Let me start by borrowing the modern paradigm used by journalists: just a few years ago, we lived in a world with little sources and a lot of history – now we live in a world full of sources and with very little history.
In the world of blogs and automatically generated news, I get asked every day by my friends about the future of the media and journalism. Do we still need the media to choose the relevant stories and put them in a broader context? What is relevant, the content or the online community? Who is the loser and who is the winner?
I believe in the internet and its interactivity, but I don’t always believe in the credibility of the information found online. In this internet age a sense of criticism and of journalistic culture often gets lost. Good stories that touch you and draw you to them are, generally speaking, still produced by serious media and journalists. Take a look at your own online media habits. We ache for superficial and sensationalist stories. Media professionalism is vital and so is a closer connection to the target audiences online. I believe we live in a hybrid age where classic and online media coexist on the verge of a true media convergence.
Kongres Magazine is celebrating its fifth anniversary. We constantly try to understand the world and help you in the process by providing credible and trustworthy information. We never think about the media crisis, instead we prefer to focus on the content. Technology and the internet present us with a challenge. We think about the future of our magazine and our partners every single day. We are interested in interactivity, multimedia, personalisation and convergence. We manage all these things because we are independent, small, flexible and adaptable, and because we truly wish for the meetings industry to make progress, which is what we are dedicated to. We will definitely take a mostly digital form in the near future, but most of all we will remain professional and independent. We will become better year after year and stay connected with the global media of the meetings industry.
And the answer to the question in the title? To a place where things will never again be the same.
Gorazd Čad
