Forget MSM or Old Media, Heritage Media is the term

I was on a panel at the start of Frocomm’s excellent New Media Summit in Melbourne Monday night, and Laurel Papworth introduced me to a new term: Heritage Media.

Heritage Media describes the mainstream media, or old media depending on your previous preference. It encapsulates the archaic nature of traditional media, in terms of its inefficient one size fits all broadcast model, and also places it correctly in an historical sense as coming from the past, and as it declines today a space to which many may show fondness, but one where we all know its time is passing.

Broadcast television is a heritage media with a known end date. Radio, paired to the bone as it is will malinger on for a bit longer, and newspapers are trying their best to adopt to survive, but both maintain their heritage media models.

The divide between heritage media and new media is more clear in using the term heritage, as it defines a difference in delivery that may not always be obvious from a term such as the mainstream media (a stupid term really given that much of new media is now mainstream anyway) or old media, which does not define the delivery method compared to heritage.

Next time you write or speak on new media, consider using the term Heritage Media when comparing the old and new. We’ll be using the term here in future coverage of the space.