INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA WORLD REPORT 2017
An annual survey by Innovation International Media Consulting Group for the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers WAN IFRA
19 EDITION
th
EDITORS
MATTHEW BENNETT JUAN SEÑOR
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA WORLD REPORT 2017
LONDON, UK GROWTH STRATEGIES • DIGITAL • NEWSROOMS • DESIGN
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MENU TAPAS 7 / KEY FACTS ABOUT MEDIA WORLD The world is changing quickly
MAIN COURSES 56 / VISUAL CONTENT
20 / MEASURING MEDIA How greatcompanies analyse and act on data By Jessica Patterson
24 / GREY LADY
What content triggers a subscription By Ismael Nafría
28 / LOYAL READERS
How to turn costly readers into profitable members By Andrew Rolf
32 /DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE Why visual journalism now equals text journalism By Chiqui Esteban
36 / WORLD DOMINATION
How design can increase time-spent and revenues earned
40 / LATIN AMERICA MONEY
How news media brands in LatAm are finding new revenue streams By Álvaro Triana
59 / INNOVATION’S DECALOGUE FOR GOOD DESIGN
44 / OPPORTUNITY PROGRAMME
70 / NEW COINS
Transforming Victoria: How to launch a digital-first news brand By Sam Whipple
Six new revenue stream ideas By Marc Basté & Pedro Norton
48 / BROADCASTING CHANGE
74 / CUNNING & POWER
The shift from analogue to digital broadcast news By Tom Fredericks
From innovation to investment By Matthew Bennet
52 / INSIDE MINDS
How to move your news brand up the value chain By Pedro Norton
Why do readers read? By Ben Compaine
78 / MORE VALUE
82 / AGILE ATTITUDE
How to scale a media brand to build a global empire By Micaeli Rourke
How do you create a news start-up culture without gimmicks By Marc Basté
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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IINWR 2017 DESSERT 88 / THE NEW EUROPEAN
100 / GRUPO GLOBO
Why only niche news brands will survive By Jessica Patterson
96 / PRENSA LIBRE
How digital transformation will change a 90-year old newspaper By Eduardo Tessler
How to re-invent print as a bridge to a digital future By Chus del Río
90 / TIMES MEDIA GROUP
How to break newsroom silos and create information engines By Micaeli Rourke
104 / GULF DESIGN
A visual journalism Mecca By Juan Antonio Giner
COFFEE TEA 117 / STORY 114 / CULTURAL INVESTMENT 115 / COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
118 / ATTENTION 119 / SEGMETATION & PERSONALISATION
116 / BUSINESS MODEL
121 / TOP QUALITY 122 / PRINT VS DIGITAL 123 / EXPERIMENT
120 / CORE PRODUCTION & DISTRIBUTION
122 / WAN IFRA
124 / INNOVATION MEDIA CONSULTING
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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CONTRIBUTORS CHIQUI ESTEBAN INNOVATION consultant, senior graphics editor, The Washington Post, formerly with National Geographic, The Boston Globe, Público and lainformación.com. ÁLVARO TRIANA INNOVATION Consultant. Former Consultant at McKinsey. Expert in business strategy PEDRO NORTON INNOVATION consultant, former CEO of IMPRESA Group (Portugal). ANDREW ROLF INNOVATION consultant, former business digital director of www.theguardian.com. TOM FREDERICKS INNOVATION Consultant. Former Senior Journalist at BBC News. BEN COMPAINE INNOVATION consultant, former executive director of the Program on Information Resources Policy at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA. MICAELI ROURKE INNOVATION consultant. JESSICA PATTERSON INNOVATION consultant, digital native with passion for innovation, multi-platform strategy, photography, magazines;
ISMAEL NAFRÍA INNOVATION consultant, former editor at Prisacom and head of digital innovation at Grupo Godó.
JUAN SEÑOR INNOVATION partner. Formerly with PBS, CNBC, and the International Herald Tribune. TV journalist, London.
CHUS DEL RÍO INNOVATION consultant, director of Digital Branded Content, former head of content & innovation at Prisacom, former deputy editor at Diario AS, Spain.
JUAN ANTONIO GINER President and founding partner of INNOVATION. Former senior research fellow at Harvard University. Wales, UK.
MARC BASTÉ INNOVATION consultant, co-founder and CEO of Lexdir.
MARTA TORRES INNOVATION Partner and administrative director.
EDUARDO TESSLER INNOVATION consultant, formerly with O Globo, Veja, Zero Hora. ANTONIO MARTÍN HERVÁS INNOVATION consultant, former editorial design director at Recoletos, former deputy art director at Expansión, Unidad Editorial, Madrid. PABLO M. RAMÍREZ INNOVATION consultant, former infographic director at Recoletos, Madrid. MATTHEW BENNETT INNOVATION editor, editor and publisher of The Spain Report. SAM WHIPPLE INNOVATION consultant, former BBC News Change Coordinator working on digital and newsroom transformation
INNOVATION would also like to thank the following people for their kindness and generosity during the preparation of this year’s report: Annika Sapper, Deborah Withey, Ian Cockburn, Mariví Murchante, María Ángeles León and the Open Value Foundation, and Claude Erbsen.
EDITORS MATTHEW BENNETT bennett@innovation.media JUAN SEÑOR senor@innovation.media
COVER ILLUSTRATION DEBORAH WITHEY cheesepicklesstudio@gmail.com
DESIGN ANTONIO MARTÍN HERVÁS martin@innovation.media PABLO M. RAMÍREZ ramirez@innovation.media
FONTS (SOLIDO & ACTA) DINO SANTOS www.dstype.com
ILLUSTRATIONS PABLO M. RAMÍREZ ANTONIO MARTÍN HERVÁS ANNIKA SAPPER ISTOCKPHOTO
JUAN A. GINER President & Founder JUAN SEÑOR Vice President & Principal Partner MARTA TORRES Administrative Director & Principal Partner
Printed in Spain ISBN: 978-84-96076-26-6 Legal deposit: NA-1435/1999
CARLOS SORIA Chairman FRANCISCO GÓMEZ ANTÓN Honorary President (1930-2015)
headquarters@innovation.media www.innovation.media
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
INNOVATION MEDIA CONSULTING GROUP © All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders
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TAPAS
The world is changing quickly
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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MOBILE PEOPLE
7.5 5.0
billion people (5.5 billion over -14s)
billion mobiles
(2.5 billion smartphones)
“Unless you dream, you’re not going to achieve anything” Richard Branson INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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ATTENTION TIME
1,400 billion minutes online
60%
20%
on smartphones apps
just on the Facebook app
“Speed is the new currency of business” Marc R. Benioff INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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MOBILE PEOPLE MOBILE PEOPLE AD REVENUES
7.5 7.5 493 5.0 5.0
billion billionpeople people (5.5 billion over -14s) (5.5 billion over -14s) billion dollars globally in 2016 billion billionmobiles mobiles
+5.7%
(2.5 billion smartphones) (2.5 billion smartphones)
The most powerful element ingoing “Unless you dream, “Unless you dream,you’re you’renot not going advertising isanything” the truth totoachieve achieve anything” Bill Bernbach Richard Branson Richard Branson INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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US EMPLOYEES Newspaper
457,800
173,709
1990
2016
Internet 28.800 1990
206,396 2016
“The biggest impediment to a company's future success is its past success” Dan Schulman INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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DIGITAL & MOBILE Ad revenues 2017 (billion dollars)
Total digital ad
Total
202
40% 21%
Mobile ad “Ideally you'd want an industry where there's at least three or four entities competing” Elon Musk INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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FACEBOOK Q4 2016
1.86 billion users 1.74 billion mobile users
$8.81 billion total revenues
84%
mobile ad revenue
“Facebook is not just technology or media, but a community of people” Mark Zuckerberg INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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PRECISE ROBOTS Machine learning error rates Images
28% 26%
7%
Speech
“99% accuracy is a game changer” Andrew Ng INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
4%
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VISUALS
Video views Facebook 8 billion (2015)
Snapchat
10 billion (2016)
Daily photo shares Facebook Snapchat 2 billion
1.3 billion
“Just because you can measure everything doesn’t mean that you should” W. Edward Deming INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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USER GENDER TV Female 75% 73% Radio 41% 33% Print 44% 38% Online 83% 82% Social media 48% 55% Male
“A woman with a voice is by definition a strong woman” Melinda Gates INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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MAIN COURSES
Dive into some gourmet innovation experiences
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MEASURING MEDIA
JESSICA PATTERSON
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
patterson@innovation.media
HOW GREAT COMPANIES ANALYSE AND ACT ON DATA INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
Single metrics are no longer good enough, they don’t tell us enough about the link between news production and reader satisfaction. Working out which combined metrics are right for which model, though, is not easy.
S
ome news companies have increased their use of analytics, but not all have taken the leap. Different types of sites have different types of models and measure their success in different ways. “We have a tendency as editors and journalists to follow what’s known as single metrics, like page views, scroll depth, time on page”, says Jon Wilks, Chief Content Officer at Content Insights, a web analytics company headquartered in Bulgaria: “All of which are increasingly known to be misleading”.
Publishers find metrics difficult for several reasons. For those with advertising business models, it is difficult to measure the impact on sales, based on users who saw a digital ad. Proving a return on investment is hard. Gathering data and acting on it, though, are two different things. Most publishers gather data, but not many know how to learn from it, and it needs to be tied to goals and key performance indicators. Different business models have different aims and indicators. A page view, for example, records a technical occurrence: it doesn’t tell you anything about
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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MEASURING MEDIA
audience behaviour. Scroll depth tells you how far someone has moved down your page but it doesn’t tell you if they’ve stopped to look at it. “Then (publishers) looked at time spent on page”, Wilks adds: “but it’s the same thing. On its own, it just tells you that somebody opened a browser and left it open. They could have gone and made a cup of tea or something”. So what do publishers need to measure? It depends on those goals. Ad-based media outlets generate revenue from advertisers and marketers with different platforms and formats, offering content for free to consumers, and aiming to draw in high amounts of traffic. Subscription-based models which seek to generate revenue directly from the consumer, should focus exclusively on their relationship with those consumers. Other news organisations might have a mix of revenue streams, and so need to measure a range of data related to different goals. Increasingly, the answer is to shift from single measurements like page views and clicks to a combination of metrics and the relationships between them. At The New York Times, data scientists have found that a reader’s frequency, depth and breadth of engagement are the behaviours most likely to indicate future subscription behaviour. Shane Murray, VP of Data Analytics and Platforms, says it’s all about “active days on our web and app properties”. “Depth, measured as the number of stories and screens viewed, reflects our goal to help readers get the most out of each visit to The Times, from breaking news and live event coverage, to in-depth, investigative reporting and visual journalism. Breadth, measured as the distinct number of topics read, reflects the range of news, opinion, feature and lifestyle coverage accessible to our readers via desktop and mobile home screens.”
Those measures correlated with an increased likelihood of subscribing. At Bloomberg, they focus on revenue: did they hit revenue goals by the end of the year? M. Scott Havens, global head of digital at Bloomberg, says the company tracks ARPU (average revenue per user), which measures how much money the organisation makes on each individual. It tells them how much a user from Facebook is worth versus a user from Google search. “We certainly connect our audience insight with financial metrics”, Havens said: “Overall, our metrics tell us that our Bloomberg audience is engaged, educated, affluent and older”. But they don’t just track one metric. “That would be shortsighted, because you want to build loyalty over time”, Havens says. He looks at audience insight and tracks behaviour and loyalty: “Are they signing up for a newsletter, are they downloading a podcast, did they register on the site?”. “I’m looking at things like newsletter subscriptions, how many touch points, how many registrations.” Content Insights has an algorithm that measures and compares metrics
“FOR EXAMPLE, THE SUCCESS OF A NEW DAILY BRIEFING MIGHT BE MEASURED PRIMARILY BY ITS IMPACT ON READER FREQUENCY”, SAYS SHANE MURRAY, VP OF DATA ANALYTICS AND PLATFORMS
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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MEASURING MEDIA
across pages. “We’re noticing that something we call scored metrics is the best way to go”, Wilks explains: “which is where you take each of those single metrics, but you’re measuring them against each other and looking at the ratios between them to try to understand behaviour”. “We look at 30 different metrics at any one time to see if that person scrolled, is there a suggestion they’re staying around that part of the page, looking at the word count on the page to see what the average amount of time it would take to read them, try to work out a sort of level of engagement that nobody’s really seen before.” While ad-based news publishers need to be looking at reach and engagement, subscription companies should look for loyalty and interest, he says: “metrics that would suggest that, like time spent on page and the amount of time that a reader comes back regularly”. At The New York Times, those measures are fed into the editorial process. “For example, the success of a new daily briefing might be measured primarily by its impact on reader frequency”, says Shane Murray, VP of Data Analytics and Platforms: “Additionally, on product and revenue initiatives we track outcomes such as new subscriptions and viewable ads, so that we can assess the direct revenue impact”. The Reuters Institute 2016 report on analytics suggest that page views, clicks and uniques “serve as currencies” for advertising-based news organisations. There is a danger, however, in any race for reach and ever-increasing traffic. “I think fundamentally, there needs to be a shift in how we work with advertisers”, Wilks adds: “The ad industry needs to use standardised metrics in a way to try to understand what they’re getting. Because the page click, the clickbait model does them no favours either,
because all they’re paying for is high numbers of browsers being opened”. Havens says there is less pressure to deliver media financial performance at Bloomberg Media because they’re not trying to eke out revenue gains, and there is a strong corporate culture of quality journalism. “From editor-inchief John Micklethwait down, there is a belief and culture here of getting the story right and doing it without sensationalising it,” Havens said. “They’re writing first and foremost for professional investors, traders and bankers. Anybody trying to create clickbait, it’s not looked kindly upon.” Some publishers are starting to look at attention metrics. Speaking to eMarketer, Keith Grossman, global chief revenue officer at Bloomberg Media, said, “We’re experimenting with all of the standard attention metrics, such as cost per minute or cost per hour”. Understanding where audiences are spending their time on news sites is valuable insight. Without it, publishers aren’t able to interact with these people or join the conversation, or sell ads around topics their audience is passionate about. Understanding behaviour will give publishers insight into how people consume content, and help publishers find new stories and new audiences. Ad-based and subscription-based news models need to understand their audiences and their different goals, and define and use metrics that make sense for them. Increasingly, this also means hiring great data and analytics talent, Bloomberg’s Havens says: “As far as translating analytics data for editors, it’s important to teach them why focusing on data matters […] and very helpful to have an analytics team or person that can simplify and breakdown the data”. x
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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GRAY LADY
ISMAEL NAFRĂ?A
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
nafria@innovation.media
WHAT CONTENT TRIGGERS A SUBSCRIPTION The New York Times Times already had a great subscription mentality. The US election provided a huge boost.
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GRAY LADY
O
n a rainy Saturday in March, the New York Times held its traditional SXSW event in Austin, Texas. At the Belmont, one of the most emblematic buildings on 6th Street, The Times managed to attract—despite the bad weather—hundreds of people interested in listening to some of the paper’s journalists and managers. One of the sessions, titled “The Future of The New York Times”, was attended by the editor, Dean Baquet, and Chief Revenue Officer Meredith Kopit Levien. They spoke at ease and at length about the past, present and future of the paper’s business. Levien explained one of the key ideas that inspires the whole New York Times team: not only that “today we are a world class news brand” but also that “we have an opportunity to be also a world class consumer brand”. Such ideas have never really been a part of the newspaper world, but the future of The Times is linked to it, and that has consequences. “Our economics depend on having a direct relationship with our users. And that is the most important thing we can do”, she continued, explaining the company is moving towards a relationships model: “We are hard at work at restoring news to being a relationship business. And in a relationship business, the value to the user on the other side increases every time they interact with you”. An essential element of this concept is subscriptions. The Times launched digital subscriptions in 2011 and since then has added tens of thousands of new subscribers each quarter. After decades as an ad-based business, in 2012 the combined income generated by print and digital subscriptions, along with sales of the print edition, was greater than print and web ad revenues. In the middle of 2015, the company broke the one million subscriber barrier. In 2016, subscriptions skyrocketed thanks to “the Trump effect” and the president-elect’s ferocious attacks on “the failing @nytimes”. In the second half of the year, 292,000 subscribers joined, compared to 184,000 for the whole of 2015.
