While on vacation in Montreal’s Old City last week, I noticed an amazing thing.
A young woman, probably around 30, dressed fashionably, held a selfie stick out from herself and checked her background. At the end of the stick was an iPhone, and on top of it a furry boom microphone. She said a few words, looked behind her again and adjusted the shot, spoke for another minute, then moved on.
She probably produced more content in those few moments than I’ll deliver as I write this. She mouthed her script, she got her shot, and what she did was likely on YouTube or TikTok before sunset. (The Royal Bank offices in Montreal are now a coffee-and-brunch place.)
The point is that most people can adapt to change quite quickly, and young people do it faster. They do it faster because they’re not tied to what came before, so they don’t have to unlearn much.
I’ve prided myself on my ability to keep up since I first started covering this medium, nearly 40 years ago. But I knew this day would come. I’m a writer. I have a face for radio and a voice for print. I prefer to do some research, then write, then edit, then publish. This has been my working mode since college. I can write something good in an hour, but you’re going to have to wait for it.
Suddenly, that mode is obsolete.
The Entrepreneur Edge
Entrepreneurs are not always young, but they always have a young person’s attitude toward change. To succeed they must be all about doing something different, because what exists is always owned by someone else.
Rapid technological change increases this entrepreneur’s edge. The problem occurs when there’s no new business model on the other side of the change. This proved true with open source. It’s certainly true in journalism.
The whole idea of a “newspaper” or a “TV show” is obsolete. Anyone working there is lost in the last century. Anyone chasing the interests of such people is chasing the past.
Many young journalists have accepted a challenge I laid down 30 years ago, when the Web was spun. They’ve become entrepreneurs, adept at finding, and chasing, new business models. Like the woman I saw in Montreal, they create TV content for the cost of blogging. They specialize, becoming the one name to know, often in an obscure niche. Then they work to expand the niche.
Audio podcasts are now all videos (although I still just listen). Meetings are now video calls (although I never turn on the TV camera). The newsletters Cox Enterprises bought as Axios will soon require video adjuncts, and they’ll be slow to it because they’re Cox, not some entrepreneur.
Innovations don’t last. MoneyBall was a big thing 20 years ago. Blogs were a big thing. The idea of the phone as a medium is barely 15 years old. Look how fast the audience has adapted, and those with youthful intelligence have moved on.
A Political Truth
This is already infecting our politics. The strategies of 2016 won’t work in 2024. It’s those who find a better method of digital interaction who will win.
Trump has an infrastructure that can lock people into place. But there are always new people coming along, and they’re never locked into place, until they are. They’re looking for something different. Finding them, capturing them, that’s the challenge both sides face.
That’s also the real story of Harris replacing Biden. It’s less about the candidates than the new team’s ability to adapt to changing technology preferences. And these changing preferences are happening across the electorate. Don’t pretend you haven’t seen Meemaw on the TikTok.
Once consumers start to change, it happens very quickly. Businesses and other institutions struggle to keep up, first condemning it, then adapting to it. By the time they’ve adapted, another change has come.
The pace of this change is happening faster-and-faster.
You ain’t seen nothing yet.
