I have a friend who ran a car service up to a few years ago. It was nothing fancy. She invested in a Town Car, had business cards printed, put up flyers and took out a classified ad
in my paper. Strictly an independent thing. She ran people back and forth to the airport–a pretty lucrative business on Long Island, lot’s of people do it.

She undercut the bigger companies and some of the independents and did OK. In the end, like many ventures, it turned out to be unsustainable. I look back on it now and wonder how things would have turned out for her if Uber or a similar business had come along just a little bit sooner.

Locally, there’s been a huge controversy in both Southampton and East Hampton towns between Uber and the traditional hometown taxi companies, which it seems are fighting hard for the business they’ve been losing to the independents working for Uber. East Hampton officials last year outright banned Uber drivers in favor of the local companies and in Southampton this year, officials decided to require any driver for hire to purchase a $1,000 annual license.

Obviously, the local companies have used their influence with the town officials to legislate the matter. But I wonder if they’re missing the bigger picture. Rather than adapt to the technology making the Uber drivers successful–and a threat, the companies continue to charge exorbitant rates (some say as much as $100 for a ride home form the bar on a Saturday night in the summer), keep people waiting for as long as an hour after calling for a cab, and turning to the old boy’s network to try to legislate themselves out of a jam.

It seems like a classic Innovator’s Dilemma to me. Refuse to change until it’s too late, while a new technology (the mobile app that allows Uber to get a car to a client in minutes, prevent overcharging and eliminates the overhead of running a garage full of cabs) comes in and lets someone take over an industry.

Uber and Southampton Town reached a compromise  yesterday–lowering the license cost to $250 for drivers, at least for the summer. Uber moves forward, and the taxi companies will, eventually, eat their dust.

I feel like I, and we, meaning the media, have been playing catch up for decades now. Rather than being at the forefront of emerging technologies, we tend to wait for something to take off and then try like hell to catch up to it and see how we can make it work for us.

The results haven’t always been spectacular, especially for small shops like mine, with limited resources and personnel. Just trying to keep up with the latest trends on social media and web production can be daunting.

But at the same time, I’ve noticed that with every new technology, every new trend, every new innovation, elements of what we do seem to become easier (after the initial bump of resistance).

So I’m hopeful that the future will continue to bring methods to improve how we get the news out, how we tell stories.

I was particularly taken by the George Bloom Ted Talk in this week’s ICC 613: Emerging Media Platforms class. He spoke about advancements in technology and the eventual effect on film making, envisioning a world where just about anyone could produce a film without the need for sets, locations, staff, etc.

Initially, my thoughts went to all the people who would be unemployed and redundant  if his vision became a reality, which stung a little because of what happened to the print industry over the past couple decades, but quickly turned to the wonder of the possibility of a plethora of self-produced film, rather than a limited menu of films produced by a few.

News reporting is becoming that, easier to produce, easier for the consumer to find what engages them, and, easier to tell stories. The trick for us “professionals” is to continue to finds way to make sure we’re doing it well–better than anyone else.

And maybe that’s where 360 video, augmented reality and the rest comes in. Instead of waiting to see how it shakes out, we should be jumping on it and making sure we’re the ones doing it best.