The News Business is Dead, Long Live News

Over the last few weeks I have read an absurd amount of articles on the life and death of the news business.  Call it Newsmageddon 4.0. Oddly many of these articles were kicked off by the supreme irony of Buzzfeed's Exploding Watermelon happening at the same time as reporting on them missing revenue targets. (Or did it?)

The following post is my attempt to find a through line of all the analysis, reporting and at times bloviating on the future of news. What have we learned that really matters? What is the heart of a going-forward business strategy? What works and what is a dead end?

For News Outlets Squeezed From the Middle, It’s Bend or Bust (April 17, 2016; New York Times)

It starts with an interview that Jim Rutenberg, the Mediator columnist at The New York Times did with Jim VandeHei, the outgoing Executive Editor at Politico.  In the interview he took the 'provocative proposition' that “journalists are killing journalism.” "It’s about convincing already-inundated audiences that they want what you’re producing, and they want it so badly that they will pay for it through subscriptions."

For VandeHei the moment of change for the news business came when digital analytics enabled editors, publishers and advertisers to understand not only how well an A1 article was doing, but that dry A10 article was being read. For VandeHei traditional news "now has ratings, just as television does."

His answer is that "it’s incumbent upon news organizations to do a better job with [content] — make them shorter and more distinctive, with data and striking visual presentation."

From the editorial meeting to the Board room it let the audience in to the editorial, advertising, marketing and every other process in a news organization. And legacy news organizations are largely failing that challenge.

Politico Pierces the ‘Brussels Bubble’ With U.S.-Style Coverage. (April 24, 2016; New York Times)

U.S. style success is starting to be exported to other markets. My own work at the Times was helping to create and then play a part in implementing a new international strategy to grow revenue overseas. (Note: a future question do U.S. news organizations have any culpability in potentially undermining a fragile vernacular news industry?)

Politico saw the opportunity to bring its heated, focused political coverage to the stodgy and complex (confusing!) halls of Brussels, but with a distinct focus on a niche audience of insiders. "Its granular coverage of everything from ministerial summit meetings to regulatory committee hearings is leavened with tidbits from errant emails and restaurant recommendations, as well as revealing anecdotes about the biggest power brokers in Brussels."

What is clear is that the going forward target of Politico (and Quartz, among others) is a targeted segment; "it is the quality, not the size, of the readership that matters most." Why because that is where the steady, loyal and engaged money resides. "Pro subscriptions, which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars a year, generate 30 percent of Politico Europe’s revenues; the rest comes from ads and branded conferences."

Politico realized early on that they could bring their type of news, the fast-paced, insider voice desired by narrow, but profitable segments of the audience. “We produce a kind of news for insiders that gives them the juice that they can use,” said Mr. Matthew Kaminski, Executive Editor of Politico Europe.

And while the notion of 'popularity' of news content did not elicit the reaction it has in the past (you can only do Newsmaggedon so many times), the Buzzfeed watermelon stunt, coupled with its dimmed revenue projections did cause some reaction. Apart from internal sniping, the response from observers was "Eh..."

Why BuzzFeed’s Exploding Watermelon Won’t Destroy Journalism (April 18, 2016; Politico Magazine)

Jack Shafer at Politico (with arched eyebrow) acidly advised Jim Rutenberg at the Times to "...consult a brilliant academic paper by Matthew C. Ehrlich, 'Taking Animal News Seriously: Cat Tales in the New York Times.' The paper documents a Timesian obsession to all things feline that makes BuzzFeed’s devotion to kitty videos seem restrained."

He went on to quote Herbert Bayard Swope, Editor of New York World until 1929, who "...saw no incompatibility in pairing the editorially worthy and the editorially popular in the same package. 'What I try to do in my paper is to give the public part of what it wants and part of what it ought to have whether it wants it or not,' Swope said."

For Those Clutching Pearls Over Buzzfeed: A History of Newspapers Reveals That It's Always Been This Way (May 2016, The Smithsonian)

Clive Thompson went back even further and makes the connection - as does Jay Rosen - between innovation and mercantilism of the late 1700s and early 1800s of the news business to today.  He writes,"In essence, newspapers were cutting-edge pioneers of the industrial revolution—the Silicon Valley of their day. 'One had to be an entrepreneur and one had to be very alert to new technologies."

"By the 1830s, those innovations cut the cost of printing so much that the “penny press” was born, a paper published daily and selling for one cent. Audience size boomed: Launched in 1833, the New York Sun started at 5,000 copies a day, growing to 15,000 in only two years. By the 1830s there were 1,200 papers across the country, and half of all families subscribed to one."

