Reimagining the News Courtesy of Covid-19
Who would have thought a tiny virus may totally discombobulate our lives and turn the news business into a field for experimentation at warp speed?
The industry has already been undergoing rapid, major disruptions in recent years, thanks in great measure to social media and uncertain economic conditions worldwide, but the coronavirus floored the accelerator, forcing news organizations to rethink how to produce and disseminate content in untested, often creative, ways.
Enter the “Special Edition of Innovation in News Media World Report 2020: Reimagining the News” with valuable insights from 17 editors and CEOs of international media to shed light on the challenges they face and how this forced transformation could be turned to their advantage.
According to report editors Juan Señor and Emma Goodman:
The pandemic and consequent lockdowns are accelerating trends in all areas of life, including news consumption and production. Trends that might have taken five years to become the norm are now becoming the norm in five months. These include the migration of the audience to digital platforms, the failure of digital advertising to provide sufficient funding for quality journalism, and the collapse of trust in social media platforms.
The Innovation Media Consulting Group’s report is a handy guide on how news organizations are capitalizing on lockdowns to draw more readers to their digital products by creating a wealth of information across multiple platforms.
On a positive note, the drop in print newspaper readership has been offset by a rise in digital news eyeballs, wrote Faisal J. Abbas, editor-in-chief of Saudi Arabia’s daily Arab News, but one shouldn’t be lulled into thinking it’s a rosy picture because their online advertising revenue has been mostly swallowed by tech giants Google, Facebook and Alibaba.
“News media can also learn lessons from TV and radio, masters of adapting to change,” he said. “Thanks to streaming, downloading and podcasts, they deliver content to consumers how and when the consumers want it, not at the whim of the broadcast schedulers. So let’s deliver news to our readers in a way that suits them, not us.”
Marty Baron, The Washington Post’s executive editor who led The Boston Globe in a previous incarnation, wrote of how that paper’s investigation of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, and the movie “Spotlight” that exposed it to a wider audience, made even abused readers appreciate the Globe’s role in exposing the horrors, and debunked charges by U.S. President Donald Trump that the press is the “enemy of the American people.”
He quoted James Madison, who co-authored the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing freedom of the press, who spoke of “the right of freely examining public characters and measures.”
“That right is still ours, thankfully, but it will mean nothing if we do not exercise it with vigor and tenacity,” Baron said, explaining that at The Washington Post they understand their role in a democracy and would meet their obligations.
Philippines media icon Maria Ressa, CEO and executive editor of Rappler, wrote of being under attack for holding officials’ feet to the fire.
She very incisively wrote:
We are at an existential moment in time — where, if we don’t take the right steps forward, democracy as we know it is dead. When journalists are under attack, democracy is under attack. Social media platforms are now the world’s largest distributor of news, but, while they’ve taken the revenues, they’ve ignored the gatekeeping powers that news groups have traditionally had.
She should know — having been arrested several times for daring to insist that “the battle for truth is the battle of our generation,” and that without facts there is no truth.
Ressa urged journalists to collaborate, throw out old definitions, stop taking the bait of emotions, seek what they have in common over what drives them apart, demand enlightened self-interest from tech companies, create a global database of disinformation networks, and, a global Interpol that stops the impunity allowing nations and companies to get away with it.
Across the miles, Groupe Le Monde CEO Louis Dreyfus of France weighed in by recommending that media invest in talent, assume a global perspective and target new generations.
He said investing in talent wasn’t limited to increasing the payroll but to also building a better working environment for the staff.
“For us at Le Monde, closing the salary and career gaps between women and men within our staff was one of our top priorities,” he wrote. “Our next priority is to seek greater ethnic diversity among the journalists we recruit.”
Looking ahead, Dreyfus said Le Monde should zero in on the formats and new platforms that attract the daughters and sons — or the granddaughters and grandsons — of the paper’s traditional audience.
Le Monde’s efforts with Snapchat Discover over the past two years significantly contributed to building a younger audience with more than 1.4 million subscribers (most of them teenagers) to our daily Discover edition. We hope that our current experience with TikTok will do the same, as well as our initiatives with podcasts. And for each of these projects with new media formats attracting new generations, we will make sure to respect Le Monde’s high editorial standards.
Irene Gentle, editor of Canada’s Toronto Star, shed doubt on the survival of news outlets in the next two decades absent a clear sense of their own identity, policies, ethics, standards and guidelines, plus direct channels between readers, reporters and top editors.
“Readers have a zillion things they can do besides pay attention to us, and as many as one third of people have simply given up news altogether,” she noted. “If we are not clear on who we are, and accountable to our own readers, ethics and standards, we’ll be unhelpful, irrelevant or both.”
To that end, the evolution of journalism isn’t limited to business models or platforms used, or whether a story is in text, video, graphics or audio, she said, adding that journalism’s foundations have to be examined this decade.
“What may have been the hill to die on journalistically 30 years ago may well be the hill your outlet actually dies on if it does not examine if that premise holds in the current world,” Gentle said.
The report offered a list of monetization models with which publishers may experiment to compensate for advertising as a primary revenue stream, admitting they won’t work for everyone.
It said diversification was vital and that the models’ key premise is high quality, unique journalism to build a loyal, dedicated, paying audience, solidify media brands’ reputation, and, provide more monetization opportunities.
A final chapter in the report is entitled “Visual Journalism Comes of Age During A Global Pandemic,” with an emphasis on graphic narratives to explain the Covid-19 tsunami that has swept entire countries.
It provides case studies of optimum ways to harness the power of data visualization in a bid to tackle different aspects of the pandemic, from explaining its origins and path around the world, to the more local, such as precise details of hospital beds, ventilators and health care capacity in specific cities and localities.
“The pieces employ a variety of narrative formats as well as visual tools — from detailed charts and interactive graphs, to complex choropleth maps and simple illustrations — to offer engaging data-driven interpretations that provide both context and clarity, proving, in turn, to be powerful vehicles of public understanding,” it said.