On Jon Greer’s blog, there is a statistic that 5-10 percent of traffic to latimes.com comes from the photo section. Traditional media is becoming less popular each day. People don’t want to read through a long story with a lot of text when they could view/hear a simplified audio or video piece.  On AOL news, when you click on a story you can either read the whole text or view a slide show of images with blurbs of information on the side. I tend to choose the image option because it is more interesting and allows for quick browsing. AOL also has a “In Video” tab in it’s slide show of relevant news stories. This shows that the media is recognizing what the audience wants, and delivering it so that they continue using their source.

Public relations practitioners have recognized this new desire for alternative media. This site allows you to create an online press release using a simple wizard that allows you to encorporate videos, photos and other file sharing tools. Prxbuilder can also distribute your releases uses non-traditional media outlets.

Here is a quote from Kevin Dugan that I think says it all:

“News can be targeted by community participation, posted to a blog, included in a podcast and a variety of other means, you don’t need to blanket the world. Use the right medium, audio, video, print, mash-up, others to convey the story…You are your own media outlet, create a channel like blip.tv, blog, podcast, slide share, and make it easy for users to share with others. Video is not limited to TV, fully integrated multimedia news organizations may well be the right target for a pitch that was previously considered the realm of television.”

It is important to recognize the change from traditional media to new media and embrace it. If you try to run and hide from multimedia tools because you are technologically shy, you will only fall behind and lose audience members.