Shaping the future - Chapter 6

  

THE FUTURE

Two different industries, media and digital technology, have become increasingly converged with the development of web technologies, and this is only set to increase. In the past few years alone, news publishers have moved from repurposing print stories for the web to introducing whole new media formats that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier: newspapers exploring video and audio, and broadcasters publishing text-based material. If more intense competition within the media industry is not enough, companies are competing against a huge number of other sources that publish news and information – including aggregated news sites like Google and Yahoo, and blogs and independent news sites that can exist because of the liberated economics of web publishing.

Given all those developments, it might be hard to predict what will be around the next corner. But we can look at how the strongest of those trends have developed and in which direction they seem to point. The key trends are:

• Social networking
• Personalisation
• Communication
• Widgetisation
• Mobile

Social networking is a term commonly used to describe sites like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo that invite users to create their own profile of personal information, photos, lists of interests, and connect them to friends. Despite the assumption that these sites are used for finding dates or various more nefarious activities, most users connect to people they already know and as such, the sites tend to replace or supplement emails or instant messaging as communication tools. These sites are also popular among people with specific interests, whether they are Madonna fans or students campaigning against HSBC for introducing fees on student accounts – already proven to be a powerful platform.

Social networking has already moved from a trend to create a virtual teenage bedroom wall to something far more functional – a rich, personalised and multipurpose hub for communication and organisation. The differentiator for Facebook over other sites is the introduction of a more extensive developer platform, which means other web-based services, such as video-sharing, film reviews and news headlines, can be added to user profiles. The site’s stated aim is to create the web within the web – potentially, users might never need to go to another website if they can do everything – including email – within Facebook.

However much that particular site continues to grow, it is unlikely to dominate the web to the extent it would like. But their strategy is representative of a number of key internet trends. Firstly, the extent to which users can customise and personalise their internet tools will continue to grow and refine. This includes compiling their own daily news package by subscribing to the RSS feeds from the news sites and blogs they trust and want to read daily, whether that is the BBC, the Times or a specialist blog on neurosurgery, for example. Users will require a combination of aggregation tools, like newsreader programmes, that allow them to compile these customised services – with human selection, contextualisation and analysis. Hence the job of the editor and journalist is not on the decline: on the contrary, news has a larger audience than ever, and more than ever users need trusted guides to navigate through it all.

The power of these networks and the enthusiasm they inspire among users has triggered other web publishers, including news sites and broadcasters, to introduce and expand similar networking features within their own sites. ITV famously bought Friends Reunited in 2005 expecting to see growth in this area, and others have tried to expand discussion areas, like Telegraph.co.uk , which introduce personalisable services where news can be tailored by subject or keyword. TheSun.co.uk has gone even further and developed MyStreet, a feature that delivers news tailored by postcode. As you’d expect (particularly from The Sun) there is a clear commercial objective behind all these developments – to encourage users to spend more time on sites, and thus drive up advertising revenues.

Very few websites have successfully built a paid-for access model: general news sites have so many competitors that most web users are reluctant to pay for something they can get elsewhere for free. The few sites that have succeeded are providing unique, specialist news or high-quality business news: the Wall Street Journal claims to be the largest subscription news site in the world, because its readers are generally wealthy and will often directly profit from the investment in that agenda-setting financial markets news. But even that site looks likely to lose its subscription service once Murdoch moves in.

For the rest of the web, the business model is built around advertising and this is unlikely to change. Advertisers sometimes pay for sponsoring certain sections – Intel sponsors the Guardian’s music podcast, for example - but more typically pay per view or for each click on an advert. Publishers need to provide enough inventory for advertisers – who are increasingly interested to push their brands online – by publishing lots of pages of new features. New media platforms like podcasts and video offer more opportunities for sponsorship and advertising: YouTube, which is the web video market leader by some way, has finally introduced adverts in the form of a ten-second overlay at the start of clips. No doubt news publishers will follow suit with a clearer financial incentive for introducing video. Regular audit figures from the regional and national press and the magazine industry have shown a steady –  and in some case dramatic – decline for years. But that trend is largely balanced out by the rise of online readership. Put aside the nostalgia about the addictive scent of printing inks and there many enormous opportunities in digital publishing: new distribution methods to reach bigger audiences and new sources of revenue.

The strategy for start-up web services is generally the same: to build as big an audience as possible and work how to commercialise that service later. Because web users expect content for free on the internet, advertising has become the accepted business model and most newspapers now follow the same web strategy of aiming for big audiences that they can commercialise through ads.

