By David Jenkin
Chang had over 20 years of experience in the magazine industry prior to applying his insight and creative thinking to the rather unique concept of ‘trends as business strategy’. In 2006 he founded Flux Trends, a company that works to distil and decipher the barrage of information we all face in the 21st century with the aim of giving businesses an invaluable window into the future.
“Firstly, I think magazines are really in a kind of no-man’s land at the moment,” says Chang, referring to the global migration from print to digital. He mentions the comments made by the editor of
Elle Magazine, Emilie Gambade, describing herself as “the editor of a daily publication which happens to be a monthly magazine.”
Essentially, Gambade was saying that their print edition was merely a component of the digital space they have to occupy, explains Chang, in an age of immediacy. “For magazines it’s a real dilemma,” he says, “You have at best two months of lead time to produce content, so with this immediacy what on Earth is going to be valid and relevant three months down the line? So it completely splinters everything, and for me the future of magazines is going to be much more of those
Visi-type collectors’ items. Much better print and paper, more of a visual treat – because we are moving into very much a hyper-visual era – so I think there’s an opportunity there for those magazines to become more of a collector’s item.”
When talking about the realm of news, things get interesting because of the impact of social media, Chang says. He believes the role of the journalist will become more of an analytical function in the wake of breaking news. Increasingly, readers will turn to quick feeds and social media platforms like
Twitter to see whatever hashtag is trending and what the breaking news is. With
Twitter using more visuals and with apps like
Periscope, they’ll be able to see a blow-by-blow account with really powerful news coverage, but the analysis will be lacking. He says the daily papers are suffering but Sunday papers, which are generally slower and more in-depth reads, are likely to hold their own for now.
Automation is also going to play a larger role in news reporting, Chang predicts, as demonstrated by the revelation from Associated Press that they publish about 3000 articles a quarter that are generated by machines. “So for online reading it has to be factually correct, it has to be grammatically correct, but it doesn’t have to have much personality. People are now reading short, quick articles that are actually generated by an algorithm.”
Chang says that in terms of citizen journalism on social media, a lack of trust remains an issue. So although for now the big media companies are still dominant voices, social media amplifies alternative voices as well, allowing for a wide range of viewpoints to be heard. “It definitely has splintered and spliced what we know as news media,” he says.
When looking at the African context the trend gets a bit skewed, he says, as in some parts of Africa the uptake of newspapers is actually growing since they are seen as something of a status symbol. There are also a great many who simply prefer to read off paper rather than a screen despite the convenience of digital where the same information is available. That group is sure to shrink in the long term.
Dion Chang’s bankable expertise comes from careful observation of the patterns that make up macro trends which, much like the weather, can be predicted with a reasonable degree of confidence. Although, just as with a weather forecast, for complete certainty time will have to tell.
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