By the end of 2016, The Times had a million or so print subscriber, 1.6 million digital subscribers and another 245,000 crossword subscribers. Just two months later, 2.85 million total subscribers had become 3 million. Levien said in Austin that such a state of affairs is a very optimistic place to be: “It took us four years to get to our first million paying digital subscribers; it will take us half that time, maybe less than half that time to get the next million, and we are now running the largest paid model for journalism in the digital world”. CEO Mark
27
GRAY LADY
Thompson said at the end of 2016 that the paper hopes to reach 10 million subscribers over the next few years. That means thinking differently about how to reach new audiences, create value and measure what’s happening. In the beginning, the strategy was to launch dozens of subscription offers at different times of the year, or targeted at different groups. More recently, the vision of how best to go about that has changed. In February 2017, The Times launched two new ideas: a joint subscription programme with Spotify: $120/year for an All Access pass to paper as well as Spotify Premium, and a subscription sponsorship programme which now allows 1.3 million students to read for free, thanks to donations from 15,500 people. One anonymous donor gave $1 million. In terms of content, a subscription business means orienting the product more towards users than advertisers. Products beyond journalism, which enrich the lives of users, must be added to the overall mix. The Times launched Cooking, full of recipes, Well, about health and well being, and Watching, about TV, series and films. “Journalism that stands apart”, the paper’s new strategic report, talks about how to measure it all. The internal data group is working on something a bit more sophisticated than page views. “The data and audience insights group is in the latter stages of creating a more sophisticated metric than page views, one that tries to measure an article’s value to attracting and retaining subscribers. This metric seems a promising alternative to page views.” “To repeat”, said the report: “The Times is a subscription-first business; it is not trying to maximize pageviews. The most successful and valuable stories are often not those that receive the largest number of pageviews, despite widespread newsroom assumptions”. In 2016, The New York Times generated $441.7 million in digital income, 28.4% of the total. Digital subscriptions were responsible for $232 million of that, beating the $209 million in digital ad revenue. They are aiming for $800 million in combined digital subscription and ad revenue by 2020. If they reach the target, managers believe they will be able to fund their current journalism ambitions. If they fail, The
AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT OF THIS CONCEPT IS SUBSCRIPTIONS. THE TIMES LAUNCHED DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTIONS IN 2011 AND SINCE THEN HAS ADDED TENS OF THOUSANDS OF NEW SUBSCRIBERS EACH QUARTER
Times will have to cut its costs to try to balance the cheque book. To get there, they are hunting for subscribers outside of the United States. At the end of 2016, foreign subscribers were just 13% of the total, and now they are investing $50 million over three years to increase their presence in other markets like Australia and Canada, or the Spanish-speaking market with The New York Time en Español. The Times is a clear example of how much readers value trustworthy, quality information when there are important news stories to follow. Donald Trump is one example. When your business depends on your readers, as Baquet said in Austin, you can’t build a bad product. “The only way the NYT can make it and be great“ is if “we are way, way better than everybody else.” Asked if Trump had helped them in 2016, Baquet replied: “He has, without a doubt, he has”. Covering the Trump presidency has become “really exhilarating”. The transformation of The Times’ business model over the past few years is a mirror in which many other outlets can observe themselves in. The paper has been a reference for quality. The key message is that a deep relationship with readers is the key to success. Levien wants “deeply engaged people experiencing the NYT”. That’s where revenue is already coming from. x
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LOYAL READERS
ANDREW ROLF
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
rolf@innovation.media
HOW TO TURN COSTLY READERS INTO PROFITABLE MEMBERS
Typography and fonts have come a long way since the 15th Century and Gothic type. Digital advances allow designers to give free rein to their imagination online, but they must temper it with respect for readers and the principles of readability
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oining a newspaper. Subscription and membership are often spoken of in the same breath but they are completely different, with different business models and different customer expectations. Many publishers have failed to realise this. To succeed, you need to understand two things; the value your proposition offers and what the audience expects from it. Knowing your value proposition is what keeps start-up founders awake at night (and rightly so), and it should be no different for the senior managers at news publishers. It’s easy to get caught up in the legacy of the paper’s title and the marketing hype of strap lines, but these are largely meaningless to your audience. They certainly aren’t the foundations of a successful growth strategy. Established news publishers don’t have the luxury of time to alter the course of their super tanker-like businesses because of a perfect storm of declining circulation, falling ad revenues and competition from Facebook, Apple and Google. The secret when there’s so much choice is to develop products that don’t just attract audiences but foster a sense of loyalty, and the highest expression of loyalty to a product is to subscribe to it, which is why it is so important.
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LOYAL READERS
Historically, subscriptions offer the publisher and the subscriber convenience and predictability. The publisher is willing to trade a little revenue, in the form of a discount or a gift, in return for the reader’s commitment to purchase. “[Subscriptions are] like the bond that keeps giving” says Kerin O’Connor, CEO of weekly news digest magazine The Week: “get it right and your subscription revenue keeps growing like compound interest”. By understanding the motivations of their subscribers, their purchasing paths, renewal cycles and how likely they are to let their subscriptions lapse, O’Connor’s team have a handle on the lifetime value (LTV) of their subscribers, giving them a degree of financial security when looking to the future. The Week can accurately predict how much revenue each subscriber will yield from the point at which they take out their initial subscription. It is wise to separate the worlds of print subscriptions from digital. Print subscriptions are held by an ageing readership, and many have returned to the printed format following recent geopolitical events that demand high quality journalism. The election of Donald Trump and the resulting friction between his office and the press has had a beneficial effect on many newspapers; The New York Times added 276,000 digital subscribers and 25,000 print subscribers in the last quarter of 2016, taking their combined subscriber base above 3 million.
This may work for titles like the New York Times, but it isn’t a guarantee that all audiences are going to warm to the idea of paying for their content. In 2015, Murdoch’s Sun reversed its decision to get online readers to pay for content because only 225,000 had signed up. David Dinsmore, News UK’s Chief Operating Officer, and a former Sun Editor, told The Drum in June 2016 that: “we are the first to admit that The Sun, the mass market product, struggles in [a paid online subscription] environment”. There’s an argument that an audience fed on headlines such as “Up Yours Delors”, or more recently “Up Yours Senors” is never going to pay for lowbrow content online when there so much of it available for free on social media. The Sun wisely changed direction and is banking on betting and holiday offers to drive revenue from an audience reluctant to part with money for its content. By contrast, membership implies belonging, a club, a shared experience, the ability to identify with other members, a badge of honour. Membership is still an emerging concept among newspapers, who have interpreted it as a live event offering, often bundled as part of a traditional subscription. There is more fertile ground among magazine audiences, where there are more obvious common themes than in the news agenda, but this is still in its infancy. The 125-year old title Cycling Weekly has developed a calendar of 80 mass-participation
LIKE THE INCREASE IN NEW YORK TIMES SUBSCRIPTIONS, THE CHALLENGE WILL BE TURNING A SPIKE INTO A SUSTAINABLE TREND
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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LOYAL READERS
and apps, a programme of self-improvement and skills training called Masterclasses, a call for donations, and an ability to sign in. All from a title that isn’t (yet) charging anyone to read its journalism. There is plenty of potential and the challenge for the Guardian’s Managing Director of Membership, David Magliano, is to bring all of this together into a coherent pitch for customers.
bike rides (known as “sportives”) for its readers. Steve Prentice, managing director of cycling at Time Inc, told the Press Gazette: “Cycling Weekly Sportives are among the fastest-growing and we intend to build on their popularity”. The weekly free magazine, Stylist, returns to London for a third year this November. It will offer a festival of shopping, talks, fashion shows and performances for women and they’re expecting over 20,000 people to pay between £15 and £95 per day at the three-day festival. When it first launched four years ago, The Guardian’s comprehensive membership proposition created waves by offering three things: a physical space owned by The Guardian, a series of live events facilitated by the newspaper, and a desire to establish a series of communities. The proposal differed by offering readers the opportunity to get behind a story, a chance to hear the debate between journalists before the ink hits the paper. The project’s aspirations were dogged first by the challenges of converting a derelict building to become a showcase events venue; the idea of a single building in London was at odds with The Guardian’s aspiration of reaching a global audience. Spiralling costs meant the events space became an early casualty of the paper’s cost-cutting programme, compounded by a lack of events outside London. The biggest challenge to the membership concept has been a confusion of competing messages; there are three tiers available, a separate subscription offering across print, iPad
He described the challenge in a recent interview with Marketing Week: “What I consider myself doing is trying to find a sustainable business model for quality journalism, finding a way for Guardian readers to help fund our journalism without having a pay wall, so what had been an opportunity for incremental revenue has now become a central part of our strategy. There are some encouraging signs that readers are responding to The Guardian’s call for financial support: over 200,000 people have signed up after an extensive programme to test different messages. Like the increase in New York Times subscriptions, the challenge will be turning a spike into a sustainable trend. The only person who doesn’t appear to be sweating is Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Digital subscriptions are up 145% and site traffic from loyalty-driving email newsletters is up by 129%, but the Post is guarded about the actual numbers. Its success can be traced to a comment made by Jeff Bezos following Amazon’s purchase of the Washington Post in 2013. “We have to be reader-focused, not selffocused or advertiser-focused, and that we need to also figure out how to use the gifts that the Internet gives us, at the same time that we are acknowledging that there are many things the Internet has disrupted in this business.” This is the nub of what makes subscription and membership work: not just understanding what readers want, but a relentless, ruthless obsession with what they really value. x
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DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
CHIQUI ESTEBAN
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting Group, Washington
esteban@innovation.media
WHY VISUAL JOURNALISM NOW EQUALS TEXT JOURNALISM Some newsrooms are still not doing online graphics, but there is a strong case to be made in 2017 for creating independent visual departments capable of running their own news agenda.
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DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
W
hat do graphics departments do?” is a question that has never had a direct, definitive reply. If you asked 20 years ago, the limits between design, production and infographics were pretty blurred. Many small or medium-sized newspapers had, and still have, infographics experts who also do design. Over time, and as digital first became the norm, that question went unanswered. Graphics departments have often been at the forefront of technological development because they have had to learn how to use so many new technologies, from new software programmes to 3D illustration. They dealt with the challenge in different ways: to begin with, many outlets had separate print and online graphics shops, others went for full integration, and a third group started out separate only to converge later. 20 years later, some places still aren’t doing online graphics. In such a competitive environment, however, media companies cannot allow themselves not to use graphics as a tool. It is a format that allows them to differentiate themselves from their competition, explain news stories properly, and drive traffic, time spent on page and subscribers. Before we answer the first question, though, we must answer another, more basic, one: what is a graphic? If we use the old definition— anything that isn’t text, photos or video—we miss out on the chance to demand the most from skilled graphics workers. If we want to get the very best from them, we want a “visual stories department”, which would be a proactive area of the newsroom that is able to propose its own stories and run its own news agenda, just like national, business or sports. It might also support other sections, but that would not be its main aim. A visual department that is nothing more than an add-on to serve others means graphics are subservient to text and will never be fully developed. A proper visual department means you need journalists with visual skills, not just people who know how to use a piece of software, and the section needs to be at least as big as the others. Visual journalists must be able to create stories from start to finish, from reporting to the creation of visual elements and publishing. At larger newsrooms, we might even have the
luxury of specialists in different areas, but in the same way a journalist in another section needs to know how to investigate and write a text, a visual journalist must be capable of independence. Once we have established the independence of the visual department, that is able to generate its own stories and run its own news agenda, there are two other things that need fixing. Firstly, the question of who edits visual projects. While copy editing can be done by a central department, visual project editors should come from the same department, and fully understand visual language and references, although this doesn’t preclude visually-educated journalists from other sections overseeing projects. Secondly, we need to deal with the question of service graphics, or graphics for others. Small graphs, local stuff that is part of the day-to-day routine for infographics experts everywhere. These images are used to explain news stories and are often key elements for readers, but they rarely attract traffic or subscribers by themselves. Some outlets, like The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR or Quartz, have chosen to create their own tools to try to automate the process as much as possible. This frees up graphics time and allows reporters to do their own minor visual elements. And that means everyone can work on bigger projects that do generate revenue. So if we want to do all of this, but we cannot for practical reasons have a full, large visual team, what we need are journalists with basic design and coding skills. As we grow, we can hire specialists who focus furhter
ONLINE COMES BEFORE PRINT. IT IS, AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE, VERY RARE FOR A PROJECT TO WORK THE OTHER WAY ROUND, AND PRINT GRAPHICS WILL ALWAYS BE MORE LIMITED, GIVEN SPACE, COLOUR AND INTERACTIVITY REQUIREMENTS
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DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
TRADITIONAL PROCESS
VISUAL STORIES PROCESS
Journalist He works on a story and needs graphics support
Graphics Artist She suggests stories, which is developed as a team
Graphics Artist She works on the visual elements
Graphics Artist & Journalist When necessary, they work with specialist journalists on documentation
Editor He edits and approves visual elements
Graphics Editor Edits and approves visual elements
The visual elements are placed on a page next to the text
Online The visual elements are placed on a separate page, with a link from the story
more on reporting, code or data analysis. The section must also help develop work on video, photography and design multimedia projects. When the visual department is big enough to start doing its own stories, its make up will change and we must then think about the following three factors. First, it must be well staffed, with the crew able to spend time building stories out instead of just illustrating those of others. Second, we need to think about the skills of those employees: they must be journalists first, not artists, who are able to publish digital graphics. They don’t all need to be code wizards, because a lot of online graphics nowadays are static, but they do need to know how to publish them, make them responsive and include a minimum level of interactivity where necessary. Online comes before print. It is, and will continue to be, very rare for a project to work the other way round, and print graphics will always be more limited, given space, colour and interactivity requirements. This means it
Text and visual elements can be in two blocks or combined
Online One page contains all the information, mixing text and visual elements
is better to develop ideas online first, without the restrictions of print. All of this, of course, might mean additional investment, which might then put some news companies off. But if we accept media outlets must strive towards providing their readers with caviar journalism, to convince them to pay for a subscription; if we believe new advertising priorities are moving away from simple questions of volume; or if we believe we must offer different content than our competitors do, then we cannot just build a small visual department. It is going to generate new stories for you, so you must be prepared to let them develop stories over time, just like textbased reporters do. Stop thinking about graphics departments as just another way of supporting or illustrating text stories. We need visual journalism departments, and that means journalism comes first. It is all about finding the best language to tell stories, and then experimenting; about building more visual, more personal and more interactive journalism, because that is what readers are evolving to expect. Quality and differentiation should be our standards. x
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WORLD DOMINATION
MICAELI ROURKE
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
rourke@innovation.media
HOW TO SCALE A MEDIA BRAND TO BUILD A GLOBAL EMPIRE Some private media companies have decided to expand globally again, after years of retrenchment, but they are not the only ones. State-controlled operations also want their opinions heard.
“T
he business of journalism looks a lot like a game of Risk right now, as media companies are angling for position with new sites and bureaus around the globe.” Justin Ellis, Nieman Lab, September 2014. Now it looks more like a Monopoly board with too many chips in play.
After a period spent closing foreign bureaus and “calling home the troops”, some large Western media organisation are re-establishing their global presence with international bureaus in order to secure digital relevance in lucrative foreign markets. Broadcasting and mobile formats are searching for Millennials: future loyal customers. Major state-run media organisations are expanding into international markets to promote their national agendas in a global arena and earn recognition and global relevance. 1. THE NEW YORK TIMES The New York Times has a new worldwide enterprise, NYT Global, plans to open a new Australia bureau and has already launched a Spanish edition, after doing a (quickly censored) Chinese version in 2012. The plan to open a full news bureau in Sydney, Australia garnered significant attention. Why Australia? Aside from a pre-existing readership and loyal subscriber base, there are obvious language and cultural similarities that make things slightly easier. The Times
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thought Australians could do with a greater variety of global news coverage, after decades of domination by Murdoch owned properties. The newly-appointed Aussie bureau chief, Damien Cave, told Nieman Lab it was a “promising experiment”, and the paper plans to invest more than $50 million in the effort until 2019.
QUARTZ: 61% OF ITS READERS HOLD EXECUTIVE LEVEL POSITIONS
NYT en Español dates back to 2015, when they began translating daily articles into Spanish. As well as the full articles, there is also a twiceweekly Spanish-language newsletter, Boletín. The target market is, broadly, South America, as well as Spanish speakers in the United States. Based in Mexico City, the plan is to translate 10-15 articles a day, a mix of news and opinion, whilst also generating original Spanish language stories.
known for its conservative coverage of American politics is staking a claim across the Atlantic, with websites in the UK, France and Germany, in English, French and German. The Economist noted in December 2016 that, while the approach may seem “oddly international for a brand that scorns the idea of a global order”, Breitbart wishes to move “into markets where it can win an audience by appealing to antiglobalisation and anti-immigrant sentiment and by aligning with an existing opposition party”. The New York Times quoted Breitbart EditorIn-Chief Alex Marlow as saying expansion to both France and Germany was related to the elections there, aiming to serve “an underserved readership”: “The same readers who had been ignored in Britain and had been ignored in the United States”.
