Newsrooms place more emphasis on specialism. This crisis has made many newsrooms realise how little they understand about science and technology — and the value of that rare breed of journalists that can explain these complex issues to a general public. With many newsrooms already under fire for an obsession with personality politics, expect a shift towards deeper and more diverse themes..
More focus on data and visual storytelling formats. Both the pandemic and US elections demonstrated the value of news organisations that could visualise and explain complex stories in an accessible way. Data journalism frequently breaks away from the traditional narrative, offering many pathways to explain and explore the news.
Other publishers are looking to develop more visual content such as the stories format now adopted by most social platforms. Case for public media becomes stronger. Heavy usage of public broadcasters and their websites during the pandemic may have made it harder for critics to undermine existing funding models — a recurrent theme in many European countries.
But this could just be wishful thinking. With Joe Biden in the White House we can, at least, expect a less antagonistic relationship over the next few years. The New York Times alone has added more than a million net digital subscribers in — citing unprecedented demand for quality, original, independent journalism 7 — and the Swedish publisher Dagens Nyheter offered open access to its website and apps for the first few months of the Covid outbreak in return for an email address — subsequently converting record numbers to boost its subscriber base by a third.
As one example, the Washington Post plans to add new jobs in , creating a newsroom of more than 1,, 10 while medium-sized and local media have often been left with staffing that is stripped to the bone. For many of the early movers, digital revenue now outstrips print and a significant number of quality titles can see a path to a sustainable future.
Can subscription models eventually work for all or just for a select number of high-quality titles? The full impact of the financial hit caused by lockdown is being felt now. No new investments, no new plans. The effort is to hold on and consolidate.
Dwaipayan Bose, Editor, Indiatoday. While a number of publishers are doing well, a large number of titles are clearly struggling and we can expect further consolidation, cost-cutting, and closures in the year ahead.
Retaining subscribers. A burning question will be how to keep all those new subscribers who came on board during the Covid bump?
With more publishers chasing a relatively small number of consumers prepared to pay, this could become even tougher as the economy worsens and personal finances get tight. Cut-price offers and differential pricing are two likely outcomes. More platform support for subscriptions. This is already under way e. Podcasts is one area where there is scope for integration — opening up possibilities for publishers to create bundled print and audio subscriptions. The Covid shock has reinforced a view that the industry needs to break an unhealthy dependence on digital advertising, which is blamed amongst other things for encouraging clickbait, reducing quality, and creating a poor user experience.
Many argue that sustainable independent media require a different approach supported by multiple revenue streams. Our survey reflects this shift, with respondents indicating more attention on subscription and less emphasis on advertising since we last asked this question in It also shows how important diversification has become, with commercial publishers citing, on average, four different revenue streams as being important or very important to them this year. These mixed or hybrid models are beginning to produce positive results.
The Independent in the UK, which ditched its print edition more than four years ago, combines digital advertising, e-commerce, affiliate revenue, premium subscription, and a contributions model.
It has also been expanding into other languages such as Spanish. What can we expect in the year ahead? There is no silver bullet or single solution to the revenue conundrum but here are some areas of potential growth.
Publishers start to look more like retailers in Publishers are increasingly thinking about how they can get a chunk of this growth by curating content that creates the right intent to buy. Other publishers are looking to create new content verticals that can take advantage of the e-shopping boom.
BuzzFeed, for example, has created its own range of branded cooking products linked to its popular Tasty Brand. Early in BuzzFeed will be creating a Sex and Wellness vertical aimed at a GenZ and millennial audience and has already created the first of a range of sex toys. Publishers may also be able to benefit from the wider subscription trend which encompasses everything from music, entertainment, and learning to fitness, flowers, and food. Apple and other tech companies have been taking a cut of ongoing subscriptions for years but news organisations with scale and good data targeting may also be in a position to help retailers find the right customers.
Yahoo is one company that already offers special deals for Netflix and Peloton, handling the billing too, which helps increase the margins. Live events and community. Covid has required publisher event strategies to be rapidly rewritten with physical get togethers cancelled and activity moving online. During the pandemic millions tuned into live concerts, fashion shows, and inspirational talks. Meanwhile publishers have found that virtual events can be spun-up more quickly, with a lower cost base, higher profile guests, and a bigger audience than a physical event.
Either way we can expect to see greater professionalisation around the production and packaging of these events — as well as new features that help deliver more compelling online experiences.
Some Zoom fatigue will be inevitable in as our craving for human contact is rekindled, but as with so many other areas, the future is a likely to be a hybrid one. One consequence of the pandemic has been rapid innovation, as news organisations found new ways of remaking existing products or created entirely new ones in the face of changed demand. Companies have been forced to think outside the box on a range of issues, from online working to developing new formats.
Others point to examples of emboldened decision-making, with CNN launching its coronavirus podcast in just a few days — a process that might previously have required months of analysis and a long series of meetings.
