(Publisher's Note: This is the first of a series of articles written by the Publisher of the Rayno Report on the media business). It’s been interesting to see speculation about the media industry and how it has been effected by huge shifts in consumption toward mobile devices and social media. Larry Kramer, the founder of MarketWatch, has gotten a lot of play out of his "Gutenberg Moment" catchphrase.  Yes, the media business is struggling. But unfortunately, technology is not a “magic bullet,” and it seems to me as if media executives are being distracted by technology and forgetting that content, not technology, has been the key to prosperity in the media business. With a technology revolution underway in the mobile space, publishers, journalists, and media personalities are caught between a bipolar world of excitement and dread. They are excited because hot consumer devices such as the iPhone and the iPad get them excited about, well, media. These devices are superb in the access and presentation of media, and they’re likely to improve at an increasing rate. As a consumer, it’s fun. What about the media business person? That’s where the dread comes in. We in the media business have seen our traditional business model cut off at the kneecaps: Gain audience, sell advertising, support the content creators. That model is in a state of secular decay.  It seems that the most visible executives have just recognized this and handed over the keys to the kingdom to the technology companies. Look at the music industry. It’s funny, we’ve seen this story before, yet we haven’t learned from it. They thought by lawyering up and doing fancy “biz dev” deals with devices makers such as Apple, they’d create new revenue streams. Instead, they got taken to the woodshed. Source: Ars Technica The same thing is starting to play out with the Kindle and the iPad. Rather than focusing on content and innovation within their own units, media executives are lured by the siren song of flashy technology, and they start rowing their boats toward the same rocks that took down the music industry. At least with the iPad there is some initial evidence that the media executives are gaining some backbone, and defending their assets. We’ll see. Has the media industry changed? No, it hasn’t, really. It's the distribution channels that are changing. They have through history, and that’s what’s turned business executives into a bunch of sissies. They've rolled over and let Steve Jobs run the show. It’s about content, folks. Why not focus on that? Yes, technology is an efficient means of delivery, but after all, the mobile content revolution is making it easier to distribute your product, not harder. So why put the cart before the horse? If I were to hold up one example of how the media industry can be fixed, it’s Bill Simmons, the sports-writing genius (I say that as a journalist, not as a Red Sox fan). Bill Simmons is a true rags-to-riches story, a guy who could not get a real job (he famously resents that the Boston Herald would not hire him full time) who just fired up a computer and started writing like a maniac on his blog. One decade later, Bill Simmons drives an entire, integrated media content empire. I have no idea what he makes but I reckon he generates millions in revenue for ESPN and that his income is probably close to seven figures. He sells truckloads of books, having been on the New York Times bestseller list many times. He has seemingly mastered all of the platforms, from bestselling books to Twitter (Bill Simmons has more than 1.2 million followers). Its’ true, very few people have the explosive combination of talent and energy that Simmons has, but his accomplishments show that generating entertaining content and having a unique ability to communicate with an audience can make you successful in any world. As an aside, it's interesting to me that ESPN (owned by Disney (NYSE: DIS)), is Simmons' primary employer, and ESPN has been better than just about any brand in transcending technological platforms with its content. I don't know many brands that play equally well in TV and Internet, but ESPN has done it, as has Bill Simmons. Is this not a successful model? One might argue that Bill Simmons is an outlier (in fact he writes about ouliers), and that the middle-ground of the media bell curve is where the serious trouble brews. Traditional media companies are slowly eroding in terms of revenue, brand power, and status. When I ask people where the successful model is in the new digital world, I get blank stares – or some bullshit like “social media.” It feels like many of these executives are hopping on that technology life-raft in the Gulfstream and hoping it takes them to the French Riviera. Sorry guys, next stop: Greenland. As with all business, it comes down to leverage. The media companies need to get their leverage back. They have lost huge amounts of influence with the emergence of the open, mobile, social—based media consumption model. They no longer control the distribution, and thus, they have no leveraged access over the consumer. Look at the cable world: Leverage was the key to the recent spat between ABC and Cablevision over distribution. Guess who won? The content company. Who knew? As if that wasn’t bad enough, the media world has been flooded with cheap content, supplied by laid off or malcontent media professionals who are blogging – so-called “pro-bloggers,” social media, Internet content aggregators, and even marketers themselves who are finding it’s easy to create content in the new world. As if to make things worse, many outlets in the media industry have turned control of the story over to the marketers. It’s incredible to me that aggregation outlets such as Techmeme play up marketing blogs above the fold, as if they are objective sources of information. But they do. More power to the marketers – they’re just doing their jobs – and they’re finding out that finally after all these years they don’t need to deal with those nasty, unkempt and dyspeptic editorial types. They can just Tweet. Horay! Some of this good, and democratic, and some of this is bad. Overall, there is more content –more jewels in the rough. But there’s also a lot more garbage requiring a higher-caliber filter. Media companies need to bust through the noise. How do you do that? With quality. Let’s face it, most of the social media noise is junk. As the Simmons model has demonstrated, real content stands out even in that world. Can the media world be saved? I think it will start to save itself when we begin innovating ourselves – like Bill Simmons -- and returning to the concept of quality. Brands can then be built around the anchor of talented content producers, rather than hoping the life-raft of technology will carry use there. It’s guerrilla warfare out there: As Simmons has shown, the real deal can infiltrate the enemy zones of social media. We need the publishers to buck up, get tough, and start bringing some unique value to a world where the media noise quotient has risen to historic proportions. I think it starts with: Don’t give stuff away from free.  Don’t give the marketers a free channel. Overwhelm your audience with force and quality, and don’t back down.  The content can only be king if you believe it is.