How has the Future of Tech Affected your Industry on a Global Level?

If you take a look at our “Pro-Views” section, you can read the views of various popular names who are experts in their respective industries on a wide range of tech topics. Throughout the various interviews, you’ll notice that technology has affected or changed almost every industry on a global level, whether directly or indirectly. So no matter what industry you are in, the advancement future tech has undoubtedly played a key role. Since every industry will have its demands, the global impact of technology changes according to the field.

Recently, we spoke to some popular industry experts and tried to find out how the future of tech has affected their industries. Let’s hear their thoughts.

Who Did We Interview?

          Francesca Peak                        Jake Basford

How has the future of tech affected your industry on a global level?

Francesca Peak is a London-based freelance lifestyle and technology journalist, focussing on everyday consumer technology. She has written for Trusted Reviews, Wareable.com, Harper’s Bazaar, and Baku magazine.

What did Francesca say?

Technology and the internet have changed journalism irrevocably, presenting new challenges and opportunities. On Masters courses, for example, students are expected to be not only adept in subbing, proofing and laying out pages, but also creating podcasts, shooting video interviews and effective use of social media.

For larger more established publishing houses like Hearst or Condé Nast, it’s a challenge to redirect manpower towards online and harnessing the power of social media to share their content in a relatable way. One successful example of this is Vogue’s “73 questions with” YouTube series. Journalists are now trained and hired specifically to make videos or manage the magazine’s social media presence – this is a huge shift from 10, even five years ago.

With the rise of wearables and our screens getting ever-smaller, being snappy and grabbing the reader from the first word is paramount. Technology doesn’t mean the death of the magazine – people will always love picking up a copy of Hello in the hairdresser’s- but it has meant printed magazines have to fight harder to survive.

Jake Basford – Geek Editor, VadaMagazine

Jake’s experience is mostly in the fields of media, PR, and press, specifically within the third and LGBT sectors. In his words: At present, I work as the Media Coordinator and Fundraiser for a Castle Preservation Trust, and am the Geek Editor for Vada Magazine, as well as a freelance writer.

What did Jake say?

While I am the Geek Editor of Vada Magazine, I specialize in gaming, and on this level, we can already see the future starting to unveil in front of us with virtual reality gaming. While this has been a concept that has been discussed since I was a child (various TV shows and films have shown harrowing and hilarious outcomes as a result, with possibly the most notorious being ‘Sword Art Online’), this is the first opportunity that we as consumers have seen the actual possibility of it being freely available on the open market. How far this goes, what lessons are ignored/retained from imaginative fiction, and at what cost this will be (both financial and psychological) it is too early to tell. And as long as there are games, I will have something to write about.

What do we think?

In our industry i.e. blogging, the future of tech has had a significant impact. With our audience having a much larger choice of to what to access, where and when, we need to be at our best to serve our readers the information they want when they want it. The introduction of small screen devices and their intensive use by the readers demonstrates that websites must be responsive to multiple screen sizes to optimize performance and provide readers with a better user experience.

Unlike previous years, when blogging was all about creating and publishing content, modern era blogging has introduced many difficulties…from optimizing websites for speed, developing SEO strategies, and improving user experience (UX) without affecting conversion through analysis of user behavior. These all create tough challenges for publishers in the age of future tech.

Links to other interviews