The first international speaker was Caroline Little, an adviser to Guardian News and Media, and former CEO of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. Caroline continued the theme of a depressed market, but then talked about the evolution of how we receive information, particularly news, and what these changing consumption patterns mean for publishers. The role of the newspaper as a record of yesterday's news has gone, and newsrooms need to adapt.
She said that revenues models are also still to be worked out. The newspaper is now no longer the most effecitve means for an advertiser to reach an audience, with the market becoming more fragmented. While she says advertising revenues will be the foundation for funding news gathering, she pointed to the increasing pressure of continuous reporting and lower monetisation online than in print. She highlighted how publishers need to move beyond simply republishing print news online.
Little said that to succeed, a news company has to keep one foot rooted in the core of quality journalism, with the other stretched as far as possible to try new things. She said there are four key areas - multimedia storytelling, database journalism, reader engagement and citizen journalism. Fear of failure must not hold proprietors back. "Think about each of your assets and how to utilise them," she said.
She said that newspapers should look to the well-known names on their existing payroll and promote them, using them in different ways. She said the cost of putting video stories in real time on the web is a fraction of that for television, and brings a refreshing rawness
Reader engagement is important for ensuring that publishers and journalism remains relevant to the population if services. Some readers will be jerks, and some will be angry, but when given a chance to participate in conversations, readers come back. Understanding Twitter and Facebook are vital for understanding engagement and their viral nature, and it is important to understand how content is being distributed away from the publisher's website. Sites need to throw out as many fishing lines as possible to reel readers back to create an audience for advertisers.
Comments