I spent some time over the last two weeks consulting with a group of professionals at a large media company. I’m pretty confident everyone in the room (beside me) had started their career by going to journalism school. Even if that isn’t the case, they clearly had grown up before the merger of media companies becoming tech companies and tech companies becoming media companies.

Given that context it was fun to discuss with them the ways that technology could transform their business. I think we came up with a number of very powerful ideas! As they launch, I’ll point out a few of them here.

However, even more interesting to me then the ideas we came up with was their view on ‘the IT department.’ While I certainly understand their perspective, it was interesting to hear how compelling solutions delivered as a software as a service were.

It did remind me that the future of media is hosted! In many ways this is just an extension of the larger software as a service trend. Yet for traditional media companies it manifests itself in some interesting ways. For example, consider the following examples:

• Why try to develop your own widgets for virally distributing your content when you can partner with NewsGator?
• Or why install an ad server, when you can let OpenX or DoubleClick host the ad server for you?
• These first two examples are probably pretty obvious, but it is also true for ‘full website properties.’ For example, why host your blogs, if you can outsource it to someone like Automattic?

I realize this is not a new thought. Umair Haque’s Bubblegeneration presentation on on micromedia a few years ago is the first time I thought about it. However, I will say my interactions with my client over the last few weeks has been a good reminder.

[Photo: akakumo, King Cloud / Flickr]