That was the message of the “Sustainable Media Models in the Internet Age” panel at the International Media Conference, as expressed by South China Morning Post Editor Reginald Chua.
Updated with video wrap replacing rushes:
While much previous discussion of the economics of online journalism has focussed on how to get users to pay for news, the panelists were united in saying that journalism itself has to evolve.
Chua outlined the production problems that the journalism industry is facing, including the low barriers to entry for online publishers and the glut of online advertising inventory.
He said the industry has not addressed how people want to get information. “We haven’t thought about how to do things in way that our consumers want, as opposed to what we would like to do.”
Newsrooms must ask themselves five questions about the new media disruption: 1) What happens to revenue? 2) How does it change how we can tell a story? 3) How does it change where we get information? 4) How does it change how a newsroom is set up? and 5) What is the product we make?
“We’ve asked ourselves the first three questions,” he said, “but a newsroom hasn’t really changed in 50 years, and neither has the product. Why is that?”
Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard cited the results of a recent study that showed that the average online American spends between two and eight minutes per month on news sites — but seven hours a month on Facebook.
“You never hear from people ‘Man, I just got lost on that news site!’” he said. “We don’t create experiences that people just want to live in for a while.”
“This is also the best time in the history of humanity to be a storyteller,” said Thomas Crampton, Asia Pacific Director, 360 Digital Influence, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.
“Now an individual journalist can compete with major organizations, that used to have a monopoly, with free tools. But the question is, how are we going to fund the expensive parts of what we do? How will we do the journalism that holds people accountable, that takes investigation and time?”
Several newspapers have been successful at charging their online audiences, such as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, Benton said. But he regards them as exceptions.
“I think that for the vast majority of news organizations in the US, the answer has to be free, because no one is going to pay for them,” he said.
He referred to the recent experiment of American newspaper Newsday, which had only 35 subscribers after several months behind a paywall.
“If the local Boston paper put up a pay wall, the local radio station would be happy to be the free news alternative,” he said.
The panel was moderated by Almar Latour, Editor in Chief, Asia, of the The Wall Street Journal.
