An occasional blog by AllAfrica's chief content and strategy officer
The third Monaco Media Forum is underway – a gathering of innovators doing novel, trend-setting digital media, sprinkled with Internet late-adopters aspiring to high-profile transitions from "old" media. Veteran print editor Tina Brown, whose DailyBeast, backed by Barry Diller, attracted 2.3 million unique users its first month, kicked off last night's program with a conversation about being the "new kid on the block." She described her venture as "curated" content, typified by the "interpretive scoop" and by "anti-received opinion". Marketwatch founder Larry Kramer, now of Polaris Ventures, presided, and early new-media analyst and entrepreneur Esther Dyson, chair of EDVenture, asked her usual pertinent questions from the front row.
A few short hours later, at this morning's formal opening, His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco called the principality "unabashedly global and international in outlook". Hosting the forum is part of that orientation.
A "State of the Mediasphere" keynote by Jeffrey Cole of the University of Southern California's Center for the Digital Future said research confirms that the era of paid content is decisively over. Pointing out that the New York Times has finally ended its highly marketed "Times Select" that provided specialized content to subscribers, he argued that content media will become advertiser supported and digital or die. "People will watch television on small screens in their pocket."
Half a dozen fast-paced presentations of new initiatives pushed those points further; no one envisions users paying for content. The most-articulated tension was between "everything-I-need-in-one-place" aggregation and a distributed social web of user-contributed and user-curated content. As someone remarked, "What if I don't share Tina Brown's sensibility?" Community-mediated alternatives were typified by Jason Greenberg's presentation of SocialMedium. I signed up on my laptop while he talked.
Three panels completing the morning session were as diverse as Ben Silverman, Vice Chair, NBC Television and Mark Thompson, Director-General, BBC talking to Michael Wolff (whose book Burn Rate was a cautionary tale as AllAfrica plunged into the digital future as one of the earliest news sites) and explorations of distributed media and open mobile environments, featuring sites like Blinkx, Vringo and OpenX. All this before lunch!
Speaking of diverse, conference attendees are, like the industry, mostly male and mostly white – not AllAfrica's habitual environment. So what are we doing here? And why talk about it on allAfrica.com?
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The answer is that it's useful. We were pioneers in technology systems development and aim to keep innovating. Poverty – and the impeccable timing of launching an Africa news site as the first Internet bubble burst – forced us to build an enterprise-level backend for ourselves, rather than commission one. That asset yielded an early revenue stream through commercial contracts. Our team built the technology platforms that enabled the Democratic National Committee to enter the Web 2.0 world, at last, and created the MediaMatters platform to monitor web and broadcast content that, for example, resulted in Don Imus being "caught" in his racist, sexist comments about the Rutgers championship women's basketball team. We developed one of the first ad-serving software applications, when our introduction of cascading style sheets was too complex for DoubleClick or any of the other ad networks.
So here in Monaco we're interacting with people who are the future of the digital space in which allAfrica.com grows – and the base for the AllAfrica Foundation's mission to apply technology innovations to African development. It's disappointing that there are – maybe – two Africans here. Mea culpa, our president Amadou Mahtar Ba attended the first year and was invited back, but he had to present at two conferences in Dubai instead.
Still, Africa is experiencing an astonishing Internet explosion, even in countries like post-conflict Liberia, which lacks grid electricity, landline telephones or piped water. It should have had a prominent place on the rich conference program.
