Industry News
SELECTED ITEMS OF INTEREST TO THE MEDIA COMMUNITY
Podcasting may be newish, but women’s leadership role is the same-old same-old
USC Annenberg's recently published study from its Inclusive Initiative calculates the gender and race/ethnicity of hosts and guests of popular podcasts – adding to its previous work across most entertainment platforms. 36% of hosts of top 100 podcasts were women and just 27% of the shows' guests were women
- Within podcasts, only 8% of business/tech podcasts were lead by women hosts
- For all platforms studied, males outnumber females, but podcasts and music have the lowest % women
- Under represented/minority hosts were only 23% of top 100 podcasts
To read the full report go here.
#managementconsulting #USCAnnenberg #inclusive management
AI personalization is coming (quickly) to a news source near you
Reuters' Institute annual deep dive global survey into news has once again explored the “personalization” desire of the public.
- They report that in the past, personalization didn't take off “partly because audiences worry about missing out on important stories, but also because they sometimes appreciate seeing things outside of their main interests.”
- In this year's work, they gathered opinions about AI personalization and compared general opinion to media leaders. “Article summarization” is of the most interest to the public and to executives.
- But the gap between the industry vs. the hoi polloi for this and all other AI tools is enormous: 70% of the leaders are planning to make it available, even though only 27% of the public is interested.
To read the full report go here.
#managementconsulting #AIpersonalization #strategy
“Two distinct media ecosystems” is the consequence of fundamental rewiring of video production, distribution and consumption
Alan Wolk, founder of TVRev -- the business-to-business media property on all things video – highlighted some of what he learned at the TVRev conference examining the “fundamental rewiring” of content production, distribution and consumption.
The big, holistic idea: There are “two distinct media ecosystems…It's about two completely different concepts of what media should be. One side values the craft of storytelling, the other values the efficiency of algorithms. One seeks emotional resonance, the other seeks instant gratification."
Two tactics consistent with the theory:
- Linear programmers must consider TikTok style algorithms for their linear feeds: younger consumers, brought up on algorithms, seem to want the machine to make their decisions for them
- Charles Dickens lives! The content and the business model of the 2025 app ReelShort --fictionalized dramas sold chapter by chapter – should be no surprise, since Dickens' Pickwick Papers in1836 was also the right content distributed in exactly the right (addictive) way
#managementconsulting #mediastrategy #streaming