Google’s products challenge news organisations in a number of ways. Though some have objected to its use of extracts of their copyrighted text that appear in search results, most recognise that search engines are essential for building traffic; like the index pages of a book, they point web users to the information they want. Google News aggregates news headlines from 4,500 news sources – rather worryingly excluding blogs but including press releases – but though a powerful and popular tool, it could not function without the conventional – and expensively produced – news stories it indexes. Google is often viewed with suspicion by traditional publishes, but that might be more because in less than a decade it has developed a $175bn business in a space where news companies failed to build.

Part of the success of Google and its entrepreneurial counterparts has been to provide tools that enable web users to take control of information in a number of ways, whether that is self publishing to the world through blogs, setting up news alerts on specific companies and issues or, in the form of YouTube, offering millions of on-demand videos. That shift in control of information is key to defining the new era of online news; a generation that now expects to be able to access or receive what they want when they want it and share it with others, taking fundamental control away from news organisations. On one hand, technology enables Burmese pro-democracy campaigners to produce and distribute news for audiences around the world – on the other, it might mean stories like “World’s tallest man saves dolphin”continue to top the BBC’s most-popular news story lists.

The web has empowered independent writers and small news organisations by giving them an equal distribution platform to established media, encouraging a plurality of media voices. It is likely that there may be some impact on this by the introduction of tiered services – part of an issue that has been called“net neutrality”.This would mean that rich corporations could pay to have their content distributed on a faster more reliable, and so leave the independent voices harder to hear.

This transition to wider, less-controlled distribution of news is very difficult for news publishers, used to keeping a very tight reign over where and how their expensive news products are delivered. What can be learnt from the web industry in the past ten years is the significant audiences have largely been built by offering services to large numbers of people for free. eBay, Google, YouTube: the strategy, albeit sometimes accidental, has been to build audiences first and worry about monetising those later. Producing content, on the other, is expensive. That is not likely to change, but the point is the shift in power as distribution moves away from the creators to the aggregators.

Users now control much of the distribution and that trend will not be reversed. It seems the most successful strategies to date have been those publishers that have joined in. The spread of widgets – smaller satellite versions of sites that appear on other sites – and news feeds is a good example. The old mindset would be to think that users should be pulled back to the main website to read the news in context: the new, to make that news available in as many other places and through as many different tools as possible, like satellites to the main sites. RSS can often be commercialised by introducing adverts in feeds, but if not can be seen as an advert for the site’s news. The reward for relinquishing a little of that control is building a bigger, and possibly new, younger, audience. And isn’t that what most news organisations always say they are aiming for?

Mobile has promised to be The Next Big Thing for content producers for some time, but it does now seem that devices are finally becoming user-friendly enough to inspire their owners to explore what is on offer: Apple’s much-hyped iPhone will be a major driver of video, music and web-based content on phones because its interface is more intuitive than previous attempts. Added to that, mobile internet is now being offered through flat rate, unlimited monthly tariffs; it was the same development in broadband rates that helped that market break through.

Many publishers already offer news SMS and sports services for mobiles, but the potential goes far beyond that. Fledgling mobile TV services are already on offer, and geo-location – the targeting of services according to the location of the phone – offers even more potential. Location-based mobile search means more contextual results, so if you search for “pubs, Wellington Road”and you’re in Wellington Road Exeter, the search will return results for the road next to you and not the Wellington Road in Aberdeen. News could be targeted in the same way, but who will explore that first?

The challenge for publishers is to keep abreast of developments, now that their future is tied so closely to that of the technology industry, which moves way faster than the media. And of those developments, it takes confidence and a proper understanding of the audience to recognise which will be relevant and useful to their own products.

The challenge for journalists themselves is to stay one step ahead of their employers. By pre-empting the changes and developments in the industry, journalists will be able to help shape their roles in the way that best suits them without having to rely on blind faith in their management. This is undoubtedly a challenging time for publishing and for journalism, but the demand for news has never been higher. This is an opportunity to seize the moment and change things for the better.

DESCRIPTION OF TERMS

user generated content material submitted to media outlets by members of their audience, including comments, photographs and video.

citizen journalism a term for people who are not professional journalists who self-publish articles on their own blogs or submit content to media outlets.

Witness contributor a term used by the NUJ to specifically describe those who submit images or video material of events to media outlets.

Hyperlocal news from the immediate local environment of the reader.

Portal major websites providing a range of different features, often including news, weather, comment, financial news, discussion forums – e.g. MSN, My Yahoo!

Web 2.0 a description of a range of recent developments on the web, with a focus on participation, user submissions, collaboration and social networking.

Monetise develop as a source of revenue