The future of news? (a quick follow-up)

A few days ago I posted some of my thoughts on the future of news as a response to an email a student sent me.  I was a little pressed for time so I didn't manage to cram in all the points I wanted to make, so this follow-up post will be a slight update to that post.  I had a physical copy of Wired magazine open on my desk at the time of writing and I wanted to include a few points that were in their "The Big Question: New media's effect on journalism".  This is the link to the online edition.  The question they posed was:

In the next decade, what new platform will most affect journalism and self-expression?

They had a variety of guests answering the question including Arianna Huffinginton (Cofounder/Editor of The Huffington Post), Clay Shirky (Academic, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus), June Cohen (Journalist and Director at TED Media), and Nick Bilton (Leader writer at the New York Times blog) amongst others, and this is what they had to say:

"I think we will see an explosion of news sites engaging their communities in the editorial process. We’ll see a great expansion of the ways citizen journalists will help drive the news: recommending stories. Technology has enabled millions of consumers to shift their focus from passive observation to active participation." Arianna Huffinginton

"There won’t be a ten-year ‘Next Big Thing’. Here’s a slice of the last ten: WordPress, Wikipedia, Digg, Meetup, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Foursquare. Twitter is the new headline news, QQ the new agora, ChatRoulette puts the ‘self’ in self-expression. Expect more of the same in the next ten." Clay Shirky

"There won’t be a single dominant platform, but rather many platforms that rise and fall. Overall, my money is on mobile: real-time and massively participatory media that will be primarily created and consumed via smartphones. Twitter is the first platform to truly harness this new ecosystem. But it won’t be the last." - June Cohen

"There’s currently a war taking place between big computing companies including Google, Apple and Microsoft; they are all competing to own the mobile platform. Self-expression and journalism will be born from the same mobile devices and the difference between the two types of content will continue to blur." Nick Bilton

They all seem to point to the idea that news will be social and communicated across lots of different networks and platforms.  It will be social, responsive and more conversational.

With the advent of new tablet platforms I expect we will see more applications like Flipboard for iPad appear, which are capable of creating a news/magazine experiences on electronic devices (you can find a quick review on Wired here).  It's a unique experience in which you get to build your own magazine out of the content being shared across your social networks, including articles and images being shared across a network like Twitter. Check out the video below to get an idea as to how it works.



The interface is pretty neat and transforms the reading experience into something akin to the traditional page flipping/browsing one found in paper formats, except it will have the advantage of being able to play digital media like video and audio. If it doesn't do this yet, services like it in the future will certainly have this kind of functionality.  Having said that, the service hasn't come without a set of problems, especially around copyright and the way in which the application scrapes content from websites and then hosts that material on its own servers.  Joel Johnson has posted on this issue in detail over at Gizmodo.  Mike Masnick on Techdirt points out this is similar to the issue that News Corp had with Google in which they accused Google of stealing their content.

What this points to is that the new developments in technology and software are capable of creating a context in which more people can read more information relevant to their interests (remember Zuckerman's warning about this kind of filtering!) providing the legal contexts in which copyright ownership around content is flexible enough to adapt.  I see that as being one of the potential barriers to the future of news.

What's the future of news? Don't ask me!

This is a blog post based on my response to a student email I received asking me about my opinions regarding the future of news that I thought some readers may be interested in.  Now this is a very good student who transferred from a practical degree to take one of our theoretical degrees - BA (Hons) Media, Culture and Communication - who is currently on a Summer internship at ITN helping with their development team. It's not often that our team gets to talk about theory students doing practical work so forgive me for my little indulgence.  Anyway, they are working on a project looking at a number of issues including the the current broadcasting environment, the evolution of Internet-based news, Twitter, smartphones and how these are all becoming ever more integrated and converged, which all sounds pretty interesting.  Everything that follows has been cut and pasted from that email so forgive the spelling errors!

The future?

Ah, the future of news, eh?  I'll come straight out and say I don't know what the future is going to be and there are many people in the same boat (including news providers!).  Lots of talk circulates around mobile being the next big thing.  We've all head the hype about the iPad and how it may save journalism but it's still early days on that front.  3 million units sold is impressive but not when it set against the global fall in paid-for news content.  Personally, I have no doubt smartphones and tablet devices will play some part in nurturing news but I think there are a few barriers at the moment including technical infrastructures (like the UK 3G/4G networks, Apple app approval processes), data limitations being imposed by mobile providers (O2 and 500mb per month cap) which will restrict the way in which news is consumed via those platforms (I can stream Sky News and BBC Radio 4 on my iPhone via 3G but reach my data cap pretty quickly unless I switch to wifi meaning I'll consume less bandwidth heavy forms of news) and the prohibitive costs of ownership (iPhones/iPads are not cheap, but Android devices are affordable to many).

