At Collective Intellect, we appreciate that social media messages don’t live in an isolated vacuum; content influences and is influenced by traditional media stories. This is why we view and treat online news content just like your standard social media message.

This confluence of traditional and social media also impacts our assessment of the larger market dynamics we are addressing. It is no secret print publications such as newspapers and magazines are being adversely impacted by the move to digital. Now, instead of 10 influential publications with an audience that could be relatively easily defined and measured, social mediums such as blogs, Twitter and message boards have shifted the power to the civilian journalist. A few books have addressed this phenomenon, including Scott Gant’s We’re All Journalists Now. Following this trend, we believe that with a few small modifications we will be able to substitute the terms reviewer, pundit, columnist and critic with a lone term: Journalist.

We see this as a key reason for why we are continuing to gain clients in the Media & Entertainment industry. Consumer generated media matters and traditional research/content discovery do not appear to work well when dealing with thousands of voices. Collective Intellect delivers value in this arena because we are able to harness thousands of independent voices and generate high level conclusions from these voices. And we do it 24/7, 365.

Considering our emergence in the Media & Entertainment arena, we noted with interest the recent announcement that Nielsen is selling several of its Media & Entertainment print publications, including The Hollywood Report, Backstage, Film Journal International and Billboard, (Here is a link to the Nielsen news release.) Because we are a nascent competitor to Nielsen in general and a direct competitor to Nielson Online which includes BuzzMetrics, we see the transfer of these assets to e5 Global Media LLC, a new company formed by Pluribus Capital Management and Guggenheim Partners under the leadership of James Finkelstein, as a possible opportunity to collaborate to make these properties even more dynamic by adding real-time insights that can be gathered with our technology. We know the industry values these publications, and we hope they thrive under new ownership. However, in our view new ownership and new capital structures don’t magically improve the economics of traditional publications. Instead, Collective Intellect believes, as the real-time media age continues to unfold, that dynamic information, not just data, will be an important component of the success of leading publications. Time will tell and perhaps Collective Intellect’s real-time processing capability will play an even larger role in this.