"This changed the nature of journalism itself. To appeal to mass audiences, many newspapers dropped the nakedly partisan tone; they couldn’t be sure everyone agreed with their party stance. In place of the big political essays, papers hired reporters whose job was to collect facts."

If we are literally back to the future of news then, as VandeHei suggests the format of the news is changing. Chris Cillizza picked up on this theme in his response to Rutenberg and others.

Journalism isn’t dying. But it’s changing WAY faster than most people understand. (April 18th, 2016; The Washington Post)

Using Erik Rydholm's critical analysis of journalism framework he wrote,"And, as the “what” faded in terms of reader interest, the “so what” and the “now what” began to rise. Suddenly, people didn’t want to just read about a presidential debate, they wanted analysis of the debate, too. And they wanted that analysis delivered at the same time as the news. They didn’t want to wait for the next day to read about who did well and who didn’t. They wanted it in real time. And that went double for anyone younger than 30."

Cillizza goes on to support that 'the what' is still vital to news it is "the spine of news - without it everything else collapses".

Which is fine, but if 'the what' is at least limping along as being relevant, how can we build a credible editorial product, let alone a business model?

The future of journalism in three words: collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. (April 18, 2016; The Guardian)

For Charles Lewis the digital world has fundamentally restructured journalistic collaboration. "What is remarkable and indeed unprecedented about the epic Panama Papers project, however, is the year-long, discreet and embargoed investigative collaboration between 370 journalists and their respective news organisations throughout the world."

"Obviously, this important work was neither feasible nor fathomable in the last century, before people even used the phrase “big data”, let alone possessed the technical knowledge and understanding to actually create the platforms to facilitate such an investigation."

The Panama Papers and the Monster Stories of the Future. (April 14, 2016; The New Yorker)

Nicholas Lehman carried this theme forward by thinking about future leaks of big data would exceed current journalistic capabilities, leading to new types of journalism partnerships or even organizations.

"What if a future data file is so enormous that significant numbers of high-end computer scientists who are expert in the more recondite realms of machine learning are better suited to find the news in it than anybody a journalism organization could afford to employ? Whether it involves big organizations or online networks, the sort of journalism narrative that turns on reporters and editors acting as intermediaries between a leaker and the public may turn out to have been just a phase in the history of the profession."

Lehman also points to another problem within the current news industry. Traditional news organizations are not just slow, they are overly protective of their turf. He writes, “Other U.S. news organizations, most notably The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have often declined to collaborate, seeking exclusivity, or preferring to write their own stories about ICIJ’s results, after the fact, rather than join in the long, slow collaborative process leading up to publishing at an agreed-upon time and date.”

(To be fair Dean Baquet, the Executive Editor of the Times cried foul that they were not given enough information, that ICIJ and others were holding back, so they could not evaluate whether they could participate.)

As innovation roils the workflow and skills of journalism, as well as its format and presentation, the other major disruption is the role of the audience in how content is published, distributed and enhanced. While long a topic with innovators within digital journalism the role of the audience is still a nebulous concept in most newsrooms.

A serious problem the news industry does not talk about. (April 19th, 2016; Jennifer Brandel, Medium.com)

Jennifer Brandel and Andrew Haeg, both brilliant news innovators, have been investigating how reporters and editors feel about their audience. What they found was not encouraging. "The culture of journalism breeds disdain for the people we’re meant to be serving, i.e., the audience."

They continue, "Journalists mainly hear from “the public” when they’ve gotten something wrong, or when someone with time on their hands and an axe to grind finds the reporter’s phone or email. And when reporters go out “into the field” (which in and of itself evokes a kind of anthropological distance), they often encounter humanity at its worst. Now do that day in, day out, return to the office, commiserate with colleagues, develop some inside jokes, and voila! You have a culture."

Alison MacAdams pointed to another weak area in preparing publishers for the future, the lack of internal programs to identify, train and support next generation editors.

Journalism has an editing crisis, but we can do something about it. (April 20, 2016; Poynter.org)

She writes, "Editing may not be sexy. It may not nourish the ego. But (do I need to say it?) great editing makes every story more distinctive and memorable. Editors give stories structure, they elevate characters and they hone focus. We now create far more content that any reasonable human being could ever read, and journalism has to work harder to get noticed. We can’t do that without editors."

MacAdams makes the point that editors are the link between talent and business of news, including fostering that increasingly important connection with audiences. She points to three key qualities of editors today: a) understanding audience-centric thinking, b) understanding emerging distribution channels, and c) understand how to create engaging, provocative content for longform, shortform 'and everything in-between'.

