NBC Getting Radical in Face of Dramatic Changes in Media Landscape

The Washington Post had an extraordinary front page article today that explained the context of NBC’s announcement yesterday that it would shed jobs and slash its budget on a path toward creating NBC 2.0.

Finally the mainstream media is writing the contextual story for what it is: a historical transformation of all media sectors towards a 21st century media rooted on the internet and in digital technologies. This media transformation has a direct impact on politics because every time you change how to reach audiences and consumers, you change how to reach constituencies and voters too.

We at the New Politics institute have been hammering on this theme for the last year, mostly notably in our 2005 report on The New Powers That Be. This report lays out the five tectonic shifts that are driving the transformation of the entire media landscape, and makes the analogy to the impact of broadcast television on politics in the 1960s. We also have been making this argument in our talks, such as The New Politics Begins.

All three avenues will give you an overview of the level of change that we’re moving through right now. It doesn’t get much more fundamental than this.

Peter Leyden
Director of The New Politics Institute