The future of news

Back to the coffee house

The internet is taking the news industry back to the conversational culture of the era before mass media

The Future of News – A Summary of an Economist Report

In its July 9th issue, the Economist (arguably the magazine world’s most thoughtful product) published a 14-page report titled: 

Bulletins from the Future, an exhaustive analysis of the current state and future shape of the global news industry.

Between the tug of traditional news delivery and the pull of new media, this is one industry that needs to get used to the idea of change.

The Economist report studies six looming issues or trends in its attempt to predict the course that News will take over the next decade or so….

1) How Newspapers are Faring: 

• The death knell has been sounded for newspapers in many parts of the world, notably in the US, Western Europe, Japan and Australia where circulation has been on a steep decline since 2005. In other parts of the world, however, such as in South Africa, China, Brazil and most definitely India, reports of its death appear exaggerated (to paraphrase Mark Twain). In India, circulation actually went up a whopping 40% in the period from 2005 to 2009 and shows no immediate signs of flagging. The Economist report says: “Thanks to India’s vast population, there is scope for growth in print media for years to come”. Still, there are others who wonder whether “this greater interest in news [will be] a short-term phenomenon that will be undermined by the spread of internet access”.

2) The Search for New Models:

• When print newspapers were the single main source of news, their advertising-oriented revenue model was simple but hugely effective. That model, the report says, “has come unstuck in the internet era, as readers have shifted their attention to other media, followed by advertisers”. Newspapers – largely in the US and Europe – which have seen their circulation and corresponding advertising revenues drop drastically in recent years are now casting around for new revenue sources. Online advertising is still nascent and has yet to establish its full value. So charging for content has become the route that publications are taking.  Several publications (the Economist included) use metered pay walls that allow readers to read a certain number of articles every month before they are asked to pay.

3) Social Media:  • No current discussion of news can be complete without factoring in

how social media has impacted it in recent times. The Arab Spring, the end of Osama bin Laden…these and other stories are believed to have been first broken or disseminated by independent bloggers and self-styled reporters. A professor of journalism quoted in the report says that the “change began around 1999, when blogging tools first became widely available”. The result, he says was to “shift the tools of production to the people formerly known as the audience”. Where does this leave trained journalists and editors? Actually in as much demand as earlier, the report concludes.  ’By providing more raw material than ever from which to distil the news, social media have both done away with editors and shown up the need for them’. Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, reinforces this view when he says that “as much iformation as there is now available, there still is an editorial function that needs to happen – there still needs to be someone who makes sense of it all.”

4) is it Activism or Journalism?:

• Wikileaks is leading the charge for complete transparency in governmental and organizational operations. It gives its sources – whistleblowers and other insiders – the full cover of confidentiality by providing an anonymous dropbox in which they can deposit their information. Other news outfits and some non-profits have followed suit. A few non-profits have gone so far as to set up their own news production units - with innovative results - but this has led to questions on whether this is truly journalism or just agenda-driven activism disguised to look like it.

5) Transparency is the New Objectivity:

• With so many opinion-rich sources of news, is balanced reporting eventually going to go the way of the cuff link (nice, but what’s the point of it?). In the US, news channels with a distinct political voice (Fox News, MSNBC) have raced ahead of rivals with a more neutral reporting tone, such as CNN. Many of India’s news channels, the report says, ‘cater to specific political, religious, regional, linguistic or ethnic groups. Only a few take an objective, pan-India approach’. Still, loosening up on objectivity shouldn’t lead to a journalistic free-for-all. It just means that transparency now becomes the new yardstick of reporting quality. Enabling transparency will mean giving the reader a view into all sources and data – in the case of the web, that means linking to these sources. After all, as a source quoted in the report says: “Objectivity is a trust mechanism when your medium can’t do links. Now our medium can.”

6) The End of Mass Media: 

• News has come full circle, the Economist report says, with a ‘vibrant, free-wheeling and discursive’ quality that it probably had in the pre-industrial 1900s of the Western world. That was the time when news travelled through pamphlets, letters and speeches across marketplaces, taverns and coffee houses. Social media are just New Age forms of those circles where ‘news, gossip, opinion and ideas [spread] with little distinction between producers and consumers of information”. It is still premature to signal the end of mass media in certain parts of the world but the shakeout that has begun in News is sure to spread, sooner or later.

What does this for mean for traditional news organizations?  • “Successful media organizations will be

the ones that accept this new reality. They need to reorient themselves towards serving readers rather than advertisers, embrace social features and collaboration, get off political and moral high horses and stop trying to erect barriers around journalism to protect their position. The digital future of news has much in common with its chaotic, ink-stained past.”

Social media:The people formerly known as the audience

• Social-media technologies allow a far wider range of people to take part in gathering, filtering and distributing news

Making news payReinventing the newspaper

• New business models are proliferating as news organisations search for novel sources of revenue

Bulletins from the future

Can Social Media Solve the Global Economic Crisis?

• Probably not.  But my theory is that it can certainly help us avoid another one.  Or at the very least solve a lot of frustration with corporate communications. 

• Now, with a lot of people paying attention to social media now, and a few actually getting that it goes beyond just using the tools and really incorporating values like transparency, authenticity, and avoiding meaningless "corporate speak," perhaps... just perhaps... these corporate communicators, publicity firms, and quasi-PR agencies will begin to move towards the values upheld by social media and in such demand by the general public.  Maybe public relations will become what it could be.  And perhaps we can begin to trust the media and its journalists again.

Why You Should Turn to Social Media During This Economic Crisis

• In these difficult economic times, it is important for all companies to become more cost-efficient. One of the ways you can lower your marketing costs is by turning to social media marketing (in case you’re not doing that already). Promoting your brand on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter doesn’t cost you anything (except for the salary of the person who’s doing the job) and is increasingly viewed as thebest way to market your product to your target audience.

Some social networks statistics

• Social networks ARE seen as a welcome channel for discussion by consumers.  See below chart from Forrester as well which breaks down interest by age groups (Note: This research was done a few months back and percentages are probably higher by now):

Why Social Media is increasing when the financial crisis hits…

• Recently reported by Economist Intelligence Unit (Global Economic Outlook 2009-10) : ‘ during recession, lipstick sales tend to go up’.

• This is not new at all, but new now is that during this recession the time spent on Social Media rises.

• Web sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are more visited than ever. People seem to have more time these days–there is lesser work in the office! With the recession deepening, so is the penetration of the social networking.

• Today, I am part of the booming world of LinkedIn. And yes, I noticed as well that it can be fun, interesting and Helpful for your own career and business as well.

• And now people on LinkedIn not only want to kill time with it, peep into other business lives but want to get a new business opportunity, they are trying to get more and more connections every day…Thé business nowadays for HR managers.