To this point most of the focus has been on the craft of journalism and the future of talent within that system. The other dominant theme is the role of technology, whether a Lehman-esque vision of increasing growth of computer science journalism or Davey Alba's support for platforms as transforming the culture of audiences.

I Saw the Future of Netflix in a Japanese Reality Show. (April 21, 2016; Wired)

Alba documented his obsession over a bad (really bad) Japanese television program targeting millennials brought to him by an globalizing Netflix.  "[Netflix] wants to hook me on a Japanese reality show I can’t find anywhere else and never would have found if its algorithms hadn’t determined that this obscure overseas morsel was exactly the kind of video junk food I’d compulsively devour. Welcome to the future of global television, which isn’t about exporting Hollywood to the world. Clearly, when TV is truly global, the world will come to you."

In his most generous, which is a Wired speciality, he envisions Netflix and other global platforms will create a new type of techno-utopianism, not based on democratic or humanitarian values, but binge watching.  Together we will watch together in peace as "global TV [will] start to look a lot less like the Americanization of global entertainment and more like a cultural exchange."

The theme of technology solving the news publishing problem is echoed in a related article by Dan Grover, a product manager for WhatsApp. In a long, but essential article, he points out that ultimately technology has to solve problems efficiently with the audience and not in spite of them.

Bots won't replace apps. Better apps will replace apps. (April 20, 2016; DanGrover.com)

He argues that the current craze of bots - technical solutions that function outside of the audience engagement  - don't solve the fundamental problems of expedient design that pile an 'audience debt' over time. For example he writes about communications via his phone: "I want the first tab of my OS’s home screen to be a central inbox half as good as my chat app’s inbox. It want it to incorporate all my messengers, emails, news subscriptions, and notifications and give me as great a degree of control in managing it. No more red dots spattered everywhere, no swiping up to see missed notifications. Make them a bit richer and better-integrated with their originating apps. Make them expire and sync between my devices as appropriate. Just fan it all out in front of me and give me a few simple ways to tame them. I’ll spend most of my day on that page, and when I need to go launch Calculator or Infinity Blade, I’ll swipe over. Serve me a tasty info burrito as my main course instead of a series of nachos."

"But more than anything, rather than screwing around with bots, I want the tech industry to focus on solving these major annoyances and handling some of the common use cases I described that my phone ought to do better with by now."

Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved. (April 25, 2016; Joshua Topolsky, Medium.com)

The ultimate knife in the gut of the struggling news business was recently delivered by Joshua Topolsky. It is an honest, brutal and direct take-down of technology exceptionalism.  "Video will not save your media business. Nor will bots, newsletters, a “morning briefing” app, a “lean back” iPad experience, Slack integration, a Snapchat channel, or a great partnership with Twitter. All of these things together might help, but even then, you will not be saved by the magical New Thing that everyone else in the media community is convinced will be the answer to The Problem."

In his cogent analysis, "[O]ver time, we built up scale in digital to replace user value. We thought we could solve with numbers (the new, seemingly infinite numbers the internet and social media provides) what we couldn’t solve with attention. And with every new set of eyeballs (or clicks, or views) we added, we diminished the merit of what we made. And advertisers asked for more, because those eyes were worth less. And we made more. And it was less valuable."

His answer to the problem with the news mirrors the same arguements Adam Davidson makes within public media (below). Topolsky writes that the only thing that will ultimately work are "[c]ompelling voices and stories, real and raw talent, new ideas that actually serve or delight an audience, brands that have meaning and ballast; these are things that matter in the next age of media. Thinking of your platform as an actual platform, not a delivery method. Knowing you’re more than just your words. Thinking of your business as a product and storytelling business, not a headline and body-copy business. Thinking of your audience as finite and building a sustainable business model around that audience?—?that’s going to matter."

A guardedly optimistic take on the future of NPR. (March 31, 2016; Adam Davidson, Medium.com)

Adam Davidson, one of the founders of Planet Money, columnist at the New York Times and talent at Gimlet Media has something very similar to say to public media. "The core solution to the future will come from deeply understanding and serving listeners’ needs and wants. The answer is out there, not in here...Different distribution means very different tone, length, style. The listeners are telling us, quite loudly, what they want, by their behavior."

This long tour of current media writing leads to some very simple and enduring conclusions: great journalism wins only if you recognize that your audience has taken a board position at your publication. The narrower the focus of your great journalism the easier to engage the audience and deduce how, when and in what format they want your content. This does not preclude legacy media from future success, but if you don't build that vision in the cultural DNA of the organization quickly the disruption will continue.

Hope you enjoyed reading at least a bit of these articles as much as I did. Dig in more deeply when you have the time.