Is quality journalism sustainable? Here are 20 media organizations that are solving this problem

This post is part of a study that identifies 20 media organizations from 16 countries and four regions  --Eastern and Central Europe, Western Europe, Latin America, and the United States-- that have developed sustainable business models for high-quality journalism. This list is by no means exclusive. The examples were chosen to present a variety of solutions to this challenge. We welcome comments on other media we could have included.

-- James Breiner

Click graphic to enlarge.

Publishers pivot toward users and credibility, away from digital advertising

For those who could not attend the annual convention of the Spanish Journalism Society (SEP, Sociedad Española de Periodística, in Malaga, Spain, May 24-25, below is a summary of my keynote address. (Here are slides of the English version, presented Sept. 22 at the Creima Conference in Oporto, Portugal.)

The talk focused on two major trends in digital journalism that are taking place in many places around the world. The slides highlight examples of media from France, Holland, Mexico, the U.S., Germany, Peru, England, Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil, among others.

Photo by José María Legorburu

1. Publishers are pivoting toward users and away from advertisers and investors as their main source of financial support. The business model that depended on advertising to support journalism is moribund and nearly dead. The automated buying and selling of advertising is controlled by the duopoly of Google and Facebook, which have more and better data about news publishers' users than the publishers' themselves. Publishers have no way to compete with that dominance of programming and targeting of ads. It's time to burn the ships and not look back. 

2. Amid the flood of junk, misinformation, clickbait, and false information, the added value of a news organization will spring from its credibility. News media need to build credibility and trust by interacting more directly with their audiences, listening to their audiences, adopting transparency about their owners and investors, detailing their funding sources and spending practices, and, above all, doing investigative journalism that holds political and business leaders accountable for their actions. 

Versión en español

Because of these two trends, there are 10 new paradigms for digital journalism:

Think small: the new metrics of engagement for news

Forget about the big numbers of total page views per month or unique users per month.

Fans are engaged and willing to give their time and money.

Those numbers are misleading and meaningless. They had meaning only in the days when the media business depended on mass media, massive audiences, and products aimed at the masses.

That was when the news media depended on advertising.

Today the business of media is all about touching potential customers with personalized, customized messages. It's about identifying the small number of people who are truly fans of your publication or the stars on your team. It's about strengthening the emotional attachment people have to your brand and its mission.

How the big numbers mislead us

In their very successful campaign to reach 1 million paid subscriptions for their digital-only edition, the Washington Post learned that the users most likely to subscribe came to their site three times a month.

The audiences are in charge: are publishers listening?

Recently I was invited to give a lecture at the University of Malaga--"The audiences are in charge: Are publishers listening?" The audience had students in their doctoral, master's and bachelor's programs, as well as a number of faculty.

Below is a summary of the presentation.

1. The marriage of convenience between advertising and journalism is over. For proof, look no further than the graphic below, which shows that newspapers in Spain have lost more than 500 million euros in ad revenue since 2009, and that includes the revenue they get from digital. (The U.S. is very similar.)

In the future, news media will need to develop a deep relationship with their users. The important thing will be not the quantity of eyeballs reached, as measured by page views and unique users, but the quality of the relationship with the users.

Versión en español

Top reason globally for paying for news? Mobile access

Richard Fletcher of the Reuters Institute has produced an in-depth analysis of the top reasons people around the world gave for paying for news online.

The Digital News Report 2017 included interviews of more than 70,000 adults in 36 countries.

Fletcher observed that the most common reasons people gave for paying were they wanted access on their mobile devices (30%), they like to consume news from a range of sources (29%), or they were offered a good deal or package (23%).

My take on Fletcher's data: The message to digital news publishers should be clear: they need to make sure their content displays rapidly and adapts well to the small screen--responsive design. Also, they should be testing various prices and packages for online content to see which ones produce the best returns. 

Forget about the big numbers; go for loyalty, trust

Anyone who has studied the metrics of the internet in any detail knows about the Big Lie: those big numbers of total users and page views that everyone relies on are practically meaningless.

• More than half of the visitors to websites stay for less than 15 seconds. 
• Three-fourths of the users of the most important news sites in the U.S. visit only once or twice a month. How can you even consider them users?
• Half of the internet users in 26 countries are getting their news through social media rather than the originating news sites themselves, according to the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2016. 
• 43% of social media users don't know where the stories they read originally appeared.

Jon Slade of the Financial Times

In other words, millions of clicks or millions of users are not an indication of trust in a particular news brand or loyalty to that brand. We need new metrics, better metrics.

Versión en español

So it was heartening to see this reality affirmed by of one of the leading lights of digital media innovation, Jon Slade of the Financial Times, in an interview with Ian Burrell (thanks to NiemanLab for the lead):

“I've seen data recently that says that of all the pages on the internet less than 1% of them are from newspapers – the vast majority of time spent is with social channels and they are always going to be much bigger than you are – so if you’re trying to play a game of scale then you’re going to lose.”

There are only a few international brands that have even a slight chance of competing with the likes of Facebook and Google for the digital advertising dollars that are based on the number of eyeballs delivered to specific ads.

Loyal users will pay for watchdog journalism

Kinsey Wilson. Photo by Mary Kang/Knight Center

AUSTIN, Texas -- One of the dirty little secrets in digital media is that the big numbers of page views and unique users touted by publishers are misleading at best. They overstate a publication's audience size and impact.

Most visitors to a publisher's content are fly-bys: They stay for only a few seconds. And even if they stay longer than that, the vast majority come to a publisher's website only once or twice a month. These are not loyal users devoted to a brand.

What is more interesting and meaningful, especially for publishers of serious news and information, is that the smaller number of loyal users -- who come frequently, linger, and read many pages -- is willing to pay for the content and other products. They identify strongly with the brand.

Kinsey Wilson, editor of innovation and strategy at the New York Times, brought the point home last week at the International Symposium on Online Journalism when he mentioned that 90 percent of  his publication's digital revenue comes from 10 percent of its users.