The ONA24 quotes that stuck in my mind (and the reasons why)

I was really privileged to get the chance to spend most of the past week at ONA24, reconnecting with some old contacts, making some new friends, hearing some of the finest minds in digital journalism talk about how they go about their business, oh... and seeing Lionel Messi play football (thanks John Saroff !).

I landed back in the UK yesterday and my brain's definitely still processing lots of conversations, but there were a strong handful of quotes and soundbites that really made me think - affirmations of things I already thought, reminders of what's changing in journalism and what we need to do about it, a few things that stopped me in my tracks and a load of other stuff in between.

So here's a list of things people said that made me think - and a summary of why they jumped out at me. Disclaimer: this was mainly written on the train back to Cardiff in the fog of jetlag and around two hours sleep on an overnight flight - but despite the challenge that causes to its coherence, I wanted to get my thoughts down while they were still fresh.

1. “Tie community to revenue on day 1”, Dalia Vainer , Viafoura

This is first on my list partly because it was from the first session I attended, but also because it stood apart to many discussions by unashamedly placing return on investment squarely at the centre of a conversation about building loyal and engaged communities. It’s a common thing for journalism conferences to gravitate towards the things that give journalists a warm glow rather than a cold shiver, and the challenges of creating business models that support the crucial work that they do often fall into the latter category.

As bookends to the sessions I was present at, the principles here were in contrast to those in my final panel of the week. “Local news renaissance” was about the Press Forward network of local news titles that now stretches extensively across the US after widespread market failure left many locations without any coverage at all. As someone with accountability for dozens of local news brands, I was eager to discover the secret behind this renaissance.

It was with a touch of disappointment that that secret turned out to be philanthropy - something that’s a huge factor in US journalism, but much less prevalent in the UK. Press Forward’s USP is in helping independent publishers frame the crisis facing local journalism in a way that can convince philanthropic foundations to invest. It’s certainly working, on the basis of the number of states that now have growing Press Forward presences. And yet the tacit conclusion that charity is effectively the only future for local brands leaves me feeling uncomfortable. There was plenty of talk of “building back better”, but to my mind, building back better means building back sustainably with sources of revenue that are dangerously vulnerable to neither market fluctuations nor shifting funding priorities. Press Forward have done a good job accessing money to resurrect local coverage in dozens of areas through conveying the existential threat facing the industry at a local level. But there are many other laudable causes - climate change, anti-poverty, anti-racism to name but a few - that could at any stage eat into the funding currently being channelled into journalism. So to my mind, the ultimate security of local journalism comes from serving a market purpose, and that means being unapologetic about monetising our core activities.

Which brings me back to Dalia’s quote (and another from the Viafoura session, from Dan Seaman: “It’s not community for community’s sake. It’s a significant driver of business value.”) We spoke afterwards in particular about AMAs with expert journalists, which is something I used to be involved in a lot during my early days in digital publishing but which now feel like they’ve gone a bit out of fashion. That’s a mistake, because when done well (with both quality and consistency), they’re a fantastic tool for driving both frequency of visits and a level of familiarity with journalists that can be a major asset in building a stronger connection with Gen Z readers. (Another quote from the same session: “Younger audiences seek connection and community… if we want to appeal to them, we need to appeal to their habits and expectations”, which was endorsed by Mosheh O. in a different session I’ll touch on later: “They will better connect to you if they know who you are. They don’t just tolerate it, they desire it.”)

The challenge, I think, comes in the "jam tomorrow" promise of a potentially slow-burn content series vs the opportunity to invest time into something that might deliver a more immediate (and more transient) return. Tying "community to revenue on day 1" by creating an infrastructure that promotes registrations from the off and tracks lifetime value of those readers who sign up and habitually tune in can be an important role in getting round that.

Full disclosure: Viafoura are a partner for us at Reach plc and we’ll be picking up the conversation about setting up a standard template through which we’ll do AMAs and Q&As on big topics in future.

2. "Whose voice is missing from this story?", Errin Haines , The 19th

Errin is a co-founder of The 19th, a relatively new independent Texas-based publisher that covers politics, gender and social exclusion. The brand is named in honour of the Nineteenth Amendment, which first gave women in the US the right to vote, but its logo includes an asterisk that recognises the people and groups who continue to be denied a voice. To be honest, I could have taken any number of quotes from what was a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion about the upcoming presidential election specifically, and the landscape of American political reporting in general.

While I’m hopeful that most journalists will regularly ask themselves this question about their reporting, it’s a question that never loses its importance, in respect of both thinking about who we’re giving a platform to in individual stories, but also the wider issue of what constitutes political reporting in general. “Politics is about the impact of policy” is a phrase any political journalist who’s ever worked for me will be well familiar with, and so I found myself agreeing with the comments of Sandhya Dirks , of NPR , about systems journalism - a phrase coined to describe a mode of reporting that digs into the underlying reasons for and consequences of inequality and disenfranchisement.?

3. “It’s amazing how quick you end up saying ‘that’s the way we do stuff here’. Even working for yourself you get wedded to a particular way of doing things,” Mosheh O.

and

“I’m extremely envious of the 2020 me who could try new things and didn’t have anything to lose,” Blair Imani

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that most traditional news publishers need to become more progressive in their content strategies - not just what they cover, but how they cover it. Platform, layout, angle, length, the visibility of the author - it’s all up for grabs. But it’s hard, right?

