Here’s why “unfiltered” media matters today: there are dozens and dozens of reporters, editors, online publications, editorialists, et al in so-called traditional media. They all own their media properties and screen their content. They sell ad space, online and in print and broadcast. They each have their own style guides. They all filter content from contributors so it aligns with their sense of their publications, their attitudes and their sense of responsibility to manage and control the content they place in their publications.

That’s all well and good.

The problem is that today everyone is a publisher. Individuals – hundreds of millions of them world-wide – are accustomed to generating their own content and gaining audiences for that content, even if they’re microscopic audiences. There’s no filtering. There’s no creative limitation. There’s no editorial policy. Just straight, unfiltered content in text, video, audio and photo imagery.

Increasingly, corporations and institutions have discovered the same thing about unfiltered content – and it’s hard for them to adjust in particular because they’ve been used to extreme filtering of their content to the outside world. This new revolution is forcing corporations and businesses, large and small, to rediscover authenticity in what they say and how they generally communicate to the outside world.

Why? Because web audience demand it. The lack of transparency and authenticity by businesses in the publishing world is perceived and detected to be phony and wooden by extremely sophisticated consumer and B to B audiences.

That’s where the action is. Authenticity. Unfiltered content. That’s why most media properties are struggling today, because they’ve always been all about control. As for the business community, those who adjust their culture to fit the new reality will do well.

Those who can’t find their way to transparency will simply shrivel and die.