I'm still confident in the value of the printed word, I'm just not sure it's being delivered and curated by established news organisations effectively.  Let's look at two examples from the UK broadsheet/quality markets; namely Times Online and Guardian.co.uk

The recent Murdoch/Times paywall issue is interesting in that News Corp is happy to sacrifice large numbers of eyeballs (in front of ads) for about 10% of their audience who are willing to pay for the service.  They changed the website design so it looked more like a newspaper too, which is pretty strange.  I'm not sure a small paying audience is sufficient insurance against obscurity, especially when the Times doesn't seem to have the kind of content that other paywall sites have (ie the Financial Times has an affluent, niche audience willing to pay for business news).

Emily Bell, the former Director of Digital Content at the Guardian  (and now a New York Prof of Journalism!) has been pretty vocal about this issue, as has Jeff Jarvis (blogger, academic, journalist, entrepreneur).  You should skim Jarvis' blog for some excellent ideas on the future of (hyper local) news: http://www.buzzmachine.com/.  There is an idea that being highly visible is important for monetising news.  The more reach you have the better placed you'll be to sell advertising and services around content.  I think the latter is important here and maybe more important in the future.  The Guardian are currently toying with their Extra service (http://www.guardian.co.uk/extra) - a £25 per year service offering live debates, news room visits, masterclasses, liver performances, exclusive offers etc to subscribers.  It might help build reader loyalty - the incentive to pay and get something out of that paid-for service.  It might also be a last ditch attempt to stymy the massive losses they've been posting the last couple of years.  Who knows?

I do know that The Guardian are interested in hearing from their readers about what they should do next.  As an iPhone app customer I've been asked to take part in various feedback sessions and one online Q&A did ask about whether or not I'd pay a monthly subscription (for the record, I'm more than willing since I use their website a lot and have stopped buying their papers for the most part).  It's an idea that might work for them, but it might backfire - especially when there is so much freely available content (BBC, I'm looking at you) that readers can go to.  It might be in their best interests to keep the content free but build in some additional features into the application such as personalised content.  Currently app users can pick their favourite themes for quick reading and share relevant stories across Twitter, Facebook,  and email but there is no way to actually engage with the news from the portable device.  This seems to be completely at odds with their main website functionality.

Curate and engage

The ability to comment on stories and engage with writers via the blogs over on Comment Is Free is a model of how to curate and sustain reader attention.  I'm frequently surprised by the sophistication and persuasiveness of argument that can be found in the comment section by Guardian readers.  Sure, there are moments when the ability to hide behind a pseudonym allows for a fair bit of trolling, flaming and nastiness, but this is superseded by the positive forms of engagement on offer.  Add to this some of the excellent daily/weekly podcasts they put out (Tech Weekly, Science Weekly, Media Talk, etc) feature insightful news, relevant expert guests and feature some of the highest production standards (on par with the BBC) all of which they sustain and curate via their main news site as well as with Twitter feeds, Flickr groups and Facebook pages.  They have a consistent and wide ranging presence, all of which push the brand to readers in ways that being behind a paywall prevents.

My feelings about Twitter as a news source change regularly.  I started out by using Twitter as a way of discovering news stories when the number of people I followed was relatively small (ie less than 200) and manageable.  As the number of people you follow increases it becomes harder to negotiate the inane from the relevant, especially as Twitter is geared around short bursts of phatic communication.  I suppose this is one of the reasons why the Lists feature was introduced, so users could tune in to certain people and not others at any given time.  Twitter is good for pointing people to interesting stories or links but it doesn't quite beat a good RSS feed in my opinion.  There's no real way of knowing how long Twitter will be around for, especially in its current guise without a clear business model, so I'd be cautious about seeing it as the future of news.  As a cost-free network for connecting people with interesting things to say, Twitter is great, but it isn't a creator of news content with some exceptions (see this fictional dystopian story for an example: http://vimeo.com/10060159).

Mob (a near-future science fiction story) by Tom Scott from hurryonhome on Vimeo.

I haven't really got around to talking about books on the subject and I'm going to have to be brief.  There are many writers who have sung the praises of the Internet in it's various stages of evolution: as a medium of abundance, a pluralistic space, a democratising tool, etc.  One of the better books I've seen in recent years was the edited collection by Natalie Fenton (2009), New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age - there's a few good chapters in there.  There's one which suggests that the despite the Internet bringing us new ways of reading about more diverse material we are actually becoming less engaged with differing viewpoints.  We tend to consume news or info that already supports our pre-existing ideas. The irony here is that the world of abundance hasn't broadened our engagement - rather we've filtered our world views through lenses that reinforce our established positions (with the odd exception).  Add to this the academic work of people like Justin Lewis (Cardiff University) which has pointed out that massive cuts in the financing of expensive news content has led to widespread reliance on PR copy and what Nick Davies calls 'churnalism' and the future of news doesn't look so bright.