That fact was brought home to me in a session with Blair and Moshei, who are two… content creators? Influencers? I’m not really clear about which is the more appropriate term, so for now I’ll settle for calling them two super-smart journalists who understand they can reach huge audiences by connecting things they want to know with how and where they want to hear it. (As Blair put it: “It’s about information delivery and reaching people where they are.”) But it was the part of the discussion referenced in the quotes above that both surprised and reassured me. If two content creators who’ve built their own brands in their own images find it easy to get institutionalised, it’s perhaps inevitable that journalists in big legacy organisations will do too. However, that doesn’t mean it’s any less important to change…

4. “Let me make this clear. We don’t have any access to search algorithms,” Jonathan Flesher , Reddit, Inc.

It’s possibly a little unfair making this the pull-out quote from a session that was much more about publisher partnerships and generative AI (more of that in a minute), but at the same time it felt there was a tangible wait of expectation from the audience to address this specific issue during Jonathan Flesher’s fireside chat with Paul Cheung of Hacks/Hackers. It’s not unreasonable given the correlation of Reddit’s extraordinary upward trajectory for Google search visibility and the well-publicised partnership between the two companies. Jonathan is VP for Partnerships and Business Development at Reddit, and was interesting about how they approach deals with partners, particularly from an AI perspective. In general, he struck quite an optimistic tone about the outlook for the news publishing industry as it faces up to the emerging threat of generative AI. The “temporal nature” of the news cycle meant that AI would always rely on human reporting in order for LLMs to be abreast of the latest events, and later added: “The big worry in Gen AI is the disintermediation of websites. It is not in the interests of Gen AI firms to disintermediate the internet. The internet would collapse and the content they rely on would not happen.”

Reassuring? Possibly, and there is certainly something in the necessity of human-generated content to create a pool of information for LLMs to feed themselves on. However (and it’s a flippant point) but he was hardly going to sit in front of a hall full of journalists and declare that AI would end the publishing industry as we know it. Moreover, he was also noticeably more circumspect when he came to answering an audience question about whether the reliance of AI firms on content created by the news industry would actually involve any meaningful money changing hands. (“The hope is that RAG and inference will take the stance of looking up trusted information. Whether that generates a tonne of money remains to be seen. I’m hopeful they’ll share back revenue to make a sustainable business.”)

Outside of AI, there were plenty of platitudes about the internet’s new favoured child wanting to play nice with the news industry, so let’s hope we see tangible evidence of that.

5. “People have a cognitive bias against taking things away”, Eric Athas , 纽约时报

A contender for longest panel heading of the week, this was from a session called “Pivot to Thoughtfulness: Taking a Measured Approach to Launching New Tools in Your Newsroom”, which was ostensibly about practical pointers for successful tech rollouts, but in reality was a highly relatable toolbox for making change of any type stick in newsrooms. Trying to get news teams to do new things, or the same things in new ways, is something I’ve spent much of the last decade doing with varying degrees of success, and so the pointers raised by Eric and his co-presenter Kwame Opam were a mixture of “yes, that!” moments and other concepts that felt instinctively true but had never crystallized as such in my mind.?

The principle in this quote is such a good point. How many times have you got together with a team to look at something that isn’t working and come away with a whole load of extra complexity, additional process, more meetings or new layers of bureaucracy? And of course, something additional is required. But taking things away, and being prepared to pare a process down to its core elements takes real bravery. Doing it needs you to be able to say to your team: “We don’t know exactly how to fix it, so let’s make it as simple as possible, and if we lose anything crucial in the process, we can always add it back in.” Taking things to back to basics and restoring only what’s genuinely needed helps create process that’s both more effective and easier to understand.?

Some other great actions from this talk:

a. When you’re making changes, communicate what’s not changing first

b. Force yourself to ask the right questions early by templating them into a checklist which you then use every time

c. When something works, it’s worth pointing out - we too often only discuss flaws

d. An organisation is a collection of departmental subcultures - so find the advocates for change, and build relationships across teams with those who see value in it.

6. “The role is not just to say ‘trust us there was a crowd’, but to bring the audience with you and be able to show them the verification process behind it," Rhona Tarrant , CBS News

Rhona Tarrant is executive editor at CBS News Confirmed, and leads a team who’ve got their work cut out at the moment trying to sort all through the information, misinformation and disinformation flying around as the US election campaign reaches boiling point. There’s some fascinating technological advances happening right now in the field of verification, and it was interesting to hear that while there’s widespread fear about the destabilising impact of AI-generated content on the verification field, the vast majority of cases that fact-checking and news provenance teams deal with still relate to non-manipulated videos and pictures that area shared as alleged proof of an unrelated situation.

Anyway, this quote struck me as interesting because it goes back to what was a recurring theme of the conference despite a wide variety of subject matter: that trust, engagement and a perception of authenticity are rewards for doing more than just telling audiences what they should believe. Whether it’s around verification, search, subscriptions or brand partnerships, the journalists and platforms that are winning are those that don’t stop at sharing information, but aim to build human relationships. It’s good business, and it’s good journalism.