Everyone knows the media is changing. It’s been changing since the 1990s, with the birth of the internet, and it continues to change with the inevitable death of newspapers and magazines.
In the next couple of weeks, by mid-June, some of our friends at Fairfax Media – and we all have a friend or two there, or we should have – will be made ‘redundant’. Some of them will have volunteered and, unfortunately, some of them will have been forced to leave.
When I left Fairfax a million years ago – it was actually in 1983 – there were about 900 journalists across the main titles of the SMH, The Age, the Australian Financial Review (where I last worked) and the Sun-Herald and Sunday Age. Now, the pundits say (Fairfax won’t reveal the true numbers) there are about 350. This is set to become 235.
It’s an interesting word ‘redundant’. I would have hoped, in our evolving world, that someone who provides information which may be: hard to get elsewhere; someone who may comment on that information or provide expert commentary from elsewhere; someone who seeks to entertain his or her audience with a well-turned phrase or interesting fact, could ever be made ‘redundant’. That is not the case.
With that as a backdrop, as dramatic and depressing as it sounds, allow me to introduce you to Shed Connect.
Shed Connect is the new name for what was known as Shed Media. Shed Media was a traditional PR company. Shed Connect, on the other hand, is a PR company which embraces the benefits of the media revolution and attempts to turn those benefits into actual sales for our clients. We are, if you like, working both sides of the street.
In the new world people do not know where they read what they read. Think about your own reading behaviour. Did you hear about whatever you heard about on Facebook, You Tube or was it in an actual newspaper? You don’t know and you don’t care.
Because we have our own titles – Investor Strategy News for institutional, New Investor for wholesale (advisers) and The Rub for retail (SMSF trustees) – we know who reads what. Those three titles have a combined readership of about 75,000 and growing fast.
As well, we connect with our thousands of social media contacts, mainly via Linkedin but also Twitter and through other platforms.
So, in that topsy-turvy world in which us media folk now live, it is hard to define what is ‘media’. It seems to us that what we need to be doing for our clients is ‘connecting’ through any means that we can.
Hence: Shed Connect.
Greg Bright, Managing Director and Publisher.