2. VICE MEDIA: VICE has gone from being a nonconformist Montreal punk ‘zine in the 1990s to a new kid on the digital block to a mature, corporatebacked competitor to all of the major news conglomerates in one capacity or another. In June 2016, CEO Shane Smith announced new ventures with Mumbai’s Times of India and Dubai’s Moby Media Group, to create digital newsrooms embedded within both companies, inserting VICE to relevant positions in Indian, Middle Eastern, and North African markets. VICE will produce its own content as well as share distribution with both groups. Television broadcasting has been behind the remarkable global expansion, with the advent of VICELAND, a multi-national channel owned and run by VICE. Programmes range from reality shows to their own style of documentary investigative journalism, food shows, LGBT programmes and even the retelling of political propaganda. It is all focused on Millenials. Last year, Smith announced the company would expand the product to 44 countries. VICE has successfully penetrated the youth news market better than any of its competitors, likely a product of its own youth in the field and no pre-existing historical focus on traditional coverage. The company did not need an institutional overhaul because there were no institutions to overhaul: it can just adapt to whatever its audiences like. 3. BREITBART NEWS While American liberals may shudder at the notion, the alt-right online news network
Breitbart is also set to expand its presence in Italy, and currently has one full-time journalist in Rome, yet it does not plan to start publishing in Italian. Unsurprisingly, trust in traditional political parties and media is lower than elsewhere in Europe. The American conservative outlet is betting their brand of incendiary coverage will influence the debate, and the polls. 4. QUARTZ Like VICE, Quartz’s short history and malleable business model make the brand suited to global digital adaptation. Founded as a business news site in 2012 by Atlantic Media, it is most wellknown for its popular daily email newsletter, the Daily Brief, and for its responsive mobilefirst design. Of the reported 20 million unique users per month, 47 percent of Quartz’s audience reads from outside the US, according to an October 2016 Digiday article. 44 per cent of advertising revenue was generated by “nonUS inventory last year”. An Indian edition was launched in 2012, an African site in 2015 (with freelance journalists working remotely from Nairobi, Lagos and Johannesburg), and there are 22 staff in London and another eight in Hong Kong. Quartz president and publisher, Jay Lauf, told
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The Guardian in March 2015 that the outlet’s “continued global expansion is a natural progression following a year of encouraging international growth”. In 2016, Quartz launched its first foreign language experiment: La Agenda, its Daily Brief newsletter in Spanish, aimed at readers in the Spanish-speaking world.
Saharan Africa, where the BBC will partner with local broadcasters to bring 30 news programs to the region.
Quartz’s growth is not comparable to something like Buzzfeed but it focuses on global executives. The company said in 2016 that 61% of its readers hold executive level positions. Will they be able to grab the attention of a new wave of Millenial executives?
6. CHINA, RUSSIA AND TURKEY In 2009, president Hu Jintao announced a $7 billion initiative to foster the global presence of state-run media including CCTV, Xinhua News Agency, and China Daily, numbers which astound most western media executives. A mere six years after Jintao’s announcement, a World Economic Forum report noted in August 2015 that “Xinhua News Agency currently has over 180 news bureaus globally, publishing...around the clock in eight languages. China Central Television (CCTV) has over 70 foreign bureaus, broadcasting to 171 countries and regions in six UN official languages. China Radio International, the world’s second biggest radio broadcaster after the BBC, broadcasts in 64 languages from 32 foreign bureaus, reaching 90 radio stations worldwide…”.
5. THE BBC WORLD SERVICE The sun never sets on the BBC. While VICE’s short history makes it more malleable to the industrial trends of news, more institutional news entities can keep up with younger companies in the race to global expansion. Even public broadcasters are trying. In November 2016, the BBC World Service announced its largest expansion initiative since the 1940s. Tony Hall, the BBC’s Director General has set a target of reaching 500m people worldwide by 2022. The new effort will bring the total number of broadcasting languages to more than 40, with the potential for over 250 million new listeners in India alone. The addition of 157 new jobs in northern India repositions Delhi as the largest BBC bureau outside of the UK. The BBC is increasing the scope of its television services worldwide, with a particular focus on Sub-
VICE HAS SUCCESSFULLY PENETRATED THE YOUTH NEWS MARKET BETTER THAN ANY OF ITS COMPETITORS, LIKELY A PRODUCT OF ITS OWN YOUTH IN THE FIELD AND NO PRE EXISTING HISTORICAL FOCUS ON TRADITIONAL COVERAGE
The British government has committed to a £289 million yearly budget increase through to 2020.
RT (formerly Russia Today), the Kremlinfunded international broadcast news outlet, has a mission of providing a Russian viewpoint on major global events, and has grown to have significant reach in the rest of the world since its creation in 2005. RT has added Arabic and Spanish networks to the original network English-language channel. The Englishlanguage version has split into RT America (in 2010) and RT UK (in 2014 ) with location-specific programming, rather than the broad global news it had previously been covering. In February of 2017, RT announced it would be expand its French-speaking operations. In the eyes of critics, RT and Sputnik are propaganda tools that seek to undermine Western democracy. TRT World, owned by the Turkish national public broadcaster TRT, is Turkey’s first English language international news platform, providing English news coverage 24 hours a day, seven days a week from Istanbul. The station began broadcasting in January 2017, via major satellite networks, to reach viewers in the UK, Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. By the end of the year, the channel aims to broadcast across 10 satellites allowing access in 190 countries on 6 continents. x
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LATIN AMERICA MONEY
Ă LVARO TRIANA
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
triana@innovation.media
HOW NEWS MEDIA BRANDS IN LATAM ARE FINDING NEW REVENUE STREAMS Many Latin American news companies are still struggling to come to terms with the digital business world. They need to do better compared to peers on other continents.
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ransformation is not an option but a requirement in order to be able to compete and serve your audience. Digital means rethinking workflows, organisational structures and the physical newsroom, as well as profound cultural change. You need new skills to produce the right content, for the right readers, on the right device, at the right time. So news companies need new revenue streams; relying on ads is not enough. Many have chosen to install hard or soft paywalls, or invest in specialist niche content because digital media outlets will continue to grow. By 2020, 35% of media industry income is expected to come from digital sources, according to the Media Flow of Funds report 2017. In most Latin American countries, most of the
money still comes from traditional platforms. Just 12%, according to the report, comes from other sources and will only grow by 4% by 2020. That is far below other regions such as North America, Europe or Asia, and it is still focused on business-to-business ad sales, not on generating consumer income. Mobile coverage in the main Latin American markets has increased, but structural conditions still limit other forms of digital access. eMarketer reported regional mobile penetration was up to 306.4 million users in 2016. With the exception of Brazil, people are not used to paying for digital news, so subscriber growth and paywall acceptance are very low. Publishers and media managers are skeptical about the chances of reader payments ever
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replacing advertising cash cows. No silver bullet has so far appeared to solve this problem. In fact, Latin America is still seeing growth in offline ads. “The paradigm of ad sales in traditional media outlets, where prices determine sales, versus fill rate at digital outlets, is still the norm in sales teams at companies”, says Guido Conterno, the executive director of the Grupo Diario de las Américas. El Nuevo Día, in Puerto Rico, is one of the few companies that have understood this properly. “On average, they have 60-70% of their web and mobile ad inventory full. There are no empty seats”, says Conterno. Companies are migrating towards, or acquiring, new market intelligence tools that allow them to build and understand customer segments, in order to be able to offer them more personalised products that fit their habits. Not many media companies in the region will be ready to take advantage of the spectacular 88% growth rate forecast for online income by the Media Flow of Funds report for 2020, unless they define their strategies, structures, processes and incentives. Newsrooms resist the total transformation of their processes due to a lack of conviction, interest or a lack of leadership skills. Younger digital-native leaders, who are currently still learning, will shift that balance over time. In that environment, however, there are some visionary companies in the region that have managed to redefine their business models with coherent digital strategies, allowing them to get ahead of the negative trend and hold on to their market leadership position. You can focus on business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C). Businessto-business means advertising and businessto-consumer means generating income from readers.
“QUALITY DIGITAL JOURNALISM DEMANDS INVESTMENT”, SAYS ARMANDO GONZÁLEZ, EDITOR OF LA NACIÓN IN COSTA RICA
SELLING ADS Programmatic ads as a percentage of the whole is a growing trend, either individually or via consortiums with other media companies. “Programmatic in 2017 is forecast to reach up to 20% of digital income”, says Andrés Daniel Rojas, the executive manager of Digital Informativos, part of the El Tiempo group in Colombia: “and it will focus mostly on international sales”. Mobile ads, mostly video, are also seen by company sales managers as an innovative way of adapting to the new platform. “Demand for video and native advertising, those are formats that have lots of potential in this country”, says Gervasio Márquez, sales manger at La Nación in Argentina: “Traditional display ads has just been through a bust. Mobile reached 8% of digital income in 2016”. Branded content is still at an early stage but is gaining traction inside companies, via specialist teams tied either to marketing departments or digital marketing agencies. At El Comercio in Perú, it is developed in “close coordination with the newsroom”, says Ricardo Fortes, the paper’s sales manager. “The use of data with greater segmentation from a DMP offers enough targeted ads for advertisers”, says Márquez: “without having to increase the development of vertical products”. “B2B is going to work on big data to do new projects and generate sales for advertisers”, adds Silvio Díaz, consumer knowledge manager at Infoglobo in Brazil: “by understanding the audience, you can offer a much more effective services to advertisers”. Combining e-mail newsletters with audience segmentation and content marketing is how El Comercio, in Perú, drives ad revenues. “The use of distribution platforms like Facebook, or editorial content aggregators, are used more to push a brand than to monetise directly”, says Fortes. SELLING DIRECTLY TO CUSTOMERS Paid-news models are a very attractive option, even if they are not very common in South America. Brazil is the only country in the region where this really works at the moment, with one in five Brazilian city dwellers ready to pay for news content in 2016, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report. Companies encourage digital subscriptions with hard or soft paywalls. Folha already has 150,000 online subscribers, via a flexible pay wall (the first five articles are free, and for the next five you need to be registered).
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LATIN AMERICA MONEY
ONLINE AND OFFLINE REVENUES IN THE WORLD North America Off-line Revenues € 0.8 bn On-line Revenues € 41 bn
Western & Eastern Europe Off-line Revenues -2 bn € On-line Revenues +41 bn €
26% (+8%)
29% (+7%) 74%
71%
16% (+7%)
12% (+4%)
30% (+6%) 84%
70%
Middle East & Africa Off-line Revenues +3 bn € On-line Revenues +2 bn €
88% LATAM Off-line Revenues + 4 bn € On-line Revenues +9 bn €
Asia Pacific Off-line Revenues +28 bn € On-line Revenues + 45 bn €
Offline share 2016
Online share 2016
Online share Increase 2016
Source: Arthur D. Little Media Flow of Funds database
“We have about 30% of digital subscribers”, says Sidney Zamel, B2C manager at RBS, the leading media company in Río Grande do Sul: “and we’re growing by 50% in 2017. 53% of our digital income now comes from B2C. Our strategy is less and less about free local content”. At Infoglobo, “we already have 45,000 digital subscribers and we hope to double that figure by the end of 2017, with new digital products and a more precise audience segmentation”, says Silvio Díaz. Companies are experimenting with freemium and some, like RBS in Brazil, charge for online access to their columnists. LESSONS FOR PUBLISHERS After analysing successful cases, INNOVATION recommends companies in the region adopt a digital strategy that fits their DNA and their audience. A short, sharp transformation is preferable to a long, drawn out process. A one-time effort stops the newsroom and corporate teams from getting tired, or losing momentum and credibility. The process must be re-inventive, not corrective. Both newsroom and commercial operations must be changed deeply to bring them into line with the new digital era. Work
flows, resources, strategy, focus, talent mix, digital journalism and cultural change are all important. Marketing and sales teams need to be reinforced to be able to broaden value proposals to better segmented audiences and advertisers. Revenues must be reinvested in producing better quality journalism. “Quality digital journalism demands investment”, says Armando González, editor of La Nación in Costa Rica: “and that means having enough revenue to pay for it, which is what the world’s leading publications have understood”. “The aim is to win over a bigger and bigger audience, more targeted. Generating news and content at that density and volume is not cheap. There has been a very sharp fall in ad revenues. We must find digital consumers for our products”, says Ascanio Seleme, editorial manager at Infoglobo. The direct relationship with readers, turning readers into loyal customers, is the most attractive option for all media companies in the region. The challenge is to design editorial products that are both powerful enough to encourage people to subscribe and interesting enough to provide value for advertisers and segmented audiences. x
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OPPORTUNITY PROGRAMME
SAM WHIPPLE
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
whipple@innovation.media
TRANSFORMING VICTORIA HOW TO LAUNCH A DIGITAL FIRST NEWS BRAND BBC News discovered it was struggling to reach diverse and younger age groups. The solution it put in place created positive results by rethinking broadcast news.
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radtional television and radio audiences are ageing rapidly and diminishing in size while the under 30 crowd shuns broadcast media, preferring to get their information on mobile devices. How can media companies attract the quickest growing audience sector without sacrificing the quality of their radio and TV output? Innovation Senior Consultant Sam Whipple, a project manager for the launch of the BBC’s pioneering “digital first” Victoria Derbyshire programme, talked to the programme’s editor, Louisa Compton, about how the show managed to do just that. TV WASN’T BIG ENOUGH In 2014, BBC News was haunted by a chart that showed it was struggling to reach young people. It had 90% or more of the over 45s, particularly men in higher socio-economic groupings, but fewer than 60% of the under 35s, especially less well-off women from more diverse backgrounds. As a public service broadcaster funded by a universal license fee, that was not good enough. They turned to the Victoria Derbyshire radio programme, which had won awards for its success at engaging young and female audiences, and decided to make it a “digital first” programme. INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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“We felt we could take all those brilliantly innovative, creative ways of telling stories that you see on social media or YouTube and really exciting websites, and try to put them on TV and be the first to do that”, said Compton. Every film would be made to work on a mobile, films would be published online before TV, and audience discussion around stories would be encouraged before, during and after its publication. The TV broadcast became a significant moment within the lifetime of a story, not the whole thing.
REACH AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE The digital-first programme starts and ends with the target audience, which is unlikely to come to TV: the team would have to get their content onto platforms they use. The programme airs from 9-11 a.m., not exactly prime time. Most people, said Compton, are: “flicking through social media, flicking through YouTube on their lunch break, on the way to work, on their way to school, on their way to university, when they get home in the evening and it’s just common sense you want your stories to reach as many people as possible”. Millions would be able to access the programme for the first time, but only if it was interesting and they could trust it.
DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE AUDIENCE’S INTELLIGENCE A new relationship with the audience is needed. There would be no more talking down to viewers. Journalists would have to listen to and respect them. “They collectively will know more about stories than anyone in the newsroom can”, Compton explained. You have to talk their language and avoid jargon: “if your friends in the pub wouldn’t necessarily be comfortable using a term, then we shouldn’t be using it on air”. Look at how the programme responded when Victoria Derbyshire herself was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016. “We expect people to be really honest and to let us into their lives. So, when something like that happens, we felt, of course, we are going to do the same and tell people what’s going on.” Derbyshire published a series of video diaries and recounted every step of her treatment for the audience, in a very personal and revealing way. She shot them herself on her mobile and the videos reached over 14 million people online. She still gets messages from people thanking her for helping them get through the same treatment.
THE DIGITAL FIRST APPROACH WILL BRING YOU A BIGGER, YOUNGER, MORE DIVERSE AND MORE HIGHLY ENGAGED AUDIENCE
“That’s really good public service journalism,” said Compton.
THE GREATEST RESOURCE Story selection is critical. Understanding the audience helps to select interesting stories. The programme tries to select topics that are not normally covered but that are important to people. And a close relationship means the audience becomes your ally. “Our audience is the greatest resource we could ever have”, Compton explained: “They will come to us with the best stories”. In September 2016, a 19-year-old viewer posted a comment on the Facebook page, saying her tax credits had been stopped because she was supposedly married, but she had never met her “husband”, who would have been 74 had he not already died! The programme followed up and discovered the company administering tax credits had made hundreds of similar errors. Within hours of the story airing, British tax authorities had cancelled the company’s contract. Hundreds more victims contacted the programme and emergency questions were asked in parliament, quoting the programme. It was a major scoop and had a profound impact on the audience it was aimed at.
PUBLISH AT MIDNIGHT This close relationship with the audience creates a new lifetime for a story. A traditional news broadcast is linear: plan and gather information, produce the finished product, and broadcast. Once the story has run, it’s over. To develop the story, you have to wait until the next programme. In a digital first world, a story is cyclical and published well before the broadcast. Why would you release your scoop before your own
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programme? So that more people can enjoy the story. Some will watch the programme as well. The programme still wants to be first with the story, but they do not have a prime time slot: “We publish all our stories online at midnight so people can read the online text piece as soon as they wake up and they can watch our film in advance”, says Compton. Reader comments sometimes help to steer the broadcast version and live interview questions, and the live broadcast is still the most significant moment in the life of the story: an exciting showtime with its own drama. “Some of our live interviews have reached five or six million people on digital platforms and I am pretty sure that if we had pre-recorded them and turned them into a film they may not necessarily have reached that same audience.” As the drama unfolds on air, the team promotes it on social media and viewers’ comments are shared on screen. When the programme ends, clips of the best bits are uploaded, encouraging more people to join the debate and see the highlights. It is a virtuous cycle.