There's also a great presentation on TED by Ethan Zuckerman (from Global Voices, a site for bloggers around the world producing non-mainstream news content: http://globalvoicesonline.org/) in which he discusses how easy (and dangerous) it is to filter out issues http://www.ted.com/talks/ethan_zuckerman.html

I want to come back to a recent example of the ways in which, despite the advantages of the Internet with its easy distribution channels, the traditional news providers still have an important (gate-keeping?) role to play.  You might recall that in April Wikileaks released a video of a US Apache helicopter firing on Iraqi civilians (2 versions: one 39 minute unedited version and one 18 minute edited version framed with a quotation from George Orwell) which drew a lot of attention and criticism from the US government. I've embedded that video below but you may need to sign in to YouTube to watch it.

Wikileaks is a site dedicated to whistle-blowing and supposedly free from editorial inflections - the edited video seemed very much like editorial work rather than a objective fact.  This week the announcement that Wikileaks  had released 92,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan to the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel was an important one.  Julian Assange (founder of Wikileaks) realised that in order for these documents to have maximum impact they needed to be examined and considered by professional journalists who could make sense of the content and frame it in a way that the public could readily engage with.  There's an excellent account of this process on Comment is Free by Dan Kennedy (academic)

Whatever the future of news is, it has to be responsive to news consumers and responsible to the basic tenements of democratic engagement.  If news providers ignore their audience, they'll soon discover they have no audience.

An open blog post to the Guardian subscriber scheme

When I first noticed the Guardian's most recent subscriber drive offering it's readers a chance to 'save money' I thought to myself, 'great - a nice incentive to actually purchase the paper versions instead of frequently reading the bits I like via my RSS feed for free'. Despite my love of technology I am still a fan of the newspaper format in its paper guise: it is portable, convenient and has established sections and routes for navigation - something which isn't always as workable in digital versions.

I've noticed quite a few Guardian pages are not yet optimised for portable browsing on devices like the iPhone, in particular one of my regular favourites from the Saturday edition of The Guide: What We Learned On The Web This Week (mobile web link here for July 18 2009). This is the message which awaits mobile browsers:

How does it work?

I was curious to see how it was organised given that most people can generally subscribe to their local newsagent to have a newspaper delivered, usually with a small weekly surcharge. There isn't much difference to this tried and tested process. Essentially, the Guardian will issue a book of vouchers which can be handed in to the newsagent where you normally purchase your paper and they will sort out the rest. Subscriptions are available on a monthly, quarterly, six month and annual basis.

There are a number of packages available:

• Seven-day Guardian and Observer package: saves 33% on cover price
• Six-day Guardian package (Monday – Saturday): saves 25% on cover price
• A weekend Guardian Saturday and Sunday Observer package: saves 20% on cover price
  

If you regularly purchase the newspapers that fit into these pricing tiers then there are some genuine savings to be made. However, this is also the root of the problem...

Who still buys newspapers?

The year-on-year trends for national newspapers is a predictable one of slowly falling circulations and has been doing so for some time. The Guardian sales themselves were down over 3.2% when comparing June 2008 with June 2009, although their digital views were the best in the UK for that month, in excess of of 27 million unique readers. As we can see, newspapers are diminishing in reader presence and this subscription deal seems like a good incentive to stimulate the existing readership or to lure back lost readers.

I'm sure there are quite a few people who regularly buy newspapers, including the Guardian, every day every weekend, etc, and this offer is an ideal proposition for them. However, what about those newspaper readers who have long since abandoned their paper buying habits or who purchase specific daily editions? Is this still a good deal for them?

I would love to be a regular annual subscriber of the Guardian but I'd like a little more options in the editions available. I regularly buy the Saturday edition of the paper and frequently purchase the Monday and Thursday editions for their excellent Media and Technology sections (worth the cover price alone in my opinion). This costs somewhere in the region of £10+ per month - not a massive cost for the quality of the end product but probably too small a figure to qualify for subscription discounts - but only if I actually chose to buy the weekday editions. Like I already said, my RSS feeds do a great job of bringing those sections of the paper to me digitally and for free. I run a broswer with adblock plus installed too.

Bottom line

So here lies the rub, would a little more flexibility in the options available be beneficial to the Guardian if it means that I'd become a regularly subscriber? It's already accepted that the cover price of a newspaper accounts for much less than the products true cost. Some estimate that the the cover price brings in about 30% of the revenue with 70% coming from advertising sales. We all know that advertising rates have tanked in the past 12 months.

So what is more beneficial: the material costs of producing a discounted newspaper, delivered to subscribers via a flexible subscription model bringing in a fixed price or the risk of further dwindling sales whilst readers switch to digital editions?