Recently I’ve started listening to Pandora on my laptop.  I actually began listening to the “Personal Internet Radio Service” about two years ago.  I never was a big fan because it was rare when two songs I really liked played back to back.  They seemed to recycle the music.  If I “marked” that I liked a particular song, it seemed to replay after every eight or so songs.  Or, I’d get a great tune from Stan Getz & Astrid Gilberto and then the next two or three would be titles like “Bosa Nova for Lovers” or “Tito Puente Plays the Music from Cats.” 

It certainly wasn’t as good as my iTunes, but thanks to Pandora, I could save the iTunes for when I really needed them, like when I was flying or lying outside by Jorg’s pool.  However, one thing I did like about Pandora was that it was a free service and totally unencumbered by any annoying ads.  That was then –

Have you used Pandora lately?  Man, oh man.  Now, after every third or fourth song you get a commercial.  Granted they’re only five seconds or so in length, but I can see the handwriting on the wall.  I’m totally convinced that Pandora will be just like any commercial radio station within a year.  Another “too good to be true” situation.  But certainly not the last one!

As I was reading one of my daily “digital briefing” newsletters, Cynthia Turner’s Column, I came across this rather disturbing piece of news:  Hulu may begin charging for its content as early as next year, according to comments made at B&C’s OnScreen Summit.

Hulu charging for its service!!!   The next thing you know you’re going to have to pay per text message.  What’ s going on here?  It looks like I’m going to have to keep cable TV and you all know how ridiculously expensive that is.

We all know that nothing is really free in life, but if you end up having to pay for a great FREE service like Hulu, a service that can, in my opinion, make a ton of dough just from its advertisers, you might just as well pay for satellite or cable now and get a better deal by committing to them for two years.

Stay tuned for more on this.  I’m sure Hulu is not alone in its strategy.  We’re sure to see more “free” sites begin charging as more people learn how to use a mouse.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year or two trying to figure out new media. But lately, I’ve been devoting more thought to the old media.

Why? The same reason people gawk at a bad accident. The old media have been T-boned by the Internet, and they’re lying twisted and smoking on the shoulder of the information superhighway.

For nearly 100 years, they’ve been at the core of communication in this country: newspapers, magazines, radio and TV.  They told us what was happening in our communities, they delivered our commercial messages, they entertained and informed us.

But the old media went over the cliff a few years ago. Now they’re like Wile E. Coyote, frantically running in place just before the bottom drops out from under them.

The list of cutbacks, buyouts and layoffs in the traditional media just since this summer would take up more space than I have in this post. Gannett and McClatchy, two of the nation’s top three newspaper publishers, each cut 10 percent of their workforce earlier this year– then came back a few months later with a second 10 percent cut. Both companies have lost more than 90 percent of their peak stock-market value. Weekly newspapers are beginning to fold, and at some point, we’ll see daily papers begin to go under.

Time, Conde Nast, Hearst and other magazine publishers have closed titles and cut jobs by the hundreds. Advertising pages are down sharply. TV stations nationwide are cutting production staff– and even, in some cases, high-profile on-air personalities.

Yet despite all their problems, the traditional media remain a critically important piece of both public and commercial dialogue. They still provide the basic reporting that the blogosphere feeds off, and they have a mass that outweighs all but the biggest national blogs and Web sites (some of which are starting to develop their own reporting resources, but that’s another story).

For marketers like me, these turbulent times pose a challenge. How does one set priorities between new and old media? Is it better to focus resources on the traditional media, hoping they’ll find your story or product interesting enough to cover? Or would it be better to create a Web site or an e-marketing campaign, and try to draw people to your message that way?

My view is that the traditional media are still important, and it would be unwise for marketers to ignore them in an overall marketing plan, both for advertising and public relations. But the relationships will be different than they were even a few years ago. Here are some changes I think we’ll be seeing.

Aggregation is more important than ever. Getting your story out through news services and Web aggregators is the best way to get it in front of the most people. That’s always been true, but as individual media outlets cut back their own staffs, they’ll rely even more on newswire and aggregation sources. And in the Internet era, a story that goes out through an aggregator can have long, long legs.

The reporters and editors who remain are harried and worried. They’ve seen colleagues leave or get the ax, and they wonder if they’re next. They’re working harder than ever, yet they feel as if nobody on the business side has figured out how to turn the ship around. Unless they’re within a few years of retirement, they’re probably working on a Plan B for their career.

I’m not yet sure how this translates into practice. In recent years, it’s been common for critics to make dismissive comments accusing the news media of merely regurgitating press releases. Having spent 20 years in the business, I can tell you emphatically that those charges are false– at least, for the quality news outlets I worked at.

But as the traditional media continue to slash their own newsgathering capacity, it’s possible that regurgitating press releases will start to look like a viable option to them.

News nuggets get more attention than in-depth information. With few exceptions, the traditional media– newspapers, TV and magazines– believe that the news consumer is pressed for time and unwilling to digest lengthy items. They’re looking for summaries, lists, nuggets, news of the weird– anything they can slot into a formatted news report. As they rely on fewer people to produce their products, this kind of fill-in-the-blank formatting will be a bigger piece of their overall output.

Local is king. A few major media outlets in the New York-D.C. axis will continue to be important in leading the national dialogue. But in regional markets– even top 20 markets like Houston, Minneapolis and Denver– producers and editors are adopting a relentlessly local focus.

If you’re trying to get their attention for a product or service that isn’t produced in their area, you’ve got to clear a much higher hurdle these days.

Marketers and the news media have always had a symbiotic relationship. But that relationship, which has run in the same comfortable channels for the last half-century, is changing in ways that we haven’t even realized yet.

I think it’s clear that the marketers are going to be less at the mercy of the media. In the old days, there were few options for going around the media gatekeepers. Not so any more.

I don’t see any signs that the traditional media are giving up. Although battered, they’re still fighting.

But Wile E. Coyote never gave up, either– and that didn’t stop him from getting conked regularly by the latest Acme anvil. I’m afraid there are a few more anvils ahead for the traditional media.