The Future of News and the Seven Cs

IntroI hate to disappoint you, especially right off the top, but I don’t know what the future of news is. So, if that’s what you came for, you can skip this one. Go have a coffee or get some fresh air before the next speaker.

But I know news has a future. Of course it does. It’s human nature to want to know what’s going on and to share it with others – we like to “talk shit.” That’s how gossip queen Lainey Lui puts it.

I also know that people who work in the news industry are trying – we’re trying, and with some desperation, to figure out our future. We’re testing a bunch of different possibilities, hoping we’ll find a way to make enough money so we can keep working in this amazing business.

Because news might want to be free, but news writers, editors, developers? No, thanks.

Speaking of free, let’s get the paywall out of the way, shall we? Last month, Postmedia, the company that owns the Journal and several other large news organizations in Canada, extended the paywall that was already in place at the Montreal Gazette and the Vancouver Sun and Province to the rest of its papers. Now, you get 10 free articles a month on our website and apps before you’re asked to pay. Reaction has been varied. And to those who have so far signed up, I want to thank you from the bottom of my mortgage.

Do I think paywalls are the future of news? No. But they might be one of the possibilities. And today, I’d like to talk to you about some other ones I think show real promise. I call them the seven Cs. Mostly because I like wordplay, and especially alliteration. But also because I read somewhere that putting a number in your headline is a great way to get people to click on it.

The pastBut before we get to the future, let’s take a quick trip back to the past, to the good old days of newspapers.

And let’s use the Edmonton Journal as an example, because, well, I know it best. I’ve been working there for nearly 20 years.

Back in the day, the Journal was the only game in town. If you wanted to know what was going on in Edmonton, you took the Journal.

And if you were in business, that’s where you advertised. It was the best way to reach the biggest audience. Until the Edmonton Sun came along in 1978, we had no real competition.

That’s pretty much how it was when I came to the Journal in 1993 as a summer intern. I joined a staff of almost 800 – 180 of them in the newsroom. Here’s what it looked like:

That’s me, in the middle, the one with the bowl cut.

Back then, we had two reporters at the courthouse, three reporters and a columnist at City Hall, and even more staff at the Legislature. Every desk in the newsroom was full.

The rise of the internetI remember thinking the internet would be a boon for our business, and it has been in many ways. It has made us better reporters, expanded our reach and given us amazing storytelling tools like Twitter and Storify, not to mention all the cats.

But the internet also destroyed our monopoly on distribution. Now, we can all be publishers. Get a free Wordpress theme and you’re on your way. And when a service or commodity isn’t scarce, it’s a lot harder to make money off of it.

This affected advertising, of course, our main source of revenue. With the rise of Craigslist and similar services, the profitable classified business was completely eroded. Print advertising dollars have become digital dimes and now, mobile pennies. What the Journal makes on mobile advertising couldn’t keep a hipster in horn-rims.

I don’t have the Canadian figures, but the U.S. newspaper industry has lost more than $40 billion in ad revenue in the past decade. And where did it go? Online, of course. Google’s ad revenues are now more than twice what the industry pulls in.

I don’t know how much less the Journal makes now, compared to the good old days. But here’s what I do know: Fewer than 300 people work there now. And when we shut down our Eastgate plant this summer and shift printing to the St. Albert Gazette’s new press, we’ll be under 200. And I expect that number will shrink even more. Employers, please keep my name on file.

Not a businessBut wait! I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m just offering some context for the challenges the news business is facing. Before, we didn’t have to operate like a business. We journalists didn’t have to concern ourselves with advertising, that dirty, money-making side. In fact, there was a strict separation of church and state: with very few exceptions, the folks in advertising didn’t talk to the news staff and vice versa. To do so was viewed almost as collusion. It was a threat to journalistic integrity.

Back then, we knew how many papers were sold every day but we had no way of measuring which stories were actually read. So, we could convince ourselves that we knew best what stories readers wanted. We went by our guts. And we thought they served us pretty well.

In its heyday, the Journal newspaper was read by more than 400,000 people a week. Now, even with a zillion other information sources to choose from, the Journal reaches more than 600,000 people a week via the newspaper or on their computers, tablets and,

increasingly, their phones. In fact, monthly traffic to our mobile site surpassed traffic to our desktop site for the first time this year.

The move to mobileAnd what surprised many of us is that mobile users aren’t just checking the weather or traffic, the latest headlines or scores. They’re also reading the in-depth stuff: investigative reporting and lengthy features.

Jana Pruden’s brilliant story for the Journal, Fear on the Family Farm, about a man who killed his abusive father after years of torment, was relatively popular on our standard or desktop site. But on the mobile site, it was the most viewed content item across the entire Postmedia network during that period, with 577,000 pageviews. Visitors spent more time on it – a collective 3.1 million seconds or 861 hours – than on any other story, video or gallery on Postmedia mobile sites.

