By Henry BellowsIf there is one thing about mass media today that everyone agrees on it is the fact that it’s changing. And changing quickly.
“It is the wild, wild west of the information age,” according to Dick Robertson, a 1967 VCU graduate who is now a senior adviser to Warner Brothers Television and chair of the School’s Advisory Board. Robertson held up his I Phone to demonstrate his point.
“There is no better time to go into this business,” he said. “The access is no longer controlled. The Internet has liberated it. It has leveled the playing field and you are now empowered,” Robertson told an audience of students and faculty.
Robertson and other members of the School’s Advisory Board participated in a panel discussion on future of content delivery systems – particularly cell phones.
From one end of the table to the other, each member talked about how cell phone technology is evolving. To start the discussion, moderator Prof. Marcus Messner, gave research results from a large class this semester that showed 99 percent of students have cell phones, while only 77 percent have a television and only seven percent read a newspaper daily.
Harnessing potential revenue from selling information through the hand-held device is something Reid Ashe is interested in as chief operating officer of Media General. “Location-specific information seems to be a potential revenue source,” Ashe said. He talked about serving real estate or restaurant customers with “short code” technology which could provide cell phone users with individual data about a house or which restaurants have no waiting.
Frank Batten, Jr., chair and CEO of Landmark Communications, Inc. said at the moment the cell phone is a “walled garden” controlled by the carriers, but that control is changing rapidly as more companies use the technology to provide Web access.
