Re-thinking business models

have to believe in it, dedicate resources to it, have a person dedicated to it and give it time” . Neue deutsche Medienmacher/innen are now working with organisations in other countries to update the guide.

Re-thinking business models may mean new forms of financing or monetising content, or it may mean re-thinking the approach to co-operation. Some of the alternative forms of monetisation are touched on in the previous section: Correctiv benefits from a tax exemption and receives donations from citizens; and Domani is backed by a foundation. In this section, we describe how Telex in Hungary and Binge Audio have used crowdfunding, while AFP is reducing its dependence on its traditional clients through an agreement which will see Google pay for AFP content. Among the different forms of cooperation, Arena for Journalism (an organisation promoting crossborder journalism) provides an infrastructure for cross-border cooperation between journalists. Radioplayer leverages technology-sharing to achieve greater negotiating power and put competing domestic radio stations in a position to take on Apple and Google, e.g. in the case of radio in the car industry. Two projects financed by the European Commission are investigating new tools to mitigate investment costs for individual organisations, and to develop other new forms of monetisation and sharing. For some, co-operation will not be enough and it will require consolidation to take on existing challenges, including the issue of media pluralism. Both Thomas Leysen, Chairman of Mediahuis and Gilles Pélisson, Chairman and CEO of TF1 Group saw consolidation as inevitable. Whatever the model, there was consensus among all speakers that new models should not undermine editorial independence in any way.

New forms of monetisation

Veronica Munk described how she set up Telex in Hungary after she and 90 colleagues walked out on their previous employer (Index) over editorial independence. They founded Telex, which was based on a crowdfunding and advertising-based model. They raised through Facebook a few thousand euros within an hour and one million euro within one month of launching through crowdfunding. They currently have 49 000 contributors and an audience of 500 000, making it one of the largest news portals in Hungary, and one valued for its independence, the quality of its journalism and its financial and ethical transparency. Binge Audio has also used crowdfunding. It could finance a publishing venture that traditional publishers were not interested in, and this year published four books, mainly on gender issues with a feminist take. “We had an engaged community not only willing to pay, but eager to pay, ” Gabrielle Boeri-Charles explained. Monetising any format in the current environment is one of the biggest challenges and it is an area where Fabrice Fries, AFP CEO, said its organisation broke new ground as the first news agency to have signed a neighbouring rights agreement with Google (in November 2021). Unlike some other agreements, including in France, it does not mix elements of copyright and commercial services, but is purely about copyright. According to Fabrice Fries, it will diversify AFP’s sources of revenue, put Google

among AFP’s top five clients and help finance the training of its own journalists’ and their media clients in fact-checking.

Richer journalism through co-operation

A range of speakers presented different models of co-operation models, often under the cross-border angle (see above for the work of Correctiv on tax issues). Binge Audio, the podcast channel described in the previous section, has made co-productions with the BBC – on a programme called No Country for Young Women3 –, with RTS (Switzerland), and still works closely with an RTBF podcaster. The Leading European Newspaper Alliance was cited by several speakers as good practice. “It has demonstrated a faster and stronger way to investigate at a global level,” as Jean-Pierre Philippot of RTBF put it. Fabrice Fries of AFP also mentioned the pan-European newsroom initiative supported by the European Commission and led by AFP and dpa, whose concept is to pool resources for the 14 other participating smaller agencies from the EU and the Balkans. They will collaborate on exchanging news stories, on training and instilling a fact-checking culture. Brigitte Alfter, of the collaborative journalism network Arena for Journalism, stressed that her network is not just for collaboration on projects like the Panama papers requiring hundreds of journalists. It can be for teams of twenty or thirty partners or less, either on an ad hoc or a permanent basis, formally or informally. The concept is that each knows its own community best and together they can tell bigger stories to their own audiences that are enriched by each bringing their own facts, perspectives, prejudices and contexts. She described collaborative network journalism as a means of bridging the gap between the local and national, and local and European levels, and a contribution to pluralism. The goal is to build an infrastructure where journalists who want to connect can meet, connect the voices of citizens, reach critical mass and contribute to decision-making. It avoids reinventing the wheel and can take the work to another level. One example is a team of 25 journalists in 16 cities who, thanks to a grant, produced 60+ stories on affordable housing, which almost one million unique users have read. 4

