Welcome to the Future of Journalism, a podcast from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
I'm Fredricka Roubini, the head of leadership development at the Institute.
Earlier this month, we published our annual report about the trends that will shape journalism in 2022, authored by Nick Neumann.
It is based on a survey of 246 news leaders from 52 countries and includes insights about revenue models,
social media and new technologies such as A.I. and the Metaverse.
Nick is joining us for this episode to albums,
navigate the report and unpack the issues shaping the future of the media industry worldwide and, more specifically, the year ahead.
Nick, welcome and thank you for being with us today. It's a pleasure, Fredricka.
Good to be here. So you say in the report the 2022 will be a year of careful consolidation for the
news industry after a couple of years of relentless intensity over the news agenda,
which honestly feels much longer. You say this could be the year of when journalism takes a breath, focuses on the basics and comes back stronger.
So if we start with the general outlook, then how do media leaders view the year ahead and the prospect of the industry and their companies?
Well, I mean, it's hard to generalise because we have a wide range of publishers in our services,
legacy print and broadcasters and digital born and in a range of different countries and context.
But you know, some are pretty confident, you know, confident about the business and confident about journalism.
And then there's, you know, others who are really struggling and who are not even sure they're going to make it through the year.
So I think it's kind of a mixture of realism and trepidation, some trepidation.
And also, you know, real focus focussed more because of COVID, more focussed on digital and more respectful of audiences, I think.
And then just the other sort of theme to stress at the beginning is that people, I think,
are also really worried about their own staff about that relentless news cycle.
You know, working from home during COVID reporting on this, this very distressing story and also being part of it.
And that's really that comment about, you know, taking a breath.
I think people are really thinking about what what their news organisations need to be on the other side of COVID, if you like.
And I think this will be a year when they'll try and make that real on the business side.
Many of the survey respondents reported growing revenue, but falling audience numbers.
Can you tell us more about the situation there? Yeah, I mean, it was a bit of a surprise.
I think that certainly in our in our data, given that the narrative is that, you know,
COVID has sort of crushed the news industry that actually 60 percent, almost 60 percent said that revenues had increased in the last year.
Only eight percent said they'd gone down.
And I think that obviously reflects the fact that more people have taken out digital subscriptions during COVID,
but also actually digital advertising has come back really, really strongly.
It's been growing at the fastest rate ever, and I think that's, you know, because we spend more time online and we're spending more money online.
So that's revenue side, which is positive, I think on the intention side.
We do see, you know, traffic to new sites falling in some countries in particular by, you know, very significant amounts to 30 percent.
And in the U.S. and U.K., for example, for some publishers and you know, some of this has to do with the news cycle.
But I think underneath it, there's a much wider problem of which is linked to trust.
It's linked to, you know, news, fatigue, disenchanted with politics in general.
So all of these things, I think, you know, the challenge is how do we re-engage people,
particularly those people who who who sort of came in for COVID and have disappeared again?
You mentioned several different revenue models. Which ones are considered the most important by media leaders in your survey, so.
So obviously that that I mean, most people are focussing on a range of models, but they either lead with subscription or they leave with advertising.
And, you know, subscription is now at the top. So 79 percent say that subscription will be important or very important in this year.
And then different kinds of advertising events, you know, interestingly,
contributions from platforms is becoming more important and has become more important.
So this is big platforms like Facebook and Google paying directly to licence content.
So that's another sort of increasingly important part of the picture.
And you mentioned paywalls,
and let's talk about the fact that half of the news leaders surveyed think that journalism is super serving reach and more educated audiences.
Do you think this is a real problem as many quality papers are embracing increasingly harder paywalls?
Or will it depend on the free option available in each country and each market?
Well, I think there's no question that, you know, educated richer audiences have this enormous range of possibilities now.
There is so much, you know,
high quality content available in any language on any topic for people who are really interested and people are willing to pay for content.
It was a lively discussion earlier in the week. Ben Smith, formerly of The New York Times.
Justin Smith, formerly The Wall Street Journal. So they were launching a new news product aimed at educating global audiences.
And you know, there was a whole load of people on Twitter were talking about,
Well, that is the audience that really doesn't need any, any any more news.
But I think, you know, we can also overemphasise this.
I think in many parts of the world, there is, of course, still a lot of high quality free content and much of Europe,
you know, strong public service broadcasters, for example, offering it free at the point of use.