The pace of innovation will remain strong this year as media companies accelerate their digital plans. Better user experience and design. Many of our survey respondents felt this was the year to put more emphasis on the core experience of websites and apps themselves, which increasingly lags behind consumer expectations. The stresses of coronavirus have left many burnt out by the rate of change. It can be easier to start new things in the heat of a crisis but harder to close them down.
For many media companies managing innovation remains a difficult and frustrating process. Finding ways to break down silos and get the best out of multi-disciplinary teams will be critical as publishers look to add agility.
Product managers help bring an evidence-based approach to the process of deciding which opportunities to pursue and a user-centred approach to delivery. Or are we in danger of setting up a new and unhealthy dependence? Increased payment by platforms for some news content is set to be one of the biggest media stories of the year. In the US this has involved paying some large publishers millions of dollars, 19 though critics say that many smaller news organisations have been left out.
These have already rolled out in Germany and Brazil with plans to expand to other markets. Content licensing and content curation by platforms.
In Australia new legislation has been tabled to force Google and Facebook to negotiate payment for using publisher content. The wider implications of all this activity on news consumption are not yet clear. Separating quality news content into tabs or apps might be good PR, but will casual users ever go there or will they instead stick to the newsfeed and organic search? Publisher solidarity comes under strain. As the deals become clear, we can expect more arguments between publishers over the criteria for selection of brands to be included and over the promotion of content by platforms.
This chart clearly illustrates that publishers still have very different views on how to deal with platforms. This is not surprising given the growing divergence of both strategies and business models, but it does also suggest that a united front will be hard to maintain across and beyond.
These programmes include product initiatives, innovation funding, and support for independent research. The threat to human life has also prompted platforms to take a more robust approach to removing misleading content in the last year.
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube removed posts shared by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for including coronavirus misinformation that violated their rules on harmful content. Despite these initiatives, news organisations continue to rate platforms poorly when asked about their support for journalism overall.
Only a third of our respondents rated Facebook and Twitter between 3 and 5 on a five-point scale that measured their commitment to journalism, with even lower scores for Apple, Snapchat, and Amazon. Scores were similar to last year, with the exception of Facebook which showed an improvement of eight percentage points. Some would like platforms to take a more proactive approach to prioritising reliable news and original journalism.
Others highlight the need for tougher action on hate speech and misinformation, with more funding for fact-checking and misinformation initiatives across multiple platforms. This could help publishers to target their marketing spend and operate more effective dynamic paywalls. Others recognise the value of funding of news literacy and innovation but would like longer term commitments in these areas.
How can publishers help themselves? Some argue that, instead of waiting for handouts from platforms, publishers need to focus much more on putting their own house in order. The Washington Post is one company that is trying to change that with its own ad tech Zeus Performance which aims to improve speed of websites and the viewability of advertisements.
These alliances are becoming more critical at a time when publishers are still working through the implications of the demise of the third-party cookie, which is making it harder for advertisers to track and target their digital media spend. Apart from, in some cases, perhaps pressuring platforms to pay some news organisations for content, many governments will be advancing plans to legislate on aspects of online activity.
This will also involve a new regulator to oversee this complex area. Across Europe, platforms will face greater scrutiny from competition authorities limiting their ability to give preference to their own services, and leverage user data across different business areas.
In terms of journalism, governments and regulators will be closely monitoring the economic impact of Covid on the provision of both national and local news titles.
Tax relief on digital subscriptions has been a significant boost for many publishers and has now been applied in many countries, including the UK, 29 but there will also be pressure to implement more of the recommendations of the Cairncross Review, such as direct government support for public interest journalism and new institutions. Taken together these changes are likely to mark a significant new phase for the internet, with more regulation in general, more limits on free speech, and more protection for consumer rights.
Not all of these changes will necessarily be in the interests of all publishers. Despite this, our digital leaders are markedly more positive about government intervention this year. This change in sentiment could reflect confidence that governments are finally prepared to take bolder action to help publishers, as well as rising concern about the impact on journalism of unchecked conspiracy theories and other forms of misinformation.
The pandemic has come at a time when the cohesion of societies is increasingly under strain from rapid economic and technological change. Rising populism, protests over social injustice and inequality, falling trust in institutions, and the rise of conspiracy theories are some of the symptoms — and these have created a new set of circumstances for journalists to navigate. At the start, leading conservatives approved. What McCarthy and television were for journalism in the nineteen-fifties, Trump and social media would be in the twenty-tens: license to change the rules.
This history is a chronicle of missed opportunities, missteps, and lessons learned the hard way. The C. The next year, the Post shrugged off a proposal from two of its star political reporters to start a spinoff Web site; they went on to found Politico. The Times , Abramson writes, declined an early chance to invest in Google, and was left to throw the kitchen sink at its failing business model, including adding a Thursday Style section to attract more high-end advertising revenue.
