Media Startup

So, you want to work in the media? Really? Hopefully it is not for economic gain. No, you are doing it for alternative economies of value, what the weekend broadsheet magazine insert feature stories call ‘lifestyle’.

Online entrepreneur magazine Startupsmart has an article posted today listing ten startups that can be started for less than ten thousand dollars. I find this exciting as I have been thinking a great deal about using my skills and starting my own company. It seems to me that the future of the media for the majority of practioners will be as sole traders or small media production companies.

Note I haven’t been talking about journalism. Journalism is something else and quite rightly. What I am talking about is closer to a media ad agency mashed with the everyday production activities of a digital native. That is, the skills of photography, video production, writing and social networking that I take for granted as an ‘expert’ user all packaged as a service and sold to (mostly, small) businesses. This is very different to the anaemic ‘branding’ activity of actual media ad agencies as there is a level of intimacy that they could never capture.

Branding is about telling a story you want consumers to believe in and experience so they want to exist in the world of the story by consuming whatever is on offer. I am talking about isolating whatever is already of value in the activities of the business and representing it as part of a world that already exists. Rather than an imposition of a world, it is an exposition of value. We already do a lot of this in niche magazines as each magazine functions to service part of a scene.

I need to increase my skill set further and then test my business model to see if it is, firstly, sustainable.