Inside Scoop

We usually talk about what we’re building here at The Wardrobe Channel in terms of the benefit it will offer: making it much easier to find, buy and wear exactly the clothing that’s right for you.

That’s not the whole story though.

It’s also borne out of our research into new media, media convergence and transmedia — what we’re building is our idea of what a 21st century media company will be.

We all know the model for 20th century media companies. You start with a huge capital expenditure, building either a printing press (newspaper, magazines) or broadcasting studios and transmission towers (radio, television). You then fill your offices with expensive staff with specialist skills: technicians to operate the equipment, editors or producers to decide what the pages or airtime will contain, journalists or presenters to deliver the story to the audience. You then add a large sales staff, who sell advertising space to pay for the whole endeavor.

For most of the 20th century, each media company created only one kind of media and most media staff were skilled in one medium.

As Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message“.

In the 21st century, the technical constraints that shaped the 20th century’s media giants are largely irrelevant. A technically adept 10 year old can create and distribute text, images, video and sound, as well as information in newer formats like links and structured data.

The primary question is no longer “do you own a distribution channel?”; it’s “why would anyone care enough to read / listen to / watch you?”.

I suspect that this century’s crop of media mega-brands will not be the owners of a huge distribution channel in an affluent market; they’ll be the online destinations people rely on to find particular types of information.

Looking up a long-lost school friend? Facebook. A former colleague? LinkedIn. A snippet of information that might be online, somewhere? Google. A video of a raccoon stealing a floor mat? YouTube. (An outfit for your job interview? The Wardrobe Channel.)

None of these sites are really about the content format; they’re about a type of information. When a person goes to Google with a question, they don’t care if the answer is on a blog or on YouTube or in a database somewhere: they just want a link to take them to it.

In other words, “the message is the message”.

So no, The Wardrobe Channel is not strictly about blogs or wikis or even video (although we’re shooting plenty of video ). It’s about clothes.

Clothing is a very broad topic — the majority of the human race wear clothes — so there are a lot of different angles. Where breaking the news quickly is paramount, we blog. When a picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth many more, we take a photo or make a video. When a well-researched article on the topic will be useful for years to come, it goes into our wiki.

We can publish all of the above using free open-source software and even our TV studios cost under $500 each (not including the computer used to edit because we owned powerful-enough computers already). When the cost structures look like that, the biggest expense is the content itself — and even some of that can be crowd-sourced.

In the 21st century, the medium is irrelevant. A compelling message is what matters.