Media extension done right!

I’ve talked in the past about the fact that I read the Toronto Star — yup, the actual paper version. In fact, my wife and I get the Star delivered to our house every morning, and although I usually don’t get a whole lot of time to check it out on weekdays, Saturday and Sunday I usually dive pretty deep into at least a few stories in the top news, world, sports, entertainment and other other sections while I sip my coffee.

An article that caught my eye this morning (actually my wife spotted it first and handed it to me immediately, realizing it was right up my alley) was about a new Toronto music store called Musideum which features instruments of various shapes and sizes from around the world. From the description it sounds a lot like the great Seattle store Lark in the Morning, and I was not only very excited to check out, but also excited to share the news with a particular group of friends — my musical colleagues in the all acoustic eighties band The McFlies. If you’ve never seen The McFlies play, I can tell you that we’re very much into, well, unusual instruments, at least for North America pop/folk music — ukuleles, melodicas, glockenspiels and cojones are just some of the things you’ll see onstage at a McFlies show. With this in mind, I definitely wanted to share the news of this new store with my fellow McFlies, so I looked up the article online to forward on.

I was EXTRAORDINARILY pleased to find, not just the article but a terrific accompanying video, complete with the store owner demonstrating many of the instruments! What a perfect extension to the text of this story, and what a great way to take advantage of what both the new and old media do best. I checked back to the original story in the paper edition and noticed that they had mentioned the video at the bottom of the story as well — missed that the first time, apparently I still need more coffee!

One thing I did think could have been added was the ability to embed the video directly here on the blog or other sites. YouTube has shown how allowing your content to be taken offsite extends your brand and ultimately your content. I would think the Star and other traditional media companies would benefit greatly from providing this kind of functionality. But at least they appear to be on the right track.

I realize a lot of newspapers and other traditional media outlets are doing similar things, but to me it just highlights the fact that different media continue to have different strengths, and should be thought of as complementary. I’ve said before that I believe newspapers will survive, but they will clearly have to change their business model to continue to thrive. I feel that new business model MUST recognize that different people will continue to consume their news in different ways, and that simply putting a text story on the web is not going to cut it.

Examples like what the Star has done here are just one small example of how old media companies can leverage new media channels. Any others you’ve seen lately that you found interesting or impressive? Leave a comment!

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