RIP UP THE RULE BOOK Many broadcasters move to digital as an afterthought, only uploading TV content produced for broadcast. A digital first programme makes every film look good on a mobile, which encourages creativity. This is how you ensure a digital or mobile first approach does not undermine your broadcast output. While classic TV might not work on a mobile, the reverse is not true: films created for mobile can look great on TV. You are not wasting resources: the content already created for broadcast is made available to many more viewers online. As an example, in December 2015, Derbyshire interviewed Shaker Aamer, a British citizen held for nearly 14 years at the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay. The full interview is 1 hour and 30 minutes, longer than you would ever run on television; most of it would have ended up on the cutting room floor. They posted the full interview on YouTube, where it has been seen 160,000 times so far, and over 50% of people watched it all the way to the end.
TAKE THAT RISK Anyone who has worked in broadcast knows it isn’t easy to get producers to change their ways. And it wasn’t. “The biggest challenge was trying to change people who’ve only ever worked
in TV and their pre-conceptions of what we should and shouldn’t do and to break down the choreography of TV”, said Compton. “It’s alright to rip up the rule book when it comes to TV”. It’s important, she explained to give them “the confidence to say ‘let’s just try it and if it doesn’t work we will reconsider’”. She instilled a learning culture, with a clear vision for the programme: everyone knew what they were trying to achieve. Innovation and failure are not to be feared; if it doesn’t work, you adapt and improve. Your digital audience provides instant feedback, so you can react quickly. Training and support are really important because some people need to learn new skills. For this programme, staff were trained on social media strategy, video journalism and creativity in storytelling. They were constantly pushed to improve and learn from each other. After two years, that approach is working: “I can see huge changes now from the way people operated when we first launched”.
DO IT YOUR OWN WAY Those changes have brought rewards. In its first two years, it has won a BAFTA for its coverage of the story of the abuse of young footballers. It has been nominated for five prestigious Royal Television Society awards and numerous others. It won one for young journalism and two Pink News broadcaster of the year awards for its coverage of LGBT issues.. “The judges praised the type of story and the way we tell those stories … we had reporters doing the kind of stories you won’t see elsewhere and presenting them in a way you wouldn’t see elsewhere and I think that makes a huge difference.” That approach works. In March 2017, the highest rated programme on BBC2 (the TV Channel the Victoria Derbyshire programme is broadcast on) was the prime-time car show Top Gear with 3.7 million viewers. The 86 news videos posted the same month by the Victoria Derbyshire programme have been seen 4.3 million times on its Facebook page, an average of 49,000 views per video. The digital first approach, far from damaging your broadcasts, will bring you a bigger, younger, more diverse and more highly engaged audience than your broadcasts ever will. Advertisers will take note because they look for bigger, more engaged audiences, which your more creative, innovative journalism is producing. x
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BROADCASTING CHANGE
TOM FREDERICKS
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
fredericks@innovation.media
THE SHIFT FROM ANALOGUE TO DIGITAL BROADCAST NEWS Legacy broadcasters are losing the distribution game whilst remaining important producers of primary content. They need to decide what they stand for. INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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onfused news broadcasters are living in troublesome times and some are struggling to keep up. Just as they thought they had a handle on how to integrate digital into their newsrooms, the goalposts have shifted again. Legacy outlets, such as those INNOVATION works with in Georgia, India and Colombia, initially take comfort in stagnant TV news audiences that neither grow nor shrink and, while no one is suggesting appointment-to-view TV news will disappear—yet—a new generation of news consumers is bypassing TV and even computers altogether, to watch what they want, when they want, on mobile phones. Formats, distribution and revenue all pose significant challenges. Social media channels domination is another problem, leading big broadcast news brands to create their own sub-outlets on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp or Snapchat in order to tap into potential audiences and a new generation of mobile news consumers. While a minority of broadcasters like the BBC, CNN and Sky News can get audiences to consume news on proprietary apps, others find that they can invest less in their apps and are forced to use social media channels and platforms to engage viewers and share content. Google and Facebook gobble up a huge share of the available advertising revenue, creating problems for commercial news broadcasters that public service entities do not have to deal with. In the global mobile ad market, they have market shares of 34.0% and 17.0%, respectively. As TV advertising starts to flatten out, broadcasters need to mobilise their newsrooms to create original, engaging mobile content so that audiences get what they need and want directly. Looking at advertising revenue predictions for India—a huge, fast growing market—it’s clear that broadcasters who focus on digital—and get it right—have the potential to significantly increase their revenues. Outlets like CNN and AJ+ are ahead of the game—and profiting financially—while other legacy broadcasters are still considering their options. They must move quickly to a mobile first news strategy. They have to master the art of turning their core content into effective digital and mobile material. Otherwise the results could be paralysing. One reason for such a historic level of inaction is that they have relied on sample audience
metrics to measure success. Advertising agencies use those figures to sell ads. Digital, however, brings much more measurable audience ratings, and many broadcast news operations have realised sample-led metrics are no longer really relevant: revenue and success can only be measured by actual views or hits. Other major reasons for inaction include a fear of change, with powerful TV anchors and editors resisting what they see as an erosion of their traditional platform. A 2016 Reuters Institute report noted that legacy broadcasters are still “very important news producers”, but “are becoming relatively less important as distributors of news and are under growing pressure to develop new digital business models as their existing operations decline or stagnate”. The report also observes, however, that “The most successful media today have digital audiences far larger than what they have historically been able to attract to their legacy broadcast offerings”. News broadcasters must work out exactly what they stand for and who their audiences are or they will not survive in this new hostile environment. The key is an editorial focus on story: by improving the quality of their ideas around stories, newsrooms can plan their production more effectively across different platforms. Story first, platform second, brand third. Newsrooms that do not plan their content carefully cannot function efficiently and audiences will suffer. Amazingly, in at least two of our major broadcast projects this year—in Georgia and India —there was no coherent, formal editorial planning operation. Unfortunately, they
THERE IS A HUGE PREMIUM NOW ON BEING WELL ORGANISED AND BEING ABLE TO PRODUCE CONTENT ACROSS PLATFORMS FOR ALL YOUR AUDIENCES
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SMARTPHONE USE FOR NEWS 50% USA UK France Japan 40%
Germany
30%
20% 2013
2014
2015
2016
Data from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2013-2016. Q8b. Which, if any, of the following devides have you used to access news in the last week? Base: Total 2013-2016 sample in each country.
TOP SOCIAL NETWORKS FOR NEWS Facebook YouTube WhatsApp Twitter Instagram
“The growth of online video is eating into the time spent with traditional television”, says Nic Newman in his Reuters Institute Journalism, Media, Technology Trends and Predictions 2017 Report: “but at the same time it is also providing new opportunities to deliver professional, high quality long-form content on any screen. Online services like YouTube, Vox and Vevo now hold their own ‘upfronts’ for advertisers in a bid to look like television while traditional companies like NBC are investing in the video operations of Buzzfeed and Vox.” NBC Universal CEO Steve Burke says the $500 million investment in Snap is part of a strategy to drive digital growth “both organically and through investments and acquisitions”. Video captures more attention (and more advertising) and provides more immediacy than other formats. And video and social mix well together. People like to share videos. The learning curve only gets steeper in the (uncertain) future. In 2015, talking about the Facebook news feed at the F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg said: “Fast forward five years, it’s going to be [mostly] video”, adding that “If you look out even further, it will be more immersive content like AR and VR”. That was already two years ago. The era of TV news bulletins is coming to a slow, painful end, and broadcasters must become relevant to a generation that is already used to bite-sized mobile content.
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are not unique. There is a huge premium now on being well organised and being able to produce content across platforms for all your audiences. A failure to plan properly at every level can have catastrophic consequences. TV, companies have lots of quality video production and expertise, but non-broadcast content producers are making more targeted and more popular video content. Vice News and The New York Times, for example. That means legacy broadcasters need to step up and reorganise their newsrooms to put mobile first.
Use for any purpose Use for news
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Broadcast newsrooms which have traditionally focused on TV need to continue to make great video but completely transform their processes so that mobile is their first priority. This means taking brave decisions and putting audiences first. Ignoring the reality of the mobile revolution taking place around the world will damage their relevance, reach and, crucially, their revenue. x
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BEN COMPAINE
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
compaine@innovation.media
WHY DO READERS
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Beyond articles or even stories, our minds are seeking four or five different types of satisfaction when they concentrate on a text or image.
READ?
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efore radio, TV, the internet and smartphones, newspapers were the prime source of news and information for most people. Headlines in 80-point type grabbed our attention. Stopping by our regular newsstands or picking up the newspaper delivered to our doorstep was a daily habit. That has gone now. A habit is a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up. A new generation with new devices and ways of connecting to the world is learning new habits. Reading a newspaper—either print or online—is not necessarily among them. Attention is the behavioural and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information while ignoring other perceivable information. Working out what is going on with readers’ ultimate aims and how attention patterns are shifting is not so easy. The Times of India defined five reasons why we read newspapers, five things readers are trying to accomplish: to learn about public affairs, to provide a framework for daily living, to find respite, to earn social prestige, and to enjoy social contact. A Harvard University study in 1981 defined four: surveillance (discovering information by serendipity), information seeking (proactively looking for something specific), social connection (reinforcing social group connections), and escape (the entertainment function). Although radio and television sucked attention away from newspapers from the mid20th century onwards, newspapers continued to perform three of their functions well. The weak spot was information seeking. In 2017, though, print newspapers only really have one remaining advantage: Harvard’s “surveillance”: finding new information you didn’t know you might want to know (Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns”), by turning the pages to see what the editors and reporters have decided to create for you that day. Beyond goals, how does print and digital
content fit into a reader’s attention and routines? And, more importantly for publishers, how does it all relate to revenue? Even if the content is the same, digital versions are not read or experienced in the same way as their print forebears, which explains why the two still exist together in many places. Researchers have found that while digital news reaches far more users than print editions, the amount of attention—measured in time— that readers spend on articles still favours the immersive print experience by a large margin. Neil Thurman at the City University of London calculated how much attention print, PC and mobile platforms attracted. He found that 88.5% of total time UK readers devoted to a range of national newspaper brands—including The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times, The Daily Mail, and The Mirror—is spent on the print edition. Only 7.5% goes on mobile versions and a mere 4% on PCs. Guardian readers spent 43 minutes a day on the print version and only 41 seconds, on average, with the online version. Readers of The Daily Mail spent 39 minutes on print and 2 minutes online. While the number of print readers is declining, the economist Matthew Gentzkow discovered reader attention is directly related to revenue, and—wait for it—print attention can be more valuable than digital attention, because of the total time readers spend on each format.
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THERE’S A SIGNIFICANT GAP BETWEEN YOUNG PEOPLE’S INTEREST IN THE NEWS AND THEIR CONSUMPTION OF IT
The Internet allows more efficient targeting of ads, so advertisers will pay more for an ad than overall, and online ads give advertisers more ways to reach a given consumer, which can reduce price. Print readers, however, pay greater attention to print, as measured by time spent on the page, than online readers spend with digital versions. According to Gentzkow’s figures, revenue per hour of time spent is higher in online newspapers (US$4.24) than in print newspapers (US$1.57). But as the total time spent reading online newspapers is less than a tenth of the total time spent reading print newspapers, print revenue for each hour of attention is actually greater (US$.22/hour vs US$ .04/hour). Less attention leads to less revenue. Gentzkow, then, agrees with Thurman’s findings: readers of print newspapers devote far more of their attention to articles than readers of the online version. This means publishers need not trade analog dollars for digital pennies. They should continue efforts to encourage their readers to enjoy a print version of their news. What about millennials, the psychology of younger readers? One meta study (a study of studies) found there’s a significant gap between young people’s interest in the news and their consumption of it, suggesting they expect news to find them rather than the other way around. Crucially, Christopher Sopher found that, to a considerably greater degree than with older generations, many young people do not see a consistent connection between regularly “getting the news” and staying informed about the issues that interest them. Millennials get random articles at random intervals. An article they come across about, say, health care reform has little relevance in the absence of the context that comes from having followed that story regularly. Sopher says the younger
generation instinctively goes elsewhere to keep up: Wikipedia, friends and family, or individual pieces of content shared through their social networks. Then there is the dark side: too much news, news junkies and information addiction. In 2006, a personal development blogger called Steve Pavlina went on a news diet for 30 days to get rid of his craving. “The need my news addiction filled was that it gave me a sense of groundedness by connecting me with what was going on in the world”, he wrote. So why are people reading at all? In 2015, Chris Moss, the commercial audience optimisation manager at The Telegraph wrote an article wondering what the point of news was, from a reader’s perspective: “Once the moment of delivery has passed, the information is utterly useless. It doesn’t tie me into any community or ideal or activism. It doesn’t solve any problems I might have. It doesn’t improve my day in any tangible way.” What, he wondered, was the relationship between goal-less information and underlying psychology? “Is it because the drug – these myriad cocktails of language and tone, layout and presentation, image and voice that we call the news – is purposely designed to generate an addiction? Is it because I’m frightened of missing something? Is it something to do with the perverse appeal of other people’s bad news?”. Where does all this point newspaper publishers? We have a reliable general sense of what consumers want from their media: the ability to find the information they need when they want it, the information they need to connect with their friends, the need for entertainment, and the serendipity of discovering what they didn’t know they wanted. Capturing the lasting attention of readers may be one key to maintaining a print newspaper subscriber base. While online modes are better at curating or finding well defined categories of news, publishers should make sure serendipity seekers are well served by feeding them “unknown unknown” articles. Readers expect to see stories each day about their political leaders, fires or business earnings, they will be rewarded with the occasional investigative piece, counter-intuitive human interest story or op-ed by someone with a bright idea. That is more art than science. x
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COURTESY OF THE WASHINGTON POST
HOW DESIGN CAN INCREASE TIME SPENT AND REVENUES EARNED In 2015 the Washington Post commissioned a study to get some scientific answers and proof to the perennial question: Does design matter or not in the digital age? And more specifically they asked: Does better page design cause the brain to pay more attention? The answer according to them was a resounding ‘yes.’
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hy and what is the proof? Media psychologist Paul Bolls of the MediaBrain Lab at Missouri School of Journalism and the Washington Post studied more than 80 readers in controlled scientific conditions. Here is a summary of their research in their own words as published in the Washington Post by Alex Remington, engineering product manager at The Washington Post. The research was sponsored by the Reynolds Journalism Institute and was conducted during Remington’s Institutional Fellowship. “The study was the result of a multi-month study involving 80 readers and six different online news stories, divided into subject-related pairs specifically chosen to maximize the distinction in page design — half with a cleaner design and half with a more distracting, difficultto-follow page design. When the readers came into the lab, electrodes were attached to their
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BRAIN FRIENDLY
BRAIN UNFRIENDLY
hands and forearms to measure their cognitive and emotional engagement by tracking heart rate and skin conductance. Shortly after they finished reading the stories, they were asked a series of questions about their reaction to the story. By statistically significant margins, readers agreed that better-designed stories were: • More interesting • Easier to read • More enjoyable • Made them want to find out more about the topic • Helped them learn more about the topic
Post has collected since redesigning its home page on August 26, 2015. Since the redesign, page views and visits are both up by seven percent, and the time spent by each unique visitor is up by three percent. These gains suggest that the cleaner, more streamlined, less distracting new design is contributing to substantially better reader engagement. Instinctively, newsrooms have long understood that readers prefer a clean page design emphasizing the story, and that flashy ads or recommendations to unrelated articles can distract the reader. This data helps emphasize just how much good design can do to improve engagement. The human brain has limited resources, and is easily distracted. Eliminating distractions on the page can keep readers more engaged and more interested in reading another story.” x
Also by statistically significant margins, readers were more cognitively and emotionally engaged by the stories with a cleaner design. These findings mirror the data that The Washington
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MARC BASTÉ & PEDRO NORTON
Consultants, Innovation Media Consulting
SIX NEW REVENUE STREAM IDEAS
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As ad revenues decline globally, newspapers must look for new income streams and subscriptions are not the only solution. We take a look at six strong examples.
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edia industry challenges are similar throughout the world: the commoditisation of audiences, a shrinking advertising market, the difficulty of creating products, and a lack of harmony with younger audiences. The following six cases demonstrate different solutions to those known problems. We have chosen them for their success, originality, flexibility and scalability. They are all revenueoriented models, analysed from a practical perspective to highlight key lessons for publishers.
