To connect one piece of media to another means to find a relationship between the two. Whether it is opposites attracting or birds of a feather, the future of media is the creation of advanced narratives. By this I mean that instead of media existing as isolated pieces, there will be means of weaving information together. Today, this takes on the form of technology such as a wiki tags.

While researching for this post, I ran across a post from Daniel Bachhuber who seems to be in agreement with me about the importance of organizing information and media. In his post, Daniel addresses the use of tags as organizational tools for his data. He also refers to his data being something as, “infinitely reusable”. These two elements, organization and access are important to the success of connected media.

In May, I wrote an post titled, “Customizable News Streams“. In that article I outline an idea for creating customized “streams” of News (information). That stream would be delivered as a linear story; moving from one segment to the next. To advance that idea I would like to propose that the delivery of information should represent the nature of information, which is anything but linear.

Raw information is environmental by nature. Having access to more than just a single source of information, in-fact a limitless supply of sources, allows for creativity and learning to take place. This in-turn invents new media, which is how we are continuing to expand our ability to communicate.

The very verbs that we use to describe our relationship to information needs to change. Today, we commonly use words such as consume, read, watch and listen. Words such as organize, collaboratively, design and share are gradually being introduced into our culture’s lexicon. It is exciting to see this happen as it shows progress towards a much deeper relationship to information.

The world is gradually changing and I believe it is for the better with things becoming much more flexible and transient. Connected Media is just one example of how one industry might behave. It would be interesting to learn how other industries of production are developing.

It needs to be stressed that the primary function Analytics play in Journalism is to preserve accuracy through measurement and encourage the wise curation of facts. As the telegraph did and the internet will continue to do, technology is aiding the human story teller.

1. A first use of Analytics in Journalism is the ability to demonstrate increasing value of your content to advertisers.
2. A second use is the ability to track content performance across platforms and to therefore determine where the audience for a single report is. This includes the use of a wider assortment of tools than just on-site technology.
3. A third use of Analytics is the ability to decide how to staff certain events and geographies that would otherwise be overcrowded.
4. A fourth use of Analytics in Journalism is the ability to accurately and reliably define your audience.
5. A fifth use of Analytics in Journalism is the ability to understand why certain media suffers in performance while others succeed. Through the use of universal metrics, the performance of a single piece of media can be measured and improved.