Time Magazine: It’s all about you

In perhaps the most startling indication that there’s a realization dawning on the media that the people formerly known as the audience (PFKATA - not my term), Time Magazine has named “us” as its Person of the Year. Oh, sure, there’s that war in Iraq, and North Korea, and Iran, and Venezuela. But this isn’t about them:

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

As if to emphasize the point, the Time article features a series of social bookmark buttons at the bottom so you can pass it along.

If nothing else, the magazine that brings us semi-annual cover stories about Jesus (around Christmas and Easter) knows how to get the buzz going.

It extends even to the cover:

We chose to put a mirror on the cover because it literally reflects the idea that you, not we, are transforming the information age. The 2006 Person of the Year issue—the largest one Time has ever printed—marks the first time we’ve put reflective Mylar on the cover. When we found a supplier in Minnesota, we made the company sign a confidentiality agreement before placing an order for 6,965,000 pieces. That’s a lot of Mylar.

Still, there’s a lesson to be learned here that I often borrow when talking to people about the way we need to be approaching journalism: not a lecture, but a conversation (again, not my idea, but expressed by several others):

Journalists once had the exclusive province of taking people to places they’d never been. But now a mother in Baghdad with a videophone can let you see a roadside bombing, or a patron in a nightclub can show you a racist rant by a famous comedian. These blogs and videos bring events to the rest of us in ways that are often more immediate and authentic than traditional media. These new techniques, I believe, will only enhance what we do as journalists and challenge us to do it in even more innovative ways.

I’ve personally called this the “mediahood of all receivers,” in which the traditional Sender-Message-Channel-Receiver (SMCR) model of communication is turned upon its head much as the church was turned on its head by the Protestant Reformation (read a conference presentation here).

For college media, the challenge is obvious: how to start engaging the community of students, staff, faculty, and alumni of our campuses. After all, it’s not every day we get to build our media with the help of Time’s Person of the Year.

You can read what others are saying at TechMeme, where I originally noticed the story.

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