And why wouldn’t we read long, sometimes complicated news stories on our phones – even those of us who grew up with newspapers? They’re our go-to devices, our favourites, sometimes our only way to access the Net. And those little screens? Have you noticed how they’re the same width as a newspaper column?

I think great journalism like Fear on the Family Farm is still a solid bet for the future of news. It’s one of the seven Cs I’ll put my money on: Content.

ContentContent, as Bill Gates and others have famously said, is king. But I don’t think the best answer for publishers is to serve up more content. We all have stacks of books and magazines, downloaded ebooks and PVR’d TV series that we haven’t had time to read or watch. We need kickass content, content worth paying for.

Have you seen the New York Times’ Snow Fall or the Guardian’s Firestorm? Both told fascinating stories with words, video and audio in an immersive, almost cinematic way online. They’re beautiful and I hope to see and make more like them. But let’s be realistic: how many newsrooms have resources like the New York Times, which put several staff and several months’ work into the making of Snow Fall?

And here’s a sobering fact: You know Nate Silver, the American statistician who developed a system to forecast the performance of Major League Baseball players then turned to politics, where he correctly predicted the winner of 49 out of 50 states in the 2008 U.S. election and all 50 in the last election? His blog, FiveThirtyEight, has brought in more traffic in a single day to the NYT.com than Snow Fall has in the since it debuted in December.

So while content may be king, characters can dethrone it. That’s the second C: Characters.

CharactersWriters like Silver, or, if you’ll permit me, like the Journal’s Paula Simons – writers with strong, unique voices, who produce staggering amounts of content, who never rest – they’re gold. Journalism schools, instead of stripping their students’ writing of personality and opinion, should be teaching them how to recognize and cultivate their perspective, how to write with conviction AND accuracy.

Newsrooms, too, must support and encourage writers to build their personal brands. It looks good on us. It’s their passion and their personal take on topics that attract readers and keep them coming back.

It really plays into the culture of recommendation that has grown up with social media: If my friend likes it, it must be good. Or sometimes: If Paula Simons likes it, it must be bad. Either way, readers are engaged, and that’s good for business.

That’s why I would argue that the traditional unsigned newspaper editorial has had its day. Again, it’s impossible to say how many of them are read in the newspaper, but online, they attract a tiny fraction of the audience who flock to opinion that has a name attached, often engaging in lively debate via social media or commenting. We just can’t afford them anymore. They’re a quaint vanity from our past.

But that’s just my opinion, like everything I’ll say today. Which is a useful segway into another C…

Customization

Increasingly, news publishers are thinking about customization. They’re trying to figure out how they can collect, curate and deliver news in a way that suits different devices and their users.

Let me give you an example: Let’s say there’s a big snowstorm. In the morning, the story might play out moment-by-moment on social and mobile, as commuters cope with slow traffic and slippery roads. They could check in through the day on the website and read about the worst accidents. That evening, they might flip through the best photos of the day on a tablet. And in the next day’s paper, they can dig into the city’s snow-clearing policy.

Then there’s customization of content based on the user’s location or other factors such as weather – and we’re only just beginning to explore these tools. If you’re near the Alberta Gallery of Art, you may get an alert on your phone asking if you’d like to read

Fish Griwkowsky’s story about The Piano exhibit. If you’re in an LRT station, you could be prompted to participate in a poll about the best route for the southeast leg. If it’s sunny, you might see ads for sandals or a coupon for an iced coffee or milkshake.

We can also make it possible for users to customize their own news experience – using apps like Zite or tools like the Globe & Mail’s Dashboard.

If there’s a dark side to user customization tools, it’s that they make it even easier to close our eyes and ears to anything that challenges our opinions. And they diminish serendipity, which has always been one of the great pleasures of news: those unexpected stories that surprise, delight or provoke.

OK, let’s get to C number 4…

Curation None of us have enough time, really, to find and filter the most relevant and reliable news; to cut through the shit that litters the internet; to distill meaning from So. Much. Noise.

That’s curation and it’s one of the jobs the news media can do – the best ones already are. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” That’s the advice the media commentator Jeff Jarvis first issued to publishers in 2007; link to the best sources of information, professional or no; to the best commentary on blogs, social media and in other publications.

There’s a great, recent example of curation on Gigaom. Just a few hours after Glenn Greenwald’s story about NSA surveillance broke in the Guardian, the Canadian journalist Mathew Ingram started systematically tracking the developments. Ingram isn’t doing original reporting, but he’s adding value by pulling together the best of the reporting and commentary that is being done. He’s like a one-man wiki. And by doing this, he’s made himself and Gigaom a reliable authority.

At the Journal and many other mainstream media outlets, the software we use to write and distribute content online makes linking out a lot more difficult than it should be. But I think newsroom culture – protective and proud – is a bigger barrier.

