deemed more credible because they are third party commentary.

Gordon Plutsky's King Fish Media Think Tank predicts 2010 and reviews 2009 prognostications.


Cory Casciato of Denver Westword has Five Fearless Tech Predictions including "the final death of the paywall... it will hasten the death of any organization that fully commits to it (note to Rupert Murdoch: I encourage you to follow through on your plans to go this route -- pretty please?) and hurt those that experiment with it by bleeding off market share they will take years to recover."

London journalist Adam Westbrook offers his outlook for 2010 in video form: including "lots of new news startups ... lots of journalist moving into NGO territory ... more journalists moving into the field of training ... the year of the hyperlocal ... paywalls in action ... demand for really high quality content will push consumers to want to pay ... journalism in real time ... the battle of the smartphones continues ... augmented reality ... and the watchword for 2010 is innovation."

Min's Media agrees that advertising won't rebound, mobile will be big, and paid content won't fly. They also provide a nice video with insights from Mark Cuban and others.

Addendum Dec. 29: I had bookmarked, but neglected to include Adam Lavrusik's roundup at Mashable, entitled "10 News Media Content Trends to Watch in 2010."

Addendum Dec. 29: Steve Outing's final column at E&P includes a 20/20 hindsight vision of what the 90s and 00s could/should have been like for newspaper publishers, plus a look ahead at 2010 and beyond.

Addendum, Dec. 30: Random Mumbler Jack Lail has rounded up his own favorite media predictions.

Addendum, Dec. 31: Alan Mutter, the Newsosaur, has posted his "un-predictions" for 2010.

Please send me any other published prognostications I've missed.  Interestingly, I checked on most of the bloggers I included in my roundup last year and found nobody sticking their neck out again (perhaps because last year David Cohn put them up to it as his turn hosting the Carnival of Journalism, but that collaboration seems to have gone into remission, or intermission, or something).