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DE CORRESPONDENT Launched in 2013 after a record crowdfunding campaign, De Correspondent publishes daily news but it doesn’t chase the latest breaking news. It prioritises “relevance over recentness” and focuses on original content. It fights for ideals, not ideology. Above all, it believes “a oneway, producer-consumer relationship between a news medium and its readership is a thing of the past”. It encourages its 52,000 readers (members) to participate. With the help of Respondens, its proprietary content management system, journalists share their story ideas even before they start reporting. They are clear about what they want to know and why they think it matters. They ask for specific input from readers and expert members join the conversation with valuable insights or inside knowledge. They use new formats like public notebooks, extensive reconstructions, short news stories, movies and courses, and they are building a loyal, growing community. Several Correspondent pieces have been sold abroad to brands like The Guardian or Wired. Now they want to go global. Engagement is the key. And they have no ads.
BLENDLE Launched in the Netherlands in 2014, Blendle is aiming to be the iTunes or Spotify of news. Instead of paying for a whole subscription to one publication, it lets you pay for single articles from several newspapers and magazines, and it comes with a money back guarantee. If you don’t like an article, just ask for your money back. Blendle lets people share articles on Twitter and Facebook, and you can see which stories your friends are reading. This platform is also ad free. Publishers can set the price of each individual article from as little as $0.15, and get 70% of the revenue. Blendle keeps the other 30%. The New York Times and Axel Springer decided to invest €3 million in the new start-up, funding entry into the German and American markets. US partners include The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Blendle Premium, in Holland, offers a less metered approach: for €9.99 per month, users can read up to 20 stories a day. Micropayments have been tested for a while now, but Blendle is one of the most promising solutions to hit the market so far. Other publishers are watching closely.
CONTENT IS KING: THE WHOLE MODEL IS BASED ON THE VALUE, RELEVANCE AND EXCLUSIVITY OF THEIR STORIES. IT DOESN’T TRY TO BE EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE, BUT THE SITE THE INFORMATION HAS BROKEN MAJOR STORIES
EXPRESSO DIÁRIO. Expresso is, by far, the most influential and the biggest weekly newspaper in Portugal. Until the middle of 2014, due to difficulties of the postal coverage on Saturdays, it had virtually no subscribers. Its website was free, 100% adfunded and not profitable. The opportunity was there, at almost no cost, to extend Expresso’s premium presence and build a strong subscriber base. Expresso Diário was the natural answer. Preceding The Economist’s Espresso app, it is a daily digital newspaper (not a site) aimed at mobile consumption, published (after work) at 6 p.m. every weekday. Its editorial proposal is very simple: to make sense of chaotic daily information overload in 30 minutes. A brief day in review (Economist style), plus five or six longer form articles that cover need to know issues, and two opinion pieces. A morning version, Expresso Curto, completed the information cycle. The Expresso Diário and Expresso (weekly) digital versions are sold as an inseparable bundle. A staff of three manages 21,000 subscribers and generates €1.3 million in revenue.
THE INFORMATION In this our “platform era”, a sustainable business based on reader revenue is the new Holy Grail. Jessica Lessin, a 33 year old former Wall Street Journal reporter is The Information’s founder and CEO. She is building a pure subscription model covering the tech industry. Again, the site runs no ads and the subscription price is $399 yearly, or $39 monthly: about what the
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WSJ charges. In just three years, her site has became a profitable business with over 10,000 subscribers from 84 countries, including Silicon Valley stars, entrepreneurs and investors, and it has built a solid insider community around the brand. Lessin herself is “one of them”, and Mark Zuckerberg went to her wedding. The Information delivers two or three deeply reported stories a day, pushed out to clients via email, with pieces running between 800 and 4,000 words. There is no video on the site, just text, photos and interactive graphics. There is one big interview a week, often with a CEO. Content is king: the whole model is based on the value, relevance and exclusivity of their stories. It doesn’t try to be everything to everyone, but the site has broken major stories, like the Snapchat IPO. Subscribers might be buying more than content, however: they can interact with Silicon Valley CEOs in the comments section, on a private Slack channel, and on monthly offline conference calls with the editor.
THE WIRECUTTER, THE SWEETHOME, CHEFD Service journalism is the new black. Shopping guides are not new but combined with exquisitely rigorous journalism, e-commerce capabilities and the trust of a legacy brand, they become a relevant revenue source. In 2016, The New York Times acquired The Wirecutter and its sister site, The Sweethome, for a bit more than US$30m. Founded in 2011 by Brian Lam, a former Gizmodo editor, both sites are highly respected for their highly reliable expert tech and household product reviews and recommendations. They are outstanding at audience engagement and trust, which led to an estimated $200 million in sales in 2016.
BLENDLE KEEPS THE OTHER 30%. THE NEW YORK TIMES AND AXEL SPRINGER DECIDED TO INVEST €3 MILLION IN THE NEW START UP
recipes. As ad revenues decline fast, companies need to find new business models. Service journalism is one of them.
THE SKIMM 4 million engaged subscribers is an impressive cover letter if we’re talking about a daily newsletter. If the subscribers are also women aged 22-34—a marketer’s dream—the phenomenon captures the attention of an industry whose tone and format have aged and which struggles to understand the needs and behaviour of younger people. Founded in 2012 (yes, 4 million subscribers in less than 4 years) by Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, both aged 30 and former NBC News producers, it found the right tone to successfully deliver digestible news that matters to 20 to 30 somethings: just a general notion of what’s going and why it matters.
Times CEO Mark Thompson said their “servicefocused guides align with our commitment to creating products that are an indispensable part of our readers’ lives”. With Wirecutter and SweetHome, The Times expects to expand e-commerce into many more verticals.
Each blast is news summaries and links to politics, business, culture and sometimes sports. There is a website and a Facebook page but most readers read the e-mail, which is reported to have a 40% open rate. This huge engagement success has brought them some $17 million in investment from companies such as 20th Century Fox and The New York Times. The Skimm is monetised with targeted advertising— native ads or branded content—and a study service that offers “an inside look into what female millenials think”.
In 2016, it announced a partnership with Chefd, a start-up that defines itself to be “the last mile between the recipe and your front door”. They want to serve the 7 million monthly active users who read NYT Cooking’s 17.000 exclusive
The Skimm’s next challenge is to convert their super-engaged users into paying users. Their first experiment is a $2.99 a month app that updates subscribers on events, travel and mustsee TV. x
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CUNNING Â? POWER
MATTHEW BENNETT
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
bennett@innovation.media
FROM INNOVATION TO INVESTMENT What is the point of innovating, from a business perspective? How have shifts in the media and technology industries affected the competitive landscape for all?
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O
n the surface, serious investing seems a complex business, full of arcane acronyms and circular references. Aside from the best business reporters, buried in charts, spreadsheets and flashing tickers, it’s probably safe to say most members of the newsroom, editors included, couldn’t tell a Warren Buffett from a Bill Gross, or capital expenditure from the last trip’s travel expenses. Yet somebody, many levels above the average reporter, pays their wages. Somebody ponies up the money to pay for the computers, the cameras and the newsroom itself. And across the road, somebody else is doing exactly the same for your rival publication, hoping that your competition is better at doing a whole range of things compared to you and your team, in the same uncertain, dynamic environment. These somebodies—investors—take a risk, hoping for a reward somewhere down the line. Forget any romantic notions of roaming around the world in search of constant injustice: it’s the news company’s job—newsroom and commercial department together—to give their investors returns. Innovation for innovation’s sake can be fun and creative, and it might, possibly, maybe, lead somewhere interesting in the future, but from a business point of view it’s relatively pointless. We need to innovate towards the creation of real value. Tren Griffin knows a thing or two about the game. Currently at Microsoft, he was previously a partner at Eagle River, a private equity firm, and is the author of “Charlie Munger, the Complete Investor”. (Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett’s long-time partner; Warren Buffett is an investor and business owner who competes for the title of richest person on the planet with Microsoft’s Bill Gates or Spanish clothing magnate Amancio Ortega). While news, he said, is certainly a “public good” in societal terms, he also believes news in business terms is basically “a waste product”. He was talking about Bloomberg’s expensive terminal business targeted at investors and analysts—where the thing that is sold is the special screen and keyboard, not the content they put on it—but the point is more broadly applicable. The commoditisation of news as a phrase has been around for a while; it means first that every competent news organisation can now
do a similar article within a few minutes of a new story breaking and, secondly, that news organisations cannot be stopped from writing about newsworthy public events. In investing terms, Griffin explains, news is a “non rival” and “non excludable” good. It is essentially economically worthless “when it’s three minutes old”. So where does the value come from? And how did we get here? The answers have public implications that go beyond news or investing. It turns out comment and analysis have value for investors as well as for readers, but whereas readers enjoy the insight, investors bask in its exclusivity. “It’s protectable by copyright. The good news is you can build a business out of it, that bad news is that it doesn’t scale”, Griffin says, adding that: “People like Ben Thompson and The New York Times are essentially in the newsletter business”. Thompson is the founder of Stratechery, an independent newsletter site that charges a subscription. He insisted several times that what the news industry has seen over the past 15 years or so is “major market failure”. Readers no longer get their news, and the world views they provide, from a single trusted newspaper and once-aday nightly news. The whole system, he says, is “fundamentally broken and it won’t be put back together like it was before”. Back then, those relatively few, focused, scarce, monopolistic elements provided “objectivity” and a way to channel profit-generating ads into readers’ minds. Society at large benefited from the existence of a limited set of common reference points. Nowadays, as news professionals well know, the whole is fragmented, atomised and polarised. News companies no longer control
READERS NO LONGER GET THEIR NEWS THE NEXT DAY VIA DELIVERY LORRIES AND NEWSSTANDS: THEY HAVE IPHONES AND FACEBOOK THAT BUZZ AS SOON AS AN EVENT HAPPENS
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the distribution chain. Readers no longer get their news the next day via delivery lorries and newsstands: they have iPhones and Facebook that buzz as soon as an event happens, or several times as it is happening, because somebody in a newsroom pushes a button. “You had a business model that supported a vibrant press. Now we have a situation where the distribution costs are essentially zero and so that business model is gone.” On the positive side, that new environment has allowed for the creation of niche value. On the negative end, the same dynamics led to Americans electing Donald Trump and Brits voting to leave the European Union. “The problem with that is that the bulk of people are starting to get their news that way. There is a smaller group of people, who are more thoughtful, who are willing to pay for something like a subscription to the FT or the New York Times or Ben Thompson, but they are so small that in terms of the electorate they are being dwarfed.” “We need to face up to the fact that something big is happening here.” Most people, Griffin points out, don’t like to read very much anyway, they watch, and they are not inclined to listen to other people’s views. “What percentage of the world reads The Economist? The people who read it the most are the people who need it the least. And that’s the sad part.” Feeding confirmation bias, though, “is extremely profitable”.He describes three business models that appear to be working in the new environment, which he labels “bread and circuses”, “confirmation bias” and “newsletters”. BuzzFeed, Fox News and the Financial Times. Entertainment, political ideology and analysis. Really clever companies and investors manage to do more than one of those at the same time. According to this model, a publication like The Daily Mail could be described as a mix of political ideology and entertainment. While Griffin himself would steer clear of the confirmation bias option—”I’d rather be thoughtful and entertaining and sleep well at night”—any given company could in theory do all three across separate media properties. Who might be a good example of such a clever media magnate? Rupert Murdoch. “Fox News is confirmation bias, Fox Entertainment is bread and circuses, and the Wall Street Journal is a subscription business”, says Griffin. “Switching costs are relatively low and habit is really just a part of brand, so what
holds Murdoch’s thing together is he really understands ‘brand’ extremely, extremely well. By pandering to confirmation bias, he still has a plenty powerful competitive advantage.” “He has always understood what the common man wants […] from the tabloids even to the WSJ, he understands what people want and he feeds it to them. He’s a master at getting people what they want.” Which type of media company would Griffin himself invest in? He got excited about Disney and all of its intellectual property: “They can just sell it over and over and over again!”. x
INNOVATION FOR INNOVATION’S SAKE CAN BE FUN AND CREATIVE, AND IT MIGHT, POSSIBLY, MAYBE, LEAD SOMEWHERE INTERESTING IN THE FUTURE
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PEDRO NORTON
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
norton@innovation.media
HOW TO MOVE YOUR NEWS BRAND UP THE VALUE CHAIN What used to look valuable and require large capital expenditure no longer seems so profitable, so some companies are searching for new types of prey.
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bit is a bit, a prophetic Nicholas Negroponte famously said in his book Being Digital, all the way back in 1995. When the world moves from atoms to bits, broadband is broadband (delivered through cable, fibre, wireless or satellite) and content is content (text, audio or video). That is what we call convergence. In the telecoms and media world, that atom to bit revolution has consequences: traditionally separate industries compete. In the US, AT&T and Verizon now compete with Comcast or Charter and they all are in the same market as Dish: broadband, which used to deliver totally separate categories of “content” (phone calls, text messages or TV) but then morphed into “multimedia”. Over the last 15 years, broadband has been deployed so massively it is now a good proxy for the digital development of a country. According to McKinsey figures (Global Media Report 2015, McKinsey & Company), the world is moving from 30% landline and 9% mobile broadband penetration in 2009 to an expected 50% landline and 58% mobile broadband penetration by 2019. These are global average figures. In most advanced markets, the figure is already close to 100%. Such high penetration levels challenge distributors: growth will soon be impossible, so the battle will move from market penetration to market share. The problem is that competing for market share in a commoditised industry, with no long-term competitive advantage (to replace the quasi-monopolistic distribution of the atomised era), usually means a price war, which leads to diminishing returns and nervous shareholders. Broadband’s ubiquity, though, is not the only nightmare for the distributor. So called over-the-top (OTT) applications are using the distributor’s costly infrastructure. WhatsApp, Messenger, Skype, YouTube, Amazon and Netflix are playing a new game, free riding on the bit economy while calling for net neutrality. For the price of a broadband connection (courtesy of the telecoms operators), they deliver text, voice and video (monetised via advertising or subscriptions) directly to end customers, eroding the distributor’s traditional business model. When, in October 2016, AT&T announced it was buying Time Warner (not to be confused
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with Time Warner Cable, bought earlier that year by Charter Communications) for $85.4 billion, many were astonished, but AT&T bet on a very simple phenomenon: the media and telecoms value chain is changing, a lot. In an age of almost endless landline and mobile broadband connections, distribution is shedding value. In the same way that free-to-air television (FTA) was a broken model (it rested on the assumption of spectrum and therefore of distribution scarcity), telecoms companies are less and less powerful gatekeepers in the pay TV world, never mind in telephony. Think about it. When was the last time you stayed at home on a Sunday to watch your… fibre connection? You didn’t. You never wanted fibre for fibre’s sake. Or cable, or any other technology. We want broadband to get at the content, which brings us back to Negroponte’s bits, whether they end up as text, images, voice or video on our devices. That’s what we are always prepared to pay for in the end. It’s just that, for a few years, cable or satellite suppliers were standing between us and our favourite content and held something of a monopoly. From that exceptional position, they could extract as much money from us as we were willing to pay, for our TV shows, music and news.
OVER THE LAST 15 YEARS, BROADBAND HAS BEEN DEPLOYED SO MASSIVELY IT IS NOW A GOOD PROXY FOR THE DIGITAL DEVELOPMENT OF A COUNTRY WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU STAYED AT HOME ON A SUNDAY TO WATCH YOUR…FIBRE CONNECTION? YOU DIDN’T. YOU NEVER WANTED FIBRE FOR FIBRE’S SAKE
Not anymore. In a bit world, content, not distribution, is the scarce resource. Content providers, and among them news publishers, are now able reach their clients directly, build dis-intermediated business models and extract most of the value that the end customer is willing to pay. Logically, AT&T decided to move up the value chain—the future of video is mobile, and the future of mobile is video—to where the content is: it bought HBO, CNN, Warner Bros., and many other content powerhouses. If the deal goes through—it was cleared by the European Commission but still requires approval from the U.S. Department of Justice (expected later this year) AT&T will kill three birds with one stone. First, it will differentiate itself from its traditional competitors, avoiding a price war in the pay TV market that destroys value. Second, it will take a seat at the content table alongside the over-the-top crowd (Netflix saw this coming and moved into content production several years ago). Finally, it will be able to combine its knowledge of consumers and the fire power of its data and analytics with all of Time Warner’s creativity. “In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything changes”, said the 18th-Century French chemist Antoine Lavoisier. We have seen this before. In the late 1990s, telecoms and media companies tried to merge: AOL/Time Warner, Telefonica/Endemol and many others all failed. Could the same thing happen this time? It could. Telecoms and media corporate cultures are still eons apart. Regulation is a serious hurdle. In the 1990s, the rationale was there but broadband ubiquity, digital literacy and customer empowerment were not. Our guess is that AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner is the tip of the iceberg. This time it is for real, and more mergers and acquisitions will follow. For content providers, the consequences could be twofold. For those wanting to play the merger game, bargaining power is increasing. For those who want to remain independent, the price tag for exclusive content (sports, news or entertainment) is also increasing. Telecoms companies are shopping. And that is good news for publishers. X
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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MARC BASTÉ
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting Group
baste@innovation.media
HOW DO YOU CREATE A NEWS START–UP CULTURE WITHOUT GIMMICKS If legacy media are not part of the innovation process, they will not only give up their current market share but will lose any chance of competing for their future.
