In this episode of Future of Engagement, Influence People CEO and Founder Murray Newlands interviews Tom Foremski, a journalist who used to write for the Financial Times and now is the owner of the Silicon Valley Watcher.

Before the Internet and the explosion of online publishing, successful journalists and PR men and women spent their careers building up lists of media contacts.

With the decentralization of media, coupled with search engines like Google punishing sites with duplicate content, these contact lists are becoming less valuable.

Online media outlets are less willing to syndicate columns and articles because they will be punished in search engine results, and many times, articles that could be published in every newspaper in the country simply don’t work well with the super-focused niche markets of today’s online media.

Tom writes primarily about Silicon Valley Business Trends and is the author of the book In My Humble Opinion: Notes from a Silicon Valley Watcher. You can find him on Twitter @tomforemski and on Facebook at facebook.com/tom.foremski.

Future of Engagement is a web series shot and produced in San Francisco, California, the heart of the global tech industry. The weekly series gives you the information—and the gossip—you need to know to keep you up-to-date with social engagement.