King of ALL Media?

King of ALL Media?

I really don’t know why I am writing so much lately about Howard Stern, I really do like him. I have been listening since 1992. I have driven to work for the past 18 years and every job I have had usually requires a 30 to 40 minute drive to and fro. Howard provides me the ability to ‘turn off’ my brain and unwind, laugh and not take myself too seriously. He also boils things down to its simplest form and applies common sense which is very refreshing. Now, I don’t always like his antics or topics but for the most part I enjoy him.

Lately, however, I have been thinking about him and his iconic stature as he is probably getting ready to be off the air in the next two years. Recently I was thinking about his ‘title’ as “King of ALL Media”. See, I am in the technology business and today’s new media is the social networking medium. I bring it up because Howard brought up the fact that he tried to get on Facebook and he found it too complex and tiresome to manage while Benjy Bronk, a member of his staff is all over Facebook and Howard was giving him a hard time. On top of that Howard does not have a blog and recently stated ‘what the hell is a blog’? If you look at the Alexa ratings for his website www.howardstern.com and compare them to WSJ.com you can see even his website, which is a form of the new media, isn’t rated number one. Also, a number of people do buy into his TV show but it isn’t rated higher than American Idol, a show he is enamored with, for example.

When I speak with new media experts they talk about the half life of news papers being 50 years and now the half life of blogs being 10 years and the new technology, twitter and the half life is about 5 years what is next? Where will Howard be with the new social media?

Perhaps we should call Howard ‘King of OLD Media’ or ‘King of; Radio, Book, Movie’ media - I don't know but he definately has some work to do to really be the 'King of ALL Media'.