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mall teams of annoying visionaries, developers and product designers, with newly invented roles, channel an extraordinary amount of financial investment around the world, pursuing one goal: using technology to generate disruptive, scalable evolution that provides exponential returns to investors. The start-up ecosystem, well stocked with talent and money, has built a virtuous circle of innovation in which every project (regardless of its level of success), every professional, every lesson learned and every investment is part of a technological evolution that has radically changed the media landscape in the last 20 years. Legacy media must become a part of this innovation process, but what is it that makes start-ups so special?
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High
Importance to FUTURE business
Low
STRATEGIC Critical to sustaining the future business strategy
HIGH POTENTIAL Maybe important in achieving future success
Strategy BUY/BUILD
Strategy PARTNER/ACCELERATE
KEY OPERATIONAL Currently needed to succeed/survive
SUPPORT Valuable but not critical now or in the future
Strategy BUILD
Strategy PARTNER/ACCELERATE Importance to CURRENT business
High
Shannon Gausepohl, the associate editor of Business News Daily, asked some leaders to identify the key elements of the start-up culture. She found 3 things: an “anything is possible mentality”, the ability to learn and react quickly, and employees and leaders who own their contributions. Legacy media companies have much to learn from that fearless approach. They should not try to imitate start-ups directly though, because most start-ups fail, and that’s an essential part of their world. Victimless failures encourage risky decisions and bold bets. That is not, however, the way to manage a 100-year old newspaper. Three elements work in favor of legacy media brands: time, money and brand. Strategies can be transformed and managed, funding is normally available, and existing brands provide initial recognition. With those three elements, there are four ways companies can engage in start-up like behaviour. Firstly, they can partner with start-ups, and establish privileged partnerships, leveraging the existing brand and market positioning. There is little to no risk, and perhaps the project does not require much up-front investment, other than opportunity cost. Failure, or success, will be quickly apparent and it might lead to some long-
Low
term collaboration. If handled badly, however, the start-up might receive more leverage than it is worth, and the business might not see a return on its investment of time and resources. Secondly, a legacy company can just build it themselves, if it already has the people and a knowledge of the problem. This is a great option for urgent strategic developments. Flexible market leaders can get this done. Organisations maintain full control, do not depend on anyone else and can use existing business resources. They are already familiar with the market. They might find it hard to compete against “real” startups, though, or find the right talent to work on the project. The third option is to buy the start-up, or invest in it. There is a constant flow of new ideas and projects that escape their control and even their knowledge, but they eventually end up dramatically affecting their businesses. This choice provides more insights than partnership, information must flow, and companies can keep an eye on product development. They also get to keep the returns if it works, and benefit from the knowledge of the employees they acquire. As Tim Cook would put it: “We buy companies with really smart people. We take that talent and
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put them to work on projects that are in line with Apple’s own strategy”. Deal flow is the key, though. Legacy media companies do not have a systematic start-up scouting process: how can they make sure the best projects arrive at the right time? Over a period of two years, Google talked to more than 2,200 companies, but only 2%—or about 55—led to an acquisition. Are we ready for that? Finally, we have the concept of start-up accelerators. Their role is to attract a large number of early stage start-ups, filter and select some of them, invest a small amount of money in each one—typically $25,000-$100,000—in exchange for 2-5% of the stock, and put them through a business bootcamp. Paul Graham’s Y Combinator is the mother of all accelerators and its portfolio is filled with start-ups that became Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe or Weebly, to name just a few. The media industry has spawned two variants on this theme: corporate accelerators and media accelerators. Corporate accelerators are promoted and funded by a single company to attract early stage projects that might fit their future strategy. Axel Springer is the most relevant example, with Axel Springer Plug and Play. It has made more than 90 investments in early stage businesses since 2013, for a total cost of €100 million. Socius is a native ad platform, Zeniad a virtual reality ad delivery platform and Blogfoster a blog platform for influencers. Media accelerators are VC funds owned by a consortium of legacy media companies. They only deal with media start-ups, including tech solutions such as metrics, platforms or ad formats. Matter was founded in 2012 by Jake Shapiro and Corey Ford. It is the benchmark for media accelerators, has offices in San Francisco and New York City, and an impressively long list of investors, from the Associated Press to the Knight Foundation.
THREE ELEMENTS WORK IN FAVOR OF LEGACY MEDIA BRANDS: TIME, MONEY AND BRAND. STRATEGIES CAN BE TRANSFORMED AND MANAGED, FUNDING IS NORMALLY AVAILABLE
They have helped 49 start-ups so far. Every year, Matter screens the market and selects 12 start-ups (six on the east coast and six on the west coast). They invest $50,000 in cash (plus $75,000 in acceleration services) in each one and accelerate them through a 20 week program. They also invest in follow-up rounds. NewsWhip, for example—an app that tracks and predicts the stories, events and people getting engagement on social networks—got $6.4 million in a Series A round in February 2017. The bootcamp focuses on human-centred learning and prototype-driven process, with lots of workshops, speakers and sessions with expert mentors and partner executives. On demo day, teams present their projects to a curated community of investors and media executives. This method mixes media start-up founders, partner executives, experts, mentors and advisors together. You might find Nick Rockwell, the New York Times’s Chief Technology Officer, and a member of Matter’s Advisory Board, attending a design thinking session and drawing wireframes on a whiteboard. There is extraordinary value for partners and investors in this method. On the one hand, they get to invest in an amazing portfolio of media start-ups that are likely to be the next disruptors, so there’s an obvious financial incentive. On the other, it is an effective way to stay in touch with the latest trends, to get first hand information of every shiny new project in the industry, and to take advantage of early stage projects to grow their investments before they become too expensive. Start-ups that have been helped by Matter include News Deeply, which builds singlesubject information hubs like Syria Deeply, and Nuzzel, a platform that lets you see your friends’ top news stories. X
MEDIA DREAMS FACTORY by Innovation Media Media Dreams Factory is Innovation’s start-up team, focused on seeking strategic investment opportunities for our legacy media clients. We constantly screen the media start-up ecosystem in search of the most promising projects and teams, validate them and offer our clients opportunities according to their investment strategy and profile. Media Dreams Factory is an exclusive service for the clients of Innovation Media Consulting Group.
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DESSERTS
Smaller, but still sweet, examples of creativity
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CASE THE NEW EUROPEAN LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
JESSICA PATTERSON
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
patterson@innovation.media
Why only niche news brands will survive UK-based publisher Archant launched a pro-European weekly called The New European nine days after the Brexit vote and, each week, CEO Jeff Henry faces a referendum on whether to keep publishing it. They were only supposed to experiment for a month, but the results have surprised everyone, Henry included, despite built-in obsolescence. In April 2017, they published their 40th issue and show no sign of slowing down
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he weekend before the referendum, Matt Kelly, Archant’s chief content officer, sent Henry an email. “He sent me a note saying, ‘what do you think of an idea of doing a publication based around the vote?’”, Henry recalled: “And I said, thanks Matt, that was a great idea, lets talk on Tuesday”. By Tuesday, at a management meeting, the outlook was grim, even depressing, until Kelly tried again. “There was silence, and then like a wave, there was enthusiasm from every area of the business going, yeah we could do that”. It had to be fast, to net all the disaffected voters. “We had a business plan done within two hours,” Henry explained: “I had, one hour later, a masthead from our design department”. The publication would focus on the 48 per cent who were pro-European and anti-Brexit, or approximately 16 million passionate Britons. The content would be a blend of serious debate and European culture. The newspaper is being built on reader revenue, with no ad revenue. The print edition costs £2 and is distributed nationally. Despite the four-week trial time, Henry didn’t want to lose: “I said, I want to go into this eliminating the sense that it could fail. It should never be allowed to fail”.
Archant is a privately-owned UK media company with over 140 news and magazine brands and associated websites, including 60 regional newspapers, 75 regional, local lifestyle and special interest titles, and a broad portfolio of digital media assets. But no low-risk, pop-up, agile publication focused on a national audience. They were perfectly positioned to try. “We were large enough to be able to do it, and we were small enough to be able to do it”, Henry said: “We had so many resources at our fingertips: distribution contracts, designers, journalists, sales staff, we had the infrastructure and we were nimble enough to be able to make it happen”. Costs would be marginal, except for contributors and some printing. “So that you actually make yourself a winner from the start, you have to be able to run and operate it on the margins of what your existing resources are.” The first issue sold 40,000 copies, each issue since has been profitable and it now averages 30,000 a week. So how have they done it, in a 24/7 global news world? The audience was passionate but they made a big effort with quality. “We tapped into a network of freelance internationally-renowned and amazing, awardwinning journalists,” Henry said: “The types
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
5% SPIKE
IN PRICE
OF FOOD
#didyouvoteforthat
WHINGEING
LIBERAL
ELITIST SNOWFLAKE (and proud)
TO ALL CANVASSERS
IF YOU THINK BREXIT IS ROCKING, DON’T BOTHER KNOCKING THIS IS AN OFFICIAL REMAIN HOUSEHOLD
of content that work are strong, provocative editorial pieces”. As a publication, The New European is a hybrid, something between a newspaper and a magazine. “It only comes out once a week, so it can never be absolutely up to the second on every pronouncement that comes out on Brexit, but what it is, it gets behind all of the issues.”
The revenue model—for four weeks—was the cover price; the advertising community was slow to warm to the idea. Brands saw it as a political newspaper, and advertising in it as choosing sides. That initial reluctance has since waned. The pop-up model allows people the freedom to experiment and run with the ideas that work. “It was vital that what we launched was a newspaper and not a website”, Henry explained: “If we had launched The New European as a website, we wouldn’t be having this conversation today. And it would not be receiving the many awards its getting, not just the accolades but the recognition. It was the fact that it was in print that was vital. The New European’s target audience is the 48 per cent of those who voted against Brexit in the EU referendum in June 2016. Hardly a niche audience, according to Henry: “But the skills we bring to The New European apply to targeted communities and were applied to this group”. The New European’s target audience, a group of 16.1 million people, has supported the paper financially since day one. That is the strength of this community: their passion for and belief and interest in everything The New European stands for. That has kept the publication thriving above and beyond four weeks. Readers love it. The main lesson other publishers can learn is to experiment and learn to believe in ideas that start to work. Not everything you create works or is successful, but better options will be found along the way. Do not be scared of trying new things. “If demand disappears for it, then there’s absolutely no fear in me saying to the team, enough’s enough, that’s it, we’ll move on to something else”, says Henry. “We’re only at the start of this process, which is the biggest single political process in the lifetime of a generation.” The longer-term life cycle of The New European remains to be seen. If the audience loses interest, the paper will cease operation. For now, while there is reader support, Henry will continue to publish it. Pop-up publishing may be a revenue solution for news publishers, but it requires two things: enough flexibility to put a new publication together on the fly, and enough resources in place to monetise and distribute it.Cashing in on special interests works for magazine publishers. Perhaps it’s time for news media to begin thinking in niche audiences and verticals.“Get to market with an initial viable cost base and let the consumer decide.” As more news organisations look for alternative revenue streams, it might be wise to take The New European’s approach and pop-up every now and then. X
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CASE TIMES MEDIA GROUP JOHANNESBURGH, SOUTH AFRICA
MICAELI ROURKE
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
rourke@innovation.media
How to break newsroom silos and create information engines Times Media Group’s newsroom in downtown Johannesburg has a 360-degree view of the city its six news brands cover. The state-of-the-art, open plan office is within walking distance of city and provincial government headquarters. The sun glimmers on still-drying painted walls. It is a pristine, unwrapped, expectant space.
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ver 400 editorial staff work there (TMG has 500 employees in total), split between four streams of content: The Sunday Times and their daily arm The Times; the daily Business Day broadsheet and an associated weekly finance magazine, Financial Mail; the group’s tabloid offering, the daily Sowetan and the weekly Sunday World; and the company’s thriving digital department, TimesLive.The refocusing and re-staffing of the team’s digital management, in particular, has brought a wave of transformation to the colossal print conglomerate, providing much-needed digital legitimacy for all brands within the group Times Media Group has been a leader in South African print news for the past century. As well as its six English-language newspaper brands in
Johannesburg, it also publishes two regional daily titles in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, has an in-house magazine division, three television stations, in-house radio broadcasting, and a bustling events departments. Its flagship title, the Sunday Times, is still the nation’s biggest selling weekly English-language newspaper (ABC Analysis, 2016). Market forces, higher federal taxes on private conglomerates, and the shift from print to digital meant a renewal was in order. It was the largest project INNOVATION had ever undertaken and there were three goals: to redesign all eight titles, to relocate to a brand new facility and to create a new editorial operations manual. The relaunches would debut incrementally over the course of the project and would require the production of prototypes and style manuals.
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The new newsroom was to be open-plan, with shared services desks, a central super desk, unassigned hot seats for journalists and meeting spaces around the edges. The editorial manual would describe, step-by-step, how to get the most out of the new set up. The consumption cycles of South African print news consumers, and how those cycles dictate shifts and peak production times, were taken into account, as were developing trends in the South African new media landscape. Employee work groups were also outlined to allow TMG staff from every department to have a voice in the changes, including the architectural design of the new space, employee wellbeing, data analytics and audio journalism expansion. The first design relaunch, Business Day and Financial Mail, came in October of 2016. Both brands soared, with increases in readership in both print and online, thanks to their new designs, which included micro-components for easily digestible news and an increased focus on visual storytelling, with sleek, modern page layouts. The digital redesigns of both business titles came with the coordinated launch of the online platform, BusinessLIVE, BusinessLIVE didn’t have a paywall, but a premium section of the site, BL Premium, did, launching to subscribers in early 2017. Feedback from print subscribers to both brands was resoundingly positive, setting a high bar for the rest of the company’s scheduled relaunches. Sunday World, TMG’s weekly tabloid newspaper, was next, in mid-November of 2016, and included informative infographics, photo spreads and cohesive, modular page designs with bold colours to compliment the brand’s bold headlines. The relaunch was more turbulent than expected, though, due to a delayed promotional campaign and a lack of reader recognition for the new logo. Consumption plummeted in the weeks following the launch. Focus group testing was done for the launch of Sunday World’s sisterbrand, the Sowetan, the historically alternative news brand made popular by its anti-Apartheid coverage prior to South Africa’s democratisation in 1994. After taking into account user feedback on the designs, the paper relaunched in March 2017 with a modern news magazine style that distinguishes the brand from its numerous daily tabloid competitors. In the end, the redesigns were markedly more straight-forward and successful than producing the new operational model. Institutional factors
and other setbacks meant that had to be amended significantly. The company was unable to fully implement the concept of shared service hubs, which are individual reference points for types of content (i.e. photos and videos for all six brands come from one desk). INNOVATION refers to this as “one kitchen, many restaurants”. More than 18 consultant-led working groups were initially met with overwhelming interest and participation. Over 150 people took part. The transition to employee leadership worked less well, and caused a loss of attention, communication and interest. This coincided with a layoff programme announced by TMG, which began in July 2016. That all meant management became more selective about which parts of the recipe were applied. The relaunch of the Sunday Times is scheduled for June 2017. It will be the largest of the redesigns, with four completely redesigned body sections for the broadsheet brand, and a bespoke luxury design for the lifestyle supplement. Its daily sister-brand, The Times, will undergo a complete redesign and relaunch in the second half of this year. Other publishers can learn five main lessons from this case: create visually compelling layouts; print really isn’t dead, it can work alongside digital; quality across digital and print platforms must be of the same high standard; make sure institutional stability enables newsroom transformation; and build a profesional newsroom that is organised around production ideas that really work. X
I THINK THIS MOVE SHOULD CERTAINLY CHANGE EMPLOYEES FOR THE BETTER AND ALLOW FOR A CULTURAL CHANGE THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE COMPANY. SARAH BUITENDACH, INNOVATION PROJECT DIRECTOR
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THE NEW HEADQUARTERS Times Media Group will launch its integrated newsroom shortly.
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
REDESIGNS Financial daily newspaper Business Day; The Star political daily in Kenya; daily Sowetan and weekly Sunday World of South Africa; and Financial Mail, business magazine
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CASE PRENSA LIBRE CIUDAD DE GUATEMALA, GUATEMALA
CHUS DEL RÍO
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
rio@innovation.media
How to re-invent print as a bridge to a digital future Prensa Libre turned from a newspaper newsroom to a multimedia production hub for the whole group, and refocused on telling readers stories.