More linking out will mean we don’t do as much original reporting, the journalist’s ideal. And when we do, we need to make sure it adds value, by providing context or analysis, or by creating a forum for conversation.

And the best conversations involve collaboration.

CollaborationCollaboration can be internal, between reporters or across large news organizations. A good example is the PANDA project, developed by some journalist developers in the U.S. It’s a Google Drive-like database where you can store, search and clean up datasets, without having to be a data wizard like my friend Lucas Timmons, who introduced PANDA to the Journal last year, with the support of Editor-in-chief Lucinda Chodan. Lucas put all the data on donations to provincial political parties in our Panda, which made it possible to quickly search for individuals or corporations to see whether they donated to more than one party, and how much. Imagine if all our reporters, or all Postmedia reporters, stored the data they collect in one Panda, so an archive would build up over time. We could search across multiple datasets and see patterns and connections that might not otherwise ever be revealed.

Collaboration can also be external, such as when news organizations publish content from contributors who are not on staff. Sometimes, this is a way to compensate for staff cuts that have reduced coverage of some topics or geographic areas. Or it can be a way to serve up expertise that doesn’t exist on staff, such as the Guardian’s remarkable stable of science blogs. Or look at Capital Ideas, a network based at the Journal for Edmonton business owners and entrepreneurs to share advice.

External collaboration has been harder for major news organizations, who have been known to think that indie news sites or writers or developers aren’t quite good enough. They worry that an association with non-professional journalists might dilute their brand. Or they want to avoid sending readers off their own sites.

I don’t like to say it, but it’s often our journalistic hubris that has kept us from embracing the audience and revenue opportunities that collaboration could provide.

Hubris has also been a roadblock to commerce.

CommerceFor the past five years or so, a new competitor to the traditional advertising model of the news business has been gaining ground. Many media types dismiss it with the same irritated, disdainful air as they did online classified ads a decade ago – and we know where that got us.

Sponsored content, sometimes called native advertising, is content that is created by or in concert with an advertiser. Often, it’s presented in a way that makes it look almost like regular editorial. The theory is that users are more likely to click on something if it doesn’t look like an ad.

Sponsored content tends to command rates two to four times greater than banner ads, so everybody’s trying it – New York Times, BuzzFeed, Forbes, the Globe & Mail, you name it.

There’s no question that sponsored content is a threat to the news business. The best of it will draw even more eyes away from traditional news. And if we trick readers into clicking or blur the line between editorial and advertising too much, we won’t be able to maintain their trust. But it also presents an opportunity. Brands have a problem that publishers can help solve: They need content but they aren’t experts at creating it. We are.

Why not repurpose or repackage the content we’ve already created for use by advertisers on their websites? Or why not work more closely with advertising clients to create appealing, engaging content that also serves their ends – not in hard news, but in topic areas that have traditionally been given feature treatment, rather than critical or investigative.

The Journal did this with Taste Alberta, when we partnered with the Alberta Livestock and Meat Agency to produce a series about food that is grown, produced and processed in the province. Over the past three years, we’ve written dozens of stories about great Alberta farmers, chefs, restaurants and businesses, and contributed to the vibrant conversation around local food. More recently, we worked with the Alberta Emerald Foundation to bring readers stories about the province’s leading environmental stewards.

We could even take commerce a step further – and this would be a big stretch for big media. We could do what Lucy Yeomans recommends and make it possible for readers to instantly buy the products we write about.

Yeomans is the longtime magazine editor who left Harper’s Bazaar to work for the fashion e-tailer Net-a-Porter. There’s a place for great stories and entertainment in publishing, she says, but if you’re also presenting the user with products, they ought to be “shoppable.”

And why not? When a story initiates a sale, publishers can and should profit. It’s a way that we can be useful to our readers and clients and support our own and other local businesses.

I think the key to success with sponsored content and other adventures in commerce is clear labelling and disclosure of the commercial relationships behind some content. We can’t afford to damage our credibility with consumers.

You heard that, didn’t you? It’s another C, my last:

CredibilityThe news media’s credibility rests on our providing fair, accurate and relevant content and on admitting and correcting our mistakes. But I think it also rests on our reflection of and our participation in our community.

Legacy media survive on the relationships we have built with our audiences. For the Journal, that goes back more than 100 years. Together, we have cried in sympathy…

…and laughed in joy.

We have shared silliness…

…and shame;

…failures…

…and triumphs.

We’re part of your past, your present and, I hope, your future.

We will fail if, after all we’ve shared, we’re too proud to change, to adapt to this tough, new business reality. We will fail if we make you feel like nothing more than a paying customer.

Our success is in continuing and extending our commitment to Edmonton. It’s in presenting local news, but more than that, it’s in engaging people to participate in that news.

We’re not just a megaphone; we’re a microphone. And we need to listen.

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