The winning business strategy builds on relationships

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.

Versión en español


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. 

Related:

Why most publisher paywalls are destined to fail
Publishers pivot toward users and credibility

Letters to a publisher II: Treat your readers with respect

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.

Alfonso Nieto, University of Navarra portrait

In this letter to a fictitious newspaper publisher, which he titled "The dwarf and the giant", Alfonso Nieto criticized media owners, managers, and journalists for failing to take into account the problems and the needs of their readers. Nieto saw the media industry as arrogant, looking down on the public and their viewpoints.

Beyond that, the media viewed their audiences as merely market segments to be lumped into groups based on age, gender, income, occupation, or other attributes that they could monetize. 

The arrogance

The media used a language, he believed, that emphasized their superior education and social position rather than trying to create a more intimate connection with their readers. This could very well describe the traditional media today, which have been losing readers and TV viewers because they focus much of their attention on the conflicts among political parties rather than finding solutions.

Letters to a newspaper publisher: it's not just the bottom line

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. Nieto was one of the pioneers in the discipline of media economics, and his writings have acute relevance today, when the media world has been disrupted again by digital technology. He was rector of the University of Navarra 1979-1991, where I now teach. 

Alfonso Nieto, University of Navarra Photo

Alfonso Nieto worked as a consultant to media executives in addition to teaching, and in this book he wanted to go public with his advice without violating any confidential information. So he created a fictitious news executive to whom he wrote a series of letters with some down-home advice. He wanted publishers to think not just of their business results and their investors but also of their publication's impact on employees, the audience, and democratic society as a whole. 

(It is interesting to note that the Business Roundtable, an organization of business leaders in the U.S., recently advocated a major change in management philosophy in line with Nieto: take into account all stakeholders--employees, customers, suppliers, and community--not just the shareholders.)

When it comes to reputation, news media brands have been missing the boat

Cees van Riel is an internationally known scholar and consultant who has spent much of his career studying how to measure the reputation of organizations and use the data for better decision-making.

Cees van Riel. Photo from Reputation Institute

During a recent chat with faculty at the University of Navarra, he talked about how a growing body of research links the financial performance of a company with its reputation as corporate citizen and community leader.

Leaders must speak up
Companies whose leaders and employees specifically say what they stand for, and back that up with their behavior, emerge as leaders in their industry by all sorts of tangible indicators, including but not limited to financial performance.

"You have to say yourself what you stand for," Cees said. "If you don't, no one will believe you."

Cees's observations made me realize that news media have done a terrible job at informing the public about the importance of what they do, namely investigating deeply to discover the truth and informing the public in a democratic society.

News media organizations should be taking this insight to heart, but often they view it as unseemly self-promotion. They assume everyone views them as an authority, as the purveyors of truth and guardians of the public interest. And, of course, they're wrong. Almost everywhere in the world, news media have low credibility. (Trust explored in more depth here.)

What money can't buy in media

Money talks. Put your money where your mouth is. Show me the money.

We have lots of expressions that equate money with crebility and trust. How people get and spend their money is often the most credible expression of what they value and who they are.

We attribute so much value to money and to the way it expresses our true beliefs that historian Yuval Noah Harari declared in his bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind:

 "Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised."

By extension, this belief in money as the best measure of value of everything in modern society -- the loss of a loved one (insurance payouts), the salary of a teacher or a CEO, a barrel of oil -- has led us to trust markets too much.

In fact, many studies have shown that the media marketplace puts great value in misinformation, disinformation, sensationalism, gossip, and entertainment (Pew, Reuters Institute, Science Advances), as measured by revenue and profits generated from advertising. This is how social networks like Facebook and Instagram make their money.

Versión en español

In putting so much faith in the Invisible Hand of markets, we have devalued the importance of ethics, credibility, trust, and community. (Among my other holiday reading on the topic were a recent column by David Brooks, Jeffrey D. Sachs's The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity and Joseph E. Stiglitz's The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe.)

'Students, you will determine the future of journalism'

"You have to practice the values of independence and honesty." University of Navarra photo.

An icon of Spanish broadcast journalism, Iñaki Gabilondo, delivered a message last week designed to inspire and challenge 400 students and professors of journalism.

"The future hasn't been written yet:, he told them. "The question, 'What is going to happen?' is irrelevant. What will happen will be determined by what you do, what you don't do, and what you allow to happen."

Gabilondo, 73, was speaking at his alma mater, the School of Communication of the University of Navarra (class of 1963), where he also was a professor for several years. His eloquent baritone voice is well known to Spaniards after decades of presence on the morning radio news program Hoy por Hoy, roughly equivalent to NPR's Morning Edition.

He recently asked Martin Baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, how journalism can survive amid all the problems we face, including the collapse of the economic model, the loss of credibility with the public, and the misinformation, disinformation, and junk published everywhere.

Versión en español

The key, Baron replied, lies in practicing the values at the heart of the profession: editorial independence, credibility, honesty, and commitment to quality. "These are not just romantic ideas," Gabilondo said. "They are the essential elements of journalism. With these values you can move ahead. They are going to last."

These days Gabilondo does a brief commentary on the news via a video blog carried on the website of El País, the country's leading daily newspaper. But he recently did a series of video interviews titled "When I'm not around: The world in 25 years", with leading scientists and technologists around the world. So Gabilondo is more interested in looking forward than in looking back.

Restoring trust: Nieman Lab's helpful list of news credibility projects

These projects aim to restore trust.

In a blog post earlier this year, I wrote about the importance of Credibility as the new currency of journalism, its significance in an era of distrust of the media, and its economic value for high-quality journalism.

A big thank you to Christine Schmidt of Nieman Lab who has just produced a helpful list of news credibility projects. Among other things, it shows how the Knight Foundation is giving help to many of them.

Below is an abbreviated form of Schmidt's list, with a few details on each project. 

Trusting News
Participants/partners: Mainly local newsrooms, such as WCPO, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, St. Louis Magazine; also A Plus, Religion News Service, CALmatters, Discourse Media, USA Today

The Trust Project
Participants/partners: News outlets like the Washington Post, The Economist, the Globe and Mail, Mic, and Zeit Online; tech companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Bing; Institute for Nonprofit News

News Integrity Initiative, Based at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
Participants/partners: The following groups received grants from the initiative’s first round of funding: Arizona State University’s News Co/lab, Center for Investigative Reporting, Center for Media Engagement, EducationNC, Free Press, Listening Post Collective, Maynard Institute, OpenNews, Public Radio International, The Coral Project; Internews and the European Journalism Centre have also received funding

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.