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rensa Libre is the leading daily newspaper in Guatemala and one of the main papers in Central America. Its slogan is “Independent, honest, dignified journalism”. Founded on August 20, 1951, in 1963 it began to print on a new Goss press. In 1983, it published its first colour photo. In 1996, it created its first webpage. In 2011, it was awarded its first WANIFRA certificate. And in 2015 it built a mobile responsive web site to serve mobile readers. In 2016, Prensa Libre decided another deep change was needed and now, in 2017, that has turned into a new design for its print edition—still the main source of income for the company. “We made the most of the institutional and media leadership we have in the region to carry out changes in the multimedia presentation of our products to better serve our demanding readers and clients”, says Felipe Izquierdo Touzet, the executive director of Grupo Prensa Libre. “This investment in our future was about
keeping the journalistic values that have guided our company for more than six decades. We feel enthusiastic and ready for the future, which will definitely be dynamic.” The newsroom wasn’t multimedia and the routines were organised around the print edition. They knew readers were changing their habits and that the company needed to be ready for that. Now they are at the point of producing the print edition to sustain revenue and the digital version to feed the audience. Thanks to that first change in 2016, a deeper remodelling was undertaken, and the staff got used to a more digital mentality and multiplatform output. Their experience, the data and the audience were solid enough pillars to build a strategy on for the future. The more floors their new “building” had, the better. The newsroom moved from digital first to mobile first. It put the user right at the heart of the operation, improved relations between different areas
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of the newspaper and bet on innovation. It is now organised around a central super desk, the motor and axis of their new multimedia news turbine. The new centralised decision making process unleashed newsroom creativity. “These past two months have been the most interesting, enriching and fun in my 20 years with Prensa Libre”, said one of the paper’s editors when they celebrated the relaunch on March 20. The newsroom boss, opening and closing editors, and graphics and visual editors all sit at the central desk. They work as one. The editors also have direct responsibilities over certain platforms. That all makes functional creation and distribution flow 24 hours a day. “Now we are a multimedia newsroom”, says Doménica Velásquez, the newsroom and central desk boss: “Our digital edition is doing news 24 hours a day and our print edition has taken a step forward. It explains why things have happened and what the consequences are. That way of creating and distributing content reinforces the commitment the founders of Prensa Libre established with this country, and it allows us to do better journalism, a journalism that is always focused on the audience”.
The central desk basically combines everyone’s talents in an intelligent way, and works closely with the best journalists in the room, who are in charge of topical sections. Everyone works to two rhythms: breaking news and day-after journalism. When a story breaks, two systems start work: one for live coverage, the other for the next day’s print publications. One talks about what, the other talk about why and what for. And it all happens naturally. Until the new plan was put in place, the print deadline set the tone for the whole paper. Now, there are rolling digital deadlines, as well as the nightly print deadline. The digital ones are organised around the online habits of Guatemalan Internet users, and the team plans ahead to avoid bottlenecks. Beyond the editorial organisational aspects, Prensa Libre has also sought to remodel its distribution, both digital and print. The print edition was redesigned, with new fonts, more order, more clarity and a better reading rhythm. The print process was also redesigned, so that the pages can be laid out according to the stories that need telling, rather than the old pre-defined section spaces. Reporters and editors have adapted well to those changes and the tool works well to be able to tell stories in the new manner. They are no longer, for example, obliged to fill up eight pages of foreign news just for the sake of it. The result is the appearance of a renewed Sunday version of the paper, a new news product that is more like a magazine than a newspaper. The daily paper is now more focused on being “the day after paper”, while Sundays are all about relaxing and reflecting on the week’s events. On the back of 2015’s responsive layout, the digital version has seen improvements to the user experience as well, both for reporters putting front pages together and users who enjoy a faster loading page. New digital products, like the “Por la mañana” newsletter were created.
REDESIGN The old version (above) compared to the new rediesigns of Prensa Libre (right).
Most of Prensa Libre’s revenue still comes from print ads, but the paper has been able to maintain its foundational values throughout the process. The company is now ready to face the future. It is no longer just the newsroom of a daily newspaper but a newsroom that produces content for the group’s different media products, both online and offline. X INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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CASE GRUPO GLOBO RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL
EDUARDO TESSLER
Consultant, Innovation Media Consulting
tessler@innovation.media
How digital transformation will change a 90-year old newspaper Brazil’s biggest media company faced a three-pronged business challenge and began to change things immediately.
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n today’s media market, after the digital revolution, if you are slow, or stand still, you will not last very long. You will die, even if you are the most important brand in your area and leader. Praying for results is not an answer. The world and the audience have changed. Grupo Globo is the biggest media company in Brazil. The conglomerate owns eight companies that do TV, radio, Internet and magazines. When certain key business figures began to fall in 2013, warning lights started to flash and, over the following 12 months, Infoglobo’s newspapers recorded falls in circulation. In 2015, the company appointed a new CEO at Infoglobo
and he had one obsession on his mind: change. Frederic Kachar understood nothing would be more foolish than to wait around for miracles and for money to just reappear. He was absolutely right. He found three pillars to the crisis: the business model, the way the audience was informed and—worst of all— Brazil’s economic situation. The business model was based on ad revenue. Classified and other ads provided more than 60% of revenues. Readers were not willing to pay for content, so a breaking news model was out. A business based on declining ad revenues and falling circulation posed a serious challenge for O Globo, which has a
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90-year record as Rio de Janeiro’s newspaper. Kachar—or Fred, as all the staff usually call him— began to drive change immediately. In just a year, he replaced almost all of the directors on the board and tried to bring in fresh blood and new ideas. A new headquarters building was being completed, a legacy of the former CEO. O Globo (a traditional quality newspaper), Extra (a popular local paper), Expresso (a very popular hyperlocal read) and the rest of the Infoglobo staff would work together in the same place. Kachar wanted everyone at the new address, which would represent a new era of integration, by the end of 2016. The newsroom was the last thing to be moved over, in January 2017. There would no longer be be three different newsrooms, offline and online production staff, and a divided company working towards separate objectives. Journalists, sales and marketing staff and audience analysts would all work together—both physically and in terms of effort—to serve readers and ensure the financial health of the company. “The new building could not be only a change of address”, Kachar said. He realised it wouldn’t be easy. O Globo newsroom was still quite papercentric, despite some digital effort. The workflow had been built for a paper edition at the end of each day, not for constant deliveries during the day. The quality of O Globo’s editorial staff gave him hope, though. They wanted the same high quality from the print edition to move straight to the digital journey. “Life is digital, our consumers are 24/7”, he said: “People cannot wait for the daily paper. We
have to offer a very unique and different digital product for all of the offer of free content we find on the web”. No one in the newsrooms believed they could work together, because of each brand’s distinct DNA. The solution was based on three principles: a new workflow, a new coreperiphery production system, and a super desk. The new workflow was a 24/7 operation guided by five prime-time slots ( 8 a.m., 11 a.m., 2 p.m., 5 p.m. and 9 p.m) for publishing high-quality content throughout the day, to generate reader habits and fidelity; fully integrated multimedia editors and reporters produced content centrally and distributed it through a set of media brands on to the different platforms; and six senior journalists—who understood how it all fitted together—sat at the new super desk in the very heart of the newsroom to oversee the production cycles and coach editors and reporters. To ensure brands DNA, Infoglobo decided to keep two editors-in-chief: one for O Globo, one for the popular papers. The O Globo website had used a metered paywall, that offered five articles for free and
IN MARCH, INFOGLOBO LAUNCHED SOME NEW NEWSLETTERS, VIDEO PROGRAMMES AND PODCASTS. AUDIENCE FIGURES WENT UP AND NEW PRODUCTS WERE PLANNED
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
five more when you registered, since 2015, but the subscription rate after hitting the wall was too low, leading to revenue problems. They had a conversion problem. A new strategy by itself is not enough if you don`t have the right professionals in the right positions to execute it. A historical shift towards monomedia journalism requires young, connected, modern, open-mind journalists to lead. “Our goal is to use intelligence, technology, all kinds of data to offer the audience the best quality content we can produce”, said Alan Gripp, managing editor and super desk leader (he was previously politics editor at O Globo): “The right content at the right time, in order to make our readers almost partners in the business. We have all the conditions to win this battle”. Gripp is an enthusiastic journalist. He knows a good digital operation is much more than breaking news. He pushes Infoglobo columnists to write short, fast analysis whenever a big story happens, and he believes in new digital products as a way of getting closer to the audience. In March, Infoglobo launched some new newsletters, video programmes and podcasts, as well as a new mobile website. Audience figures went up and new products were planned. The strategy is to increase the size of the heavy users group. Most of the audience only visits Globo. com once or twice a month, so the battle is to turn occasional visitors into heavy users. All efforts are directed towards that goal. The first meeting is at 7:30 a.m.. Before the changes, most editors were not at work at that time of the morning. Now they have to come
up with new ideas, discuss them with section staff and try to turn them into digital narratives. Immediately after the morning meeting, they sit down with designers, developers, the super desk and audience staff to brainstorm content ideas for the five new reader-oriented content deadlines. The super desk is the command center, constantly pushing editors and reporters. They must think digital, produce for multiple platforms and not forget paper, which is the last stop in the daily cycle. As multi-platform content sections are developing multimedia stories, a group of paper copy desks transforms the most relevant stories, along with some exclusive news, for the next day’s print editions of O Globo, Extra and Expresso. The super desk is the key to providing good content for both digital and print. A glass studio website, launched in March, is growing strongly. A glass studio inside the newsroom is the tool for improving videos across all sections. Data and Analytics are used for all editorial and strategic decisions; trial and error using data to match things up. The main question is no longer “what will go online?” but “what will go in the paper?”. Digital is where things start and paper is now just another content channel. Everyone is committed to growing digital. They know change is the only way forward, but cultural change was hard. For years, journalists understood their job was done when the article was written. Now they have to think digital and work digital. X
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CASE GULF DESIGN MIDDLE EAST
JUAN ANTONIO GINER
President & Founder, Innovation Media Consulting
giner@innovation.media
A visual journalism Mecca Times of Oman is visual story telling at its best: a broadsheet newspaper from one of the most striking countries on the Arabian peninsula that—confronted with limits on what it can print—decided to develop a new kind of graphic creativity to capture the attention of readers and advertisers. Two people are behind this unique strategy: Ahmed bin Essa Al Zadjal, the CEO of Times of Oman, and Adonis Durado, its creative director.
P
ublished by The Muscat Media Group, and founded in 1975, Times of Oman is the oldest Englishlanguage six-day-a-week newspaper in the country and, like many media companies in the Arab world, has hired some of the world’s most talented visual journalists, many of them from other countries. Adonis Durado is from the Philippines and before coming to Oman worked in Dubai and Thailand. Antonio Farach is from Honduras and has created fantastic extra large infographics, full of creativity. The pair are no exception in a region in which many design consultants have done first class work. As always, though, each newspaper’s
editors and designers are the ones that make the real difference. In Dubai, Mexican designer Miguel Angel Gomez is the art director of Gulf Times, the leading English newspaper in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a newspaper where other great visual journalists work, like the Brazilian Douglas Okazaki, the current Society of News Design (SND) president—Mexican Hugo Sanchez (infographist) or the Indians Shanka Khan (photographer) and Ramachandra Babu (illustrator). In Abu Dhabi, The National excels at photojournalism thanks to Chilean Jaime Puebla. Another Mexican designer, Robert Canseco, is the art director of the Khaleej Times. X
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Selection of award-winning covers of Thursday, a weekend magazine INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
The Great Fort of Nizwa
Location
Ancient Omani Fortification A historical edifice and a monument to Omani architectural ingenuity, Nizwa Fort reflects an ancient military engineering prowess. It was a bastion against raiding forces that had an eye on Nizwa’s oasis and its strategic location at the crossroads of ancient caravan routes. This splendid 17th century edifice, the largest in the Arabian peninsula, took 12 years to construct. Built by Imam Sultan bin Saif al Yaarubi in 1668 AD, the fort’s design reflects the advancement made in the field of military fortifications and mortar-based warfare. Its central tower was a stronghold of might against enemy attack with robust walls that could withstand fierce barrages.
Oman
Ar Se
Building color key Original structure Added structure Cutaway
Lookout
Basic structure The fort was designed as a artillery tower. With cilindrical shape, have all angle firing coverage Cresting
9m
Terrace
18m
Well
Ground
Shelter
Side view
Two rooms hut that gave refugee to the soldiers or the supply of goods. Also was used as jail.
43m
Top view
W
Cutaway line Rock-releasers
Dungeon
Obstacle 2: Murder-hole
Ablution facilities
Prisoners were lowered into the dungeons only by rope
A murder-hole is a straight vertical channel that enables quartered soldiers pour in substances or drop solid objects to ward off enemies and intruders
C Murder hole 2
Armour stock
The ‘reception’ at the main entrance for unwelcome visitors was a misile (a rock) over the head
The murder-holes also was used to pour water in order to extinguish the fire that the intruders ignite on doors
Pourers
Murder hole 1
The exterior of the wall is plastered with lime mortar
Dungeon Wall thickness
Pitfal
Murder hole 3
Intruder receiving a hot welcome
Roughly cut stone
Dungeon
2m
Pitfall 4
B
Pitfall 3 Pitfall 2 Pitfall 1
Filling
18,000 cubic me of stone and soi equivalent to 29 towsend tonela Well’s ward
Fort's main entrance
A small double leafed door is reached by a small staircase but formerly only by a sloping beam over a 2 metres wide chasm that can be removed if some unwelcome visitor try to enter.
Castle's main entrance Castle’s Hall
Stairs
Door
Beam Courtyard
Chasm Nowadays
Before
Sources Forts & castles of Oman, Fahad Mahmood Al-Said. Nizwa Fort Experience History, Ministry of Tourism. The Journal of Oman Studies Volume 6 Part 2: Introduction to Omani Military Architecture of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Enrico d’Errico.
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Al Muladdah
A
rabian ea
L
Barka
Muscat
H
AJ
Rustaq AR
Jabal Shams
MO
Nizwa
S
Samail
Fort (In yellow)
Wadi Kalbouth
Jabal Al Akhdar
Very common in Omani forts, the loopholes, are small openings in the walls that allow the musketeers fire from the interior
Outside the city limits
Wadi Hijri
North
Airport
U N TAIN
Obstacle 1: Loophole
150 m
Seeb
Castle (In blue)
Merlon
50 km Izki Niche for the musketeer (The hole)
ﺻﻮﺭ
Nizwa Wall
ﺟﺮﺍﻣﺎ
Nizwa Fort’s first line of ﻔﻠﻴﺞ ﺍﻟ defense was a fortified wall surrounding the citadel
ﻮﺍﺭ
ﺧ
ﻟﺪﻓﺔ ﺍ ﺱ ﺭﺃ ﺲ ﺭﻭﻳ ﺴﻮﻳﺢ
ﺍﻟ
ﺑﻨﻲ
ﻼﻥ ﺟﻌ ﻋﻠﻲ ﺑﻮ
ﺨﺮﺓ
ﺍﻷﺷ
Inside the city limits
North
Fire step for let the musketeers displace along the complete 360 degrees of the fort.
The central loophole is for long distrance shots
A
Deep wells
Filling
The wells at the fort have an extra depth because its height
C Fort’s height
Ground level
East
The slits around the tower have a steep angle in order to let the shooter reach enemies that was approaching very close to the fort
Well
North
Downhole
South West
Stairway
Well
Formerly there was only one single stairway sideways to the wall. After the restauration, the fort was gifted with 3 double stairways that allow the visitors to admire the hole Nizwa valley
Musketeer
Faith in war time
Even under siege the protectors of Nizwa could pray: They made the ablution with fresh water of the well and would to the prayer hall
A Mecah
Prayer hall
Gunner’s Squad
Obstacle 3: Double-trap
The effect of the cannons is absorbed directly by the wall
ll 5
The lateral loopholes was used for medium range shots
The pour quality of the powder used in ancient times not produce acurate cannon shots, but the flash and sound impress a powerful psicological effect on the enemies
Every door along the zigzag stairs to enter the fort have two traps:
1
The murder-hole action is before the door
Doors are double-side reinforced
B
etres il, the 9 ates
Main entrance to the hole complex (Castle/Fort)
These traps are strategically located immediately after each turn
2
If the intruder enters the door, there is a double leaf hatch that open with the weight and he falls into this receptacle
Fort keeper’s place
Graphics
Oman’s Nizwa Fort, an ancient fortification (Times of Oman, 2012). Winner of SND, Malofiej and Asian Media Awards.
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
An extensive feature on Omani national dress (Al Shabiba, 2016). Winner of SND, Malofiej, and Asian Media Awards.
The covers of the World Cup Supplement published with Times of Oman
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
QAHWA ARABEYA
HISTORY named Khaldi, who noticed that his herd had eaten the berries and became energetic.
?
qahhwat al-bun meaning 'wine of the bean'. Qahwa has been a part of Arab traditions for centuries and holds a big part of their history, which has come to symbolise both hospitality and honour. Its traditional preparation is intricate and unique to its kind with rituals to be conducted with proper etiquette.
Turkey 9
?
