Hundreds of global experts in the media industry gather each year in
Perugia, Italy, to talk about the past and future. Some of the items on
the schedule look particularly interesting, so I have started putting
together my personal agenda.
Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have said just before signing the Declaration of Independence, "We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
News publishers have taken this idea to heart with a trend toward collaborating as a means of survival when so many economic forces are working against them. Collaboration, rather than competition, allows small, vulnerable news organizations to spread the risk and cost of journalism that challenges the powers that be and serves the public interest.
When they collaborate, small newsrooms get access to at least three scarce resources: time, in the form of help from other organizations; expertise, in the form of people who know how to do things they don't; and money, because the combined organizations can sometimes attract grants that none of them could by themselves.
One example: Nieman Lab reported on the Institute for Nonprofit News's collaborative investigation on the lack of hospitals and health care services in rural America. Twelve news organizations in seven states participated.
Hospitals in rural areas of the U.S. have been closing as population declines, much as local news media have been disappearing. The Institute for Nonprofit News, founded 10 years ago, has 230 members and promotes sharing of resources and expertise that support investigative journalism in the public interest. The funding comes from a variety of national and local foundations and nonprofits.
This blog entry was written for IJNet.org, Tips for Journalists in 2020 from other Knight International Journalism fellows.
The losing strategy that seeks mass audiences and mass advertising as measured by unique users and page views has led many media to chase clicks with ever-more sensationalistic content about celebrities, sports figures, imprudent politicians and sex scandals.
Those sites will continue to lose revenue and audience to the search and social platforms, as well as credibility and trustworthiness.
If you build a relationship with your audience, they are more likely to become loyal, to trust your work, to recommend your work, and to be willing to pay to support your mission. The total audience will be smaller, and the percentage willing to pay for your content might be in the single digits, but this public-service, user-focused strategy builds trust and credibility for the long term. Examples are Mediapart in France, eldiario.es in Spain, Animal Politico in Mexico and The Texas Tribune in the U.S.
Here’s a tip: build your email subscriber list. This way you own a relationship with your users, and you can avoid using the search and social platforms as an intermediary. Tailor newsletters for these email subscribers according to their interests and tastes. Other examples of relationship tactics include crowdsourced stories, face-to-face and online events, reader polls, crowdfunding and WhatsApp and Telegram group chats. Read more, in Spanish, about how two websites are monetizing their email newsletters.
Picard: News organizations need to focus on creating value for users
Picard: Your content has to be exclusive and specialized.
Now that Google, Facebook, and other tech platforms have taken away most of their ad revenue, news publishers are realizing they need to get revenues from users to stay afloat.
Well, good luck with that. Most of the paywalls or freemium products they have created are doomed to disappointment.
Publishers will have trouble breaking their bad habits. They have been so busy delivering mass audiences to advertisers with increasingly frivolous or sensationalistic content, or delivering profits to investors by cutting key editorial staff, that they may not have the know-how or talent to produce content valuable enough that people will pay for it.
PAMPLONA, Spain -- For the past five years I have been buying my newspapers on the weekend at a neighborhood newsstand. The owner and I, Jesus Erro, got to be casual friends, and we talked about the politics and culture of our respective countries. He is a big reader.
Sign in the window announces the owner is retiring and closing the shop.
This weekend, I found out he is closing his doors and retiring after 27 years at that location. Nobody wanted to buy the business, and he had reached the legal age to retire, 62. His son is a teenager, and his wife works for the local government, and he plans to focus on them. But beyond that, he isn't sure what he will do.
Three years ago, I interviewed him to get his perspective on the newspaper business in Spain. All the dailies were suffering at that time. It had been in a steady decline since 2008, first because of the financial crisis and then because of consumers' switching to digital platforms to get their news. Lately, it has gotten even worse.
Erro loves books, and his original idea when he bought the shop was to sell books. Newspapers were just a sideline. With the crisis, he also took to selling bread since lots of cafes and bakeries opened up nearby and also sold the local newspapers.
Below is a video of our 2016 interview, with subtitles in English.
On Tuesday, Nov. 19, Erro will close for the last time. He had a clearance sale going on. I bought an armload of National Geographic specials on science and archeology.
There are few nearby places to buy the national press, so I'm not sure what I will do. I still like the printed editions, especially on the weekends when there is a lot more to read.
His latest historical novel tells of CIA misinformation campaign
Mario Vargas Llosa, a Nobel laureate in literature, has just published a historical novel, Tough Times ("Tiempos recios"), whose plot is based on the 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected government in Guatemala that was engineered by the CIA.
For the novelist, that conspiracy has many echoes today in the status of news media organizations and the abundance of information and disinformation available to the general public.
During a publicity tour in Spain, Vargas Llosa gave an interview to El Pais, arguably the country's most prestigious daily. He said that the 1954 coup in Guatemala was masterminded for the CIA by a public relations expert named Edward L. Bernays, whose nickname was "the clever puppetmaster". Bernays's philosophy of communication could be boiled down to a phrase: propaganda will prevail over the truth.
In fact, the media campaign described in the novel was based on what really happened. A propaganda campaign persuaded the elite of Boston "that the interests of the United Fruit Company are the same as the United States, and that the recently inaugurated democracy of Guatemala puts them in jeopardy because of their dependence on the Kremlin". In fact, Soviet influence was exaggerated or non-existent; the government's land policies threatened United Fruit's business interests. Versión en español
How should a media executive manage the business during a time of disruptive technological change? Alfonso Nieto
attempted to answer that question in his book "Letters to a newspaper
publisher," written in 1987 when newsrooms in Spain were moving from
typewriters to computers. His comments have acute relevance today.
In this letter to a fictitious newspaper publisher, titled "A Shameful Scandal", Alfonso Nieto criticizes media executives who are focused only on the bottom line without paying attention to the quality of the content in their own publications. (The scandal is a defamation lawsuit against a reporter.)
Nieto also emphasizes the importance of hiring journalists with high ethical standards. "This profession is so prominent that it should exclude those of mediocre character who are untrustworthy, resentful, or selfish" (p. 58).
The top executives of the media organization have the responsibility to communicate clearly the editorial standards of the organization, Nieto says. Without that, there is disorder in the newsroom. In the absence of clear direction, each section editor creates their own fiefdom, and "this disorder is the key that opens the door to misinformation and mistakes" (pp. 59-60).
