"The future of media will be about sharing content," said Netherlands-based media consultant, journalist and producer Jonathan Marks.

This will be done by encouraging the audience to be involved in the programming process. In the case of newspapers, it’s hard to ask readers what piece of news they’ll like to hear about in a few weeks time. Yet newspapers ought to figure out better ways to know their readers’ news needs (a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism showed that news in user-ranked sites was very different from mainstream sources).

The future of news will also lie within increased personalization and tailored news (a recent piece discusses the approaches of The Sun and the Telegraph in that area).

"The concept of 'mass media' will be replaced by 'my media'," said Gary Shapiro, president of the influential US Consumer Electronics Association.

So the future of news will be highly based on user interaction, personalization and networking. And although user-generated content is growing, the broadcasters didn’t view it as an immediate threat.

"Professional story-telling will not go away... most UGC is useless generated content, because not everyone can tell a good story," said Marks.

On the other hand, one of the broadcasting speakers also acknowled that “UGC is a threat, I admit, and ignoring any threat would be a big mistake.” More importantly, whether for newspapers, broadcasters or other news media, the media must rid itself of the notion that has shaped its very name: its medium and platform-based thinking.

The real asset of media is its content, as Marks nicely summed it up.

"I don't believe in the future of radio, TV and the web. I believe in the future of audio, visual and text on various platforms. The future is sharing stuff, but on which platforms and media depends on where you are in the world."

Source: BBC Monitoring