8 Syria
6 Jordan Iraq Palestine 7
5 Saudi 4 Arabia
3 Oman
2 Yemen
PREPARATION Here are the steps on how to make the qahwa.
1 Ethiopia
No more.
Some more.
Dhallah in the left hand Water
Cloves
(optional)
Ground cardamom
Ground bean is enjoyed around the Middle East and the world. 4
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
6
Finjaan in the right hand 7
10
9
11 11
TRADITION It is customary that before leaving, the hosts
Do not stir.
GRAPHIC: LUCILLE R. UMALI
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A series of infographics (Times of Oman, 2015) showing the Oscar nominees in each category and culminating on a spread with result of the winners. This won Gold Award in WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards.
A pop-up graphic about the Maracana Stadium during the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
The history and preparation of Arabic coffee (Thursday Magazine, 2013). Winner of SND Award. INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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Graph showing life expectancy around the world.
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COFFEE & TEA
After enjoying your meal, here are the key take-aways
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1
CULTURAL INVESTMENT
MAKE SURE THE WHOLE COMPANY IS INVOLVED There is not much point trying to do newsroom transformation if corporate is not investing in change properly, nor in headquarters trying to drive change when reporters and editors are not fully on board Page 78: “The transition to employee leadership worked less well, and caused a loss of attention, communication and interest. This coincided with a layoff programme…” INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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2
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
THE MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE HAS CHANGED You know the days of monolithic control over reporters, production, distribution and revenue are over. A news company does not control the elements it once did and must adapt to a new environment filled with hungry competitors Page 66: “WhatsApp, Messenger, Skype, YouTube, Amazon and Netflix are playing a new game, free riding on the bit economy while calling for net neutrality. INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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3
BUSINESS MODELS
BREAD CIRCUS. SUBSCRIBER KNOWLEDGE. POLITICAL BIAS Within a changing media environment, three major models exist to attract reader attention and build a profitable business. Entertainment, understanding and political promotion. Give readers what they want Page 62: “What percentage of the world reads The Economist? The people who read it the most are the people who need it the least.” INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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4
STORY
GIVE YOUR READERS STORIES, NOT ARTICLES Sometimes a story is a person, or a company, or an event, but not always. Stories are not categories. Story is conflict, tension, drama, contrast and people trying to achieve their goals in life. Story is normally an ongoing struggle Page 84: “Reporters and editors have adapted well […] They are no longer, for example, obliged to fill up eight pages of foreign news just for the sake of it.” INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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ATTENTION
WHY ARE YOUR READERS EVEN READING? Beyond “story”, your readers and viewers have minds that work in different ways towards different goals. Do they want something new and surprising? Are they bored and looking for escape? Do they seek social prestige and connection? Meet those needs Page 52: “Once the moment of delivery has passed, the information is utterly useless. It doesn’t tie me into any community or ideal or activism. It doesn’t solve any problems I might have.” INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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SEGMENTATION PERSONALISATION
WHAT ARE THE NICHES WITHIN THE NICHES? If a reader is interested in “Spain”, is he interested in the whole country, or just Podemos (politics) or Real Madrid (sports)?
Page 76: “The publication would focus on the 48 per cent who were pro-European and anti-Brexit, or approximately 16 million passionate Britons.” INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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7
CORE PRODUCTION DISTRIBUTION
A CENTRAL SUPER DESK SHOULD CONTROL QUALITY AND FORMATS The stories are the same, and senior editors control which new events “tell the story” for their readers, and which multimedia skills reporters need to apply to which formats for which channels to that end Page 44: “Every film would be made to work on a mobile, films would be published online before TV, and audience discussion around stories would be encouraged before, during and after its publication” INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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8
TOP QUALITY
THE BEST JOURNALISTS AND THE BEST QUALITY JOURNALISM With so many publishers and competitors around you, striving for the best quality will only help you to attract more readers that you can turn into loyal customers
Page 58: “A historical shift towards monomedia journalism requires young, connected, modern, open-mind journalists to lead.” INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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PRINT VS. DIGITAL
PRINT REALLY ISN’T DEAD! Digital and paper products can, and often should, work alongside each other. They can both be profitable, both compliment each other, both be properly resourced, and both be of that same very high standard. Both contribute to building your brand Page 70: “3 things: an “anything is possible mentality”, the ability to learn and react quickly, and employees and leaders who own their contributions.” INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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10
EXPERIMENT
KEEP TESTING AND MEASURING EVERYTHING You have hundreds or thousands of things you could work on to build your company and make your readers happier. So far, no one has discovered the exact recipe for success, so make sure you think about what works for your newsroom and your readers Page 20: “Because the page click, the clickbait model does them no favours either, because all they’re paying for is high numbers of browsers being opened” INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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“Our mission is to defend and promote press freedom, provide knowledge and strategic advice to help members and the industry understand and manage structural and cyclical changes, conduct relevant industry research with academic and media partners, and provide leadership in matters of common interest”
www.wan-ifra.org
A
GAMI has had an incredibly exciting year. Here is a look at some of our activities in 2017:
NEW ONLINE LEARNING PROGRAMME ABOUT DIGITAL REVENUE
INJECT: Launched in January, GAMI is part of an 18-month project, funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, aiming to build a suite of digital tools for journalists designed and developed with journalists, for journalists.
mong numerous advocacy activities and strategic imperatives, here are just some of the initiatives driving the work of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) this year.
In May of this year, WAN-IFRA launched the first online learning platform for digital revenue and transformation: the Media Management Accelerator. As traditional print revenues continue to drop in most parts of the world, publishers have been eager to discover new possibilities and maximum potential with digital revenue. This programme was created to support publishers in these initiatives and to provide an open, engaging platform where participants can glean insight from industry experts, share their newsroom experiences with fellow publishers, and achieve certification in the industry’s only complete digital revenue programme. Our e-learning platform empowers news publishers to make the digital leap by providing pragmatic advice, the necessary tools and best practices in the industry. We have invited industry experts, senior editors, and our panel of consultants to share their wisdom. We have also included real-life case studies from the likes of The Economist, Die Welt, Verdens Gang and Amedia. The programme features six modules for news media managers to pursue: digital revenue strategy & diversification; paid content & reader revenue; three on digital advertising (formats & marketplaces, sales & execution, and data & analytics); and innovation & integrating start-up culture. For more information, visit mma.wan-ifra.org
GLOBAL ALLIANCE FOR MEDIA INNOVATION GAMI
VR MASTERCLASS: From 11-13 May, the World VR Forum, GAMI and the UNINE (University of Neuchâtel) offered a VR Masterclass, creating VR journalistic experiences during the conference. MEDIA INNOVATION MAPPING: This is a collaboration between GAMI and the Media Innovation Studio at UCLan. The project plans to ‘map’ innovation labs, clusters and a selection of projects globally to establish insights on how the media labs are structured, why they were created, and what type of methods they use to innovate, their products and services. The results will be published on www.mediainnovation.news MEDIA LAB DAY: On 8 September in Bordeaux, France, the ‘live’ version of our Media Innovation Mapping research will be unveiled. Come discuss successes and challenges with like-minded media lab heads and staff. START-UP PARK @ DCX Berlin: At the Digital Content Expo in Berlin, come and join the brand new StartUp Park (100 sqm including a speaking area); 10-12 October, Save the date!
VR ADVERTISING PROTOTYPE PROJECT
Advertising in 3D worlds is nothing new. Back in 2008, Barack Obama’s election campaign bought billboard space by the side of the virtual road in the game Burnout Paradise. But now the technology has arrived to both view those 3D worlds in VR, and capture
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the real world in 360 video. So how can publishers experiment with the new medium while exploring revenue opportunities? Many news publishers are producing branded VR and 360 content – but this can be expensive and difficult to scale. With support from Google DNI, and in collaboration with leading Benelux news publisher Mediahuis, WANIFRA is running a prototype project to combine these concepts and to stimulate the creation of original VR and 360 video news content. We anticipate developing several ad units – static image, 3D billboard or interactive elements that can be placed in appropriate spatial position in a 3D GUI overlay on 360 degree video footage. The prototype ads will offer a template for publishers to better monetise initial experiments in VR or 360 video storytelling. The project will also stimulate discussion about non-intrusive VR ad formats in a news context.
NEW RESEARCH REPORTS
Here are a few of the reports WAN-IFRA is producing: The Facebook Revenue Question: The relationship between Facebook and news publishers is complex to say the least, and in 2017 WAN-IFRA is focused on understanding it better, aiming towards a more sustainable business model for journalism. WANIFRA and the World Editors Forum has organised a global task force to address the complex issue. As a part of this, we have commissioned a report looking at practical ways publishers can work with Facebook to drive revenues. The report is written by Grzegorz Piechota, Research Associate and Harvard Business School and longtime news executive at Agora. Smart Data: In the past few years, NRC Media in the Netherlands underwent a huge new way of working with, yep, you got it: “smart data.” One of the major changes was putting businesspeople behind the wheel of driving data teams. In cooperation with NRC’s Xavier van Leeuwe, Matthijs van de Peppel and Mather Economics’ Matt Lindsay, WAN-IFRA will produce three reports on the topic. World News Media Outlook 2017: Surveying about 300 news executives across the globe, this report, done in cooperation with Innovation Research Group partners, Dr. François Nel, Faculty of Culture and Creative Industries, University of Central Lancashire, and Dr. Coral Milburn-Curtis of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, aims to better understand and quantify our industry’s responses to the challenges across the news company value chain.
MEDIA FREEDOM
WAN-IFRA believes that increasing media freedom directly strengthens democracy and human rights and is a foundation of societal development, be it economic, cultural or political. We have built a portfolio of signature media freedom programmes through generous support from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, as well as global donor agencies including Open Society Foundations and IREX. Highlights of this work include: Targeting 60 media and more than 500 high potential women editors and journalists, as well as their CEOs, publishers and editors-in-chief in an effort to enhance gender diversity in the news, in the newsroom and in the boardroom, the WAN-IFRA Gender and Media Freedom Strategy is running in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Botswana, Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe The Strengthening Media and Society programme seeks to strengthen digital actors, create professional networks between media, encourage innovation and empower women media leaders. Via unique Media Freedom Committees in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Malaysia, Indonesia, The Philippines, Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia, the programme puts media professionals in the driving seat when it comes to delivering advocacy that tackles governance, accountability, professional safety, economic prosperity, poverty reduction and human rights. More at www.wan-ifra.org/pressfreedom/ @FreeMediaWorld
CONTACTS WAN-IFRA
Rotfeder-Ring 11, 60327 Frankfurt, Germany Tel. 49.69.2400630 96 bis, rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris, France Tel. +33.1.47428500 info@wan-ifra.org www.wan-ifra.org
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GROWTH STRATEGIES • DIGITAL • NEWSROOMS • DESIGN
We Consult. We Learn. We Publish
INNOVATION IN MAGAZINE MEDIA
An Annual Report for the International Federation of Periodical Press (FIPP). A look at the top magazines and publishers, and what they’re doing to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. Featuring new marketing strategies, new technologies, and emerging forms of journalism and content. But most of all, you’ll see where the magazine industry is headed.
CONFIDENTIAL NEWSLETTER
A quarterly review of the technological changes, journalistic innovations and commercial challenges of the new Information Society, written by experts sensitive to the needs of the professional market. It is aimed at senior executives with an international perspective and a creative mentality. It is published in English and Spanish.
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA
An annual examination of innovations in news media, distributed at the general meeting of the World Association of Newspapers, now WAN-IFRA. The Report features richly illustrated articles with insights by INNOVATION consultants on the latest editorial, marketing and other developments and trends in news media around the world.
INNOVATION IPAPERS
All our clients and subscribers receive a new periodical publication devoted to time-sensitive issues. The INNOVATION PAPERS cover new editorial products, new technology developments and digital platforms, and new advertising and marketing innovations. It is published in English and Spanish.
We hope you will become a part of our readership For subscriptions and to obtain copies visit: www.innovation.media INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
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GROWTH STRATEGIES • DIGITAL • NEWSROOMS • DESIGN
“From Media Companies To Information Engines”
I
NNOVATION is a leading global media consulting company based in London (UK), founded 35 years ago, working with more than 100 media and management consultants fluent in 27 languages in almost 60 countries, which: • Develops and implements strategic plans for diversification, convergence and full multimedia integration. • Plans, directs and implements high quality editorial projects for the modernisation of newsroom management, graphic presentation, tablet applications, mobile media, and editorial content to drive greater advertising revenues and increased circulation. • Produces detailed and unique editorial multimedia integration models and news operations manuals, including news workflows for INNOVATION’s state-of-the-art open-space newsrooms. • Organises tailored in-house training programs for journalists and publishing executives. • Works with family-owned media companies to successfully navigate generational changes. • Publishes reports and newsletters on global media trends, including a quarterly Confidential Newsletter in English and Spanish. • Produces an annual report on Innovations in News Media for the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA). Published since 1999, the report appears in English and several other languages including Russian, Arabic and Chinese. • Publishes (since 2010) an annual report on trends in the magazine industry for the London-based International Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP). The report is published in English and Chinese.
OUR VISION
INNOVATION believes that old style media companies must become “multimedia information engines TM”. We firmly believe that good journalism is good business, and we believe that an information company’s first responsibility is to be profitable because without profitability there is no independence, and without independence there is no credibility. Without credibility there is no audience, and without an audience there is no advertising. These new “Multiplatform Information and Marketing Solutions Engines TM” must lead from Readers to Audiences, and from Audiences to Communities.
HOW WE OPERATE
We believe that change should not be imposed but negotiated and based on consensus. We do not believe in magic formulas. Every project is unique. Every market is different. Every company has its own characteristics. Every newsroom has its own culture and personality. We are not a general management consulting company. Journalism is in our DNA. We come from the industry and speak its language. Although all our projects are tailored to the client’s specific requirements, they always include three key steps: analysis, implementation and follow-up. All three are critical elements in any consulting project.
THE CHANGE PROCESS
Analysis, implementation and follow-up are the three main phases of INNOVATION’s editorial, graphic, technical, management, and business change processes. We do not believe in cosmetic changes or miracles. Every serious project requires time and reflection. Improvisation only leads to failure. We work closely with our clients’ executives and professional staffs. INNOVATION projects build on close creative interaction between our clients and our consultants. Success is heavily dependent on follow-up, training and implementation.
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
DUBAI TRIP: Thomaz Souto Correa, Juan Antonio Giner, Adonis Durado, and a friend.
MAGAZINES John Wilpers presents INNOVATION’S magazine report.
SOUTH AFRICA Antonio Martín Hervás making new friends at Johannesburg
GUATEMALA Helen Alvizures at the launch party for the new Prensa Libre.
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INNOVATION PROJECTS 2016-2017
NEW INNOVATION CONSULTANTS
FIPP (UK, Asia)
Andrew Rolf: Former business digital director of www.theguardian.com
INMA (USA) Pedro Norton: Former CEO of IMPRESA Group (Portugal)
GPB (Georgian Public Broadcasting) The Marketing Annual Congress “CAMP” -
Inês Bravo: Web designer, user experience (UX) editor at Expresso (Portugal).
Seminario Perú Company Lucía Adams: Former Digital Director at The Times
Prensa Libre (Guatemala)
Joe Territo: Former forward-thinking content executive at Penton (NY)
El Periódico de Catalunya (Spain) RCN Radio, RCN TV (Colombia)
Louise Court: Director of Editorial Strategy and Content Hearst UK
Falcon & Associates, Vision (Dubai)
Hubert Grealish: Brand and product marketing lead.
TV18 Broadcast Limited (India) Infoglobo (Brazil)
Mariola Moncada: Development of Chinese language educational projects and culture in collaboration with the China Cultural Centre of Madrid
EDIPRESSE Media Hong kong Limited (China & Singapour) WAN-IFRA (Germany, Colombia, London)
Albert Montagut: Former communications director at Barcelona Football Club.
Economedia (Bulgaria)
Paula Neiva: former journalist at Veja Magazin (Brazil)
Times Media (South Africa) Distripress (Switzerland, Dubai)
Jessica Patterson: Digital native with passion for innovation, multi-platform strategy, photography, magazines
SIP (Miami) Alberta Magazines (Canada)
Sam Whipple: Former BBC News Change Coordinator working on digital and newsroom and transformation
Media forum 3D Journalism (Russia) Dennis Publishing (UK) Grupo América (Argentina) Canadian Magazine Association (Canada)
INNOVATION IN NEWS MEDIA 2017
JOURNALISM
IS OUR CORE BUSINESS Good Journalism is Good Business. If you agree, let’s have a chat
LONDON, UK In Abu Dhabi, Albania, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Chile, China, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Dubai, Egypt, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zeeland, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, United States of America, Venezuela and Zimbabwe we speak the same language: Journalism. 35 YEARS IN 64 COUNTRIES GROWTH STRATEGIES • DIGITAL • NEWSROOMS • DESIGN www.innovation.media headquarters@innovation.media