Welcome to Germaine Theory

  The Evolution of Media is a Good Thing, right?   The adage, ‘Everything must change’ does not exclude communications; media has come an extremely long way. Behold, the printing press. The newspaper allowed people to deliver different types of news stories regularly. At this point, messages were reliant upon the speed of man or animal. Industrial change brought about trains, the locomotive, cars and boats. This vastly increased the efficiency and effectiveness of communications. The telegram followed and changed the game. Messages were transmitted electronically and life altering change followed. Just when you thought you’ve reached the pinnacle of communications, the telephone came along and made the telegraph inadequate. You could actually speak your message and get a verbal received understanding of the message; it was a game changer. When you are living with a process, it is everything until the next better process comes along. Each improved method of communication ...

I was asked an interesting question this week; are we currently watching the death of newspapers or the re-invention of the print industry? What do you think? There are different metrics we can use to attempt to quantify the current level of success achieved by newsrooms across the country as a whole. We can look at newspaper sales, we can look at customer satisfaction surveys and we can even speak about our own personal accounts and opinions. The Pew Center is a think tank that compiles data regarding trends and attitudes towards many different facets of life. They are a non-partisan organization that has done some of the work for us. "More than eight-in-ten U.S. adults (86%) say they get news from a smartphone, computer or tablet “often” or “sometimes,” including 60% who say they do so often". (Shearer, 2021) Eighty-six percent is a staggering number. To put it into better context, television was 68%, radio was 50% and print was the low man on the totem pole coming in at 32...

Hello All, To those of you who don't know, my name is Samuel Germaine Powell. Welcome to Germaine Theory. In this blog we will deep dive into Strategic Communication and Emerging Media. We will discuss new and exciting methods of news delivery as well as some of the tenets of the older forms of media delivery. We will look at which forms of media are more effective and explore things that can be done to rejuvenate the current methods of news and media distribution. This blog will be published weekly by no later than Sunday, 11:59pm for the next 8 weeks. The blog can be found at the following address: https://germainetheory.blogspot.com/ I created this blog to discuss Emerging Media Methods. These will be contrasted and compared to the older, tried and true methods of communication. We will look at the effects of new media on its predecessors and see if anything can be done to transform these methods to make them more effective, efficient and desirable to the current news...