More alarming than what the Times and the Post failed to do was how so much of what they did do was determined less by their own editors than by executives at Facebook and BuzzFeed. Who even are these people? She can also be maddeningly condescending. All the way through to the nineteen-eighties, all sorts of journalists, including magazine, radio, and television reporters, got their start working on daily papers, learning the ropes and the rules.
Rusbridger started out in as a reporter at the Cambridge Evening News , which covered stories that included a petition about a pedestrian crossing and a root vegetable that looked like Winston Churchill. In the U. Much the same applied in the U. Beat reporting, however, is not the backstory of the people who, beginning in the nineteen-nineties, built the New Media. Jonah Peretti started out soaking up postmodern theory at U. Santa Cruz in the mid-nineteen-nineties, and later published a scholarly journal article about the scrambled, disjointed, and incoherent way of thinking produced by accelerated visual experiences under late capitalism.
Or something like that. This type of acceleration encourages weak egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily. Media Lab. Peretti was in charge of innovations that included a click-o-meter. Its business was banditry. Abramson writes that when the Times published a deeply reported exclusive story about WikiLeaks, which took months of investigative work and a great deal of money, the Huffington Post published its own version of the story, using the same headline—and beat out the Times story in Google rankings.
Pretty soon, there were jackdaws all over the place, with their schizophrenic late-capitalist accelerated signifiers. Facebook launched its News Feed in Lists were liked. Hating people was liked. And it turned out that news, which is full of people who hate other people, can be crammed into lists. The Post winnowed out reporters based on their Chartbeat numbers.
At the offices of Gawker, the Chartbeat dashboard was displayed on a giant screen. These distinctions are lost on most readers. The ambitious news site Mic relied on Facebook to reach an audience through a video program called Mic Dispatch, on Facebook Watch; last fall, after Facebook suggested that it would drop the program, Mic collapsed. Every time Facebook News tweaks its algorithm—tweaks made for commercial, not editorial, reasons—news organizations drown in the undertow.
The fake news that roiled the election? A lot of that was stuff on Trending Topics. Last year, Facebook discontinued the feature. BuzzFeed surpassed the Times Web site in reader traffic in By , BuzzFeed employed a hundred and fifty journalists, including many foreign correspondents.
It still is. That May, Sulzberger fired Abramson, who had been less than all-in about the Times doing things like running native ads. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed purged from its Web site more than four thousand of its early stories. Not long afterward, the Times began running more lists, from book recommendations to fitness tips to takeaways from Presidential debates. The Times remains unrivalled.
It has more than a dozen reporters in China alone. That is the new skillset. There are new roles and responsibilities. If your job can be replaced by an algorithm, you have to question what you were doing in the first place to add value as a human being.
Now ask if the technology can enable you to do something better. One of the biggest skills journalists are going to need is to be entrepreneurial—I mean that in the broadest sense—to understand the diversity of journalism.
There is an over-abundance of information in the world at the moment, and too much of it is the same or of poor quality. One of the things that journalists are going to have to do is work out how they add value in what they do, day to day and year by year. That has only partly to do with the technology, of course. Is there a big skills gap?
Yes, definitely. The biggest conclusion in our JournalismAI report was that there is a huge skills gap, not just in that specialist tech knowledge, but in understanding the new systems: for example, what audience data might tell you about how you relate to the public and what you might do with that.
We designed it with journalists for journalists, because newsrooms told us that basic knowledge is needed before you can introduce the technology. As an industry, we are not good at thinking in that strategic, systematic way about the resources that our journalists need. From an industry point of view, the skills gap is also related to the lack of diversity. Journalism needs people with the skill of understanding different communities, identities, or classes.
It needs people with different life experiences and perspectives. We also need more people who understand science or law, for example. In this recent crisis we have seen the deficit of understanding when it comes to statistics, health science and epidemiology. In that sense, I would say, if you want to become a really successful journalist, study law, languages or science. Lawyers, for example, do continuous career enhancement or professional development.
Journalists often have fantastic experience and have developed great contacts and relationships, and yet they need to be retooled or refreshed. That is not just for the technology but for the new circumstances they are operating in.
Journalists need core human aptitudes such as curiosity, creativity and commitment. You have to believe in the ideal that your journalism is going to have some kind of impact.
To reflect back on society in its diversity, you have to have lots of different approaches, attitudes and skills. The idea of the hard-boiled hack is one useful myth.
Journalists can be helped by technology but they need to improve their human values, their emotional literacy. By that I mean understanding identity and practicing empathy. Not as a nice thing to have but as a central organising principle.
If you are going to try to connect to people, you have to be able to understand their lives. Understanding might mean at a human-interest level. It might mean understanding at an expert, curational level.
Understanding what people do with the news. There is so much room in this industry for different kinds of skills and competencies. The problem at the moment is the reverse. It has become demographically more homogenous.
The pandemic and related social change, such as the current protests around race, are having immediate effects but they will also change our lives in the long-term.
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