Sharing technology, competing on content

Radioplayer is a non-profit radio station aggregator that makes radio available in cars and on devices. It is a pan-industry partnership aimed at growing listenership in national settings, but owned and operated by broadcasters. They share technical standards for the browser, the radio-discovery apps, and the back-end systems that power them, but broadcasters retain control over their own branding, streaming, and commercial deals. In short, partners “share technology and compete on content,” according to Lawrence Galkoff, General Manager at Radioplayer Worldwide. “We make sure that broadcasters can monetise themselves.” The partnership gives Radioplayer the strength and the metadata to talk to the automotive industry so that radio stays on the dashboard. “The biggest inhibitor for collaboration is the mindset. We need to change the mindset and see that other radios are no longer competitors but that they need to invest in collaborative platforms to compete against everybody else.” “Collaboration protects our language, our art, our music, plurality, our national identity and national employment”, he added. Christophe Leclercq, Founder of the Euractiv media network and Europe’s Media Lab, presented two projects/studies funded by the European Commission with a view to finding efficiency gains through pooling resources and new forms of content monetisation. One of the two projects funded by the

3 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p063zy3c 4 https://journalismarena.eu/use-our-data-make-your-own-housing-investigation/

Commission looked into the feasibility of a single user-facing branded platform in Europe to compete with Google News, and concluded that sharing across all forms of media would be the ideal. Yet, business models are too different: according to Leclercq, “an all-encompassing platform will not happen,” but a B2B2C platform concentrating on broadcasting (and in particular the public service broadcasters) is feasible. The project is also looking at tools which can act as building blocks in driving innovation and mutualising costs, at syndicating the work of freelancers through translated syndication of features, maximising the use of translation technology, and at a new concept for news agencies, where agencies would not only sell content to the media but would also buy content from the media and sell it to corporates. Corporates, unlike the media, do have money to spend on buying content. “If the agencies do not do that, the GAFA will, so let’s pre-empt them.” A separate strand of the work is data sharing in a common media data space: “data creates revenue, especially if it can be targeted

more.”

Changing mindsets on co-operation at national level

The examples above largely deal with cross-border collaboration, though the Radioplayer model combines both as it requires national radio channels to compete. Several speakers noted a perception that co-operation within borders is not possible where everyone is fighting for market shares. They argued that the industry needs to move on from this mindset in order to understand that the industry is not competing nationally, but has a common external competitor with the global digital platforms and other changing media consumption trends, these speakers stressed. Lawrence Galkoff of Radioplayer was one speaker who highlighted this challenge: “The biggest obstacle in sharing data is mindset. We all have the same aim. Collaboration should be a massive benefit; we should be thinking about where we can share things.” Jean-Pierre Philippot was also an advocate for this domestic cooperation: “we have to work more closely together between public service broadcasters, between newspapers and local players. We have the same competitors.” Greg Piechota of INMA made a similar point: “Smaller players need to recognise where they are actually in different segments. They can collaborate to use contextual targeting or team up in dealing with advertisers.” Examples cited during the Forum of how new forms of cooperation are already emerging or could be envisaged included national news organisations cooperating with local news organisations, and cooperation with cultural and educational players.

When consolidation can be an answer

In some instances, speakers underlined that co-operation may not be enough. Thomas Leysen, Chairman of Belgium’s Mediahuis argued that “continuing quality journalism needs a certain amount of scaling. This leads inevitably to a degree of consolidation, but it should not be at the expense of plurality.” He believes many medium and small-sized media firms will find it very hard to survive standalone or to make the investments that will be needed to invest in technology platforms and to attract people, including on the technology side. Gilles Pélisson of TF1 had a similar perspective, that is consolidation is the only way to make the technology affordable. “The GAFA have technical capacity in tens of billions and TF1 has tens of millions.” For him, consolidation is also an opportunity to build a French champion. Victoria Svanberg, President of Sweden’s NWT Gruppen, regards consolidation as an imperative in smaller countries. “It is necessary to survive” and the only way to afford the investment in technology.

The new environment also requires new skills in technology and data as well as journalism, a topic touched on by several speakers. Thomas Leysen suggested that smaller groups will struggle to attract those skills, while a consolidated international group can offer more interesting career prospects.