And then there's many others that are following that path. And it's not just about subscription.
So in research that we've done, we know that a lot of people who are not very interested in news that really come across the paywall,
so it's not so much of an issue for them.
I think a bigger problem is the one that I talked about earlier is sort of disconnection from news entirely or sort of liked Connexions, if you like.
And you know, more and more people relying on unreliable sources in social media or through face-to-face networks,
I think that's that's that's a more significant problem right now.
Mm-Hmm. And you also talk about a creator economy in the report and the so-called battle for talent in 2022.
What do you see happening there? Well, last year was really interesting.
So you had the so-called Substack phenomenon.
But even before that, where individual journalists left mainstream publications with the promise of delivering, you know,
riches, untold riches from directly getting subscriptions and building up these these subscription newsletters primarily.
And some of them did indeed make lots of money. What we saw last year was some of them actually going back to news organisations
because they realised that actually being part of something bigger was also important.
And maybe there wasn't as much money. It was a bit more taxing than they thought running their own business in this way.
I think this year we're going to see more halfway houses.
If you like sort of more journalists, collectives, this one called Park in the U.S. that's just started.
And, you know, they're trying to get the best of sort of being entrepreneurial and getting some of the rewards,
but at the same time, being part of something else with these lower infrastructure costs.
And I think that that's that's a really interesting phenomenon. We're going to see a lot more of.
And then I think the other aspect of it is the platforms themselves have released a lot of interesting new features,
like just to take one example, super follows in Twitter.
So, you know, you could have your your normal feed and then you can provide bonus content and get rewarded for it.
So that again, is interesting for the town's economy, as you know how our publishers is going to react to that.
Are they going to let individual talent earn money on the side of that?
So so yeah, that battle for star talent between individuals or collectives or different companies is one side of it.
But I think also how the rewards are going to work when they're more visible and evident, it's going to be an interesting theme.
Mm-Hmm. And let's move to social media how a news lead us thinking about social media in the year ahead.
Who in the industry is having an innovative approach that we should be pay attention to?
Assocham is a big, a big area, but I think one of the one of the standout data points from slides is that
publishers say they're going to be putting a lot more effort into tick tock,
into Instagram and into YouTube, and they're going to focus a lot less on Facebook and on Twitter.
And I think that kind of reflects the sort of innovation in format which is come out of TikTok, which, you know,
all the other social platforms are reacting to, actually, and we'll react to this year in terms of formats,
you're seeing sort of Facebook really trying to innovate and reels both on Instagram and on Facebook now in similar ways,
trying to capture the same wave of entertainment and increase the information in some of these short videos as well.
And YouTube shorts being another example of it. So I think, you know, going to see a lot of publishers trying to get involved in that, obviously.
Just a couple of examples you asked about, you know, good interesting practise.
There's a start up in Spain called Actuality,
which works on Tik Tok and other platforms doing these very sort of entertaining, youth focussed news round ups.
And you also have slightly longer ones as well explainer formats.
How TOS work really well as we have the BBC's Ros Atkins, who does a daily monologue of about 10 minutes,
something like that seven to ten minutes on a big issue, which is kind of engaging.
It's designed for social media, but it's also, you know, impartial and the ones, for example,
on sort of Boris Johnson's Christmas party has got something like 11 million views, which is a huge number, a huge amount of engagement.
If you compare that with conventional television, so I think that's what we'll see this year is, you know,
some of those video formats that are facts and evidence based competing with obviously
the huge amount of partisan content that's out there on social media as well. I'm scared to ask, is this a pivot to video, too?
Well, I think I did use the word pivot to video chat. You may remember pivot to video one.
And yeah, I think that both the combination of short form video and the new efforts are going to that.
Also, actually longform is really interesting as well.
Again, COVID has made more of us sort of watch these long form video on our computer screens or on a mobile phones.
And so there are publications trying to take advantage of that. So CNN, for example, is launching a premium CNN Plus video longform channel this year.
You have you have a lot of media companies trying to use Twitch for longform.
And of course, in many of these environments,
you already have personalities and influencers creating a lot of value already with long form and community.
It's that sort of combination of the network and longform video. Mm-Hmm.
You mentioned before when we were talking about the creator economy newsletters,
and the report highlights an increased focus on loyalty forming channels, podcasts, newsletters.
What will happen this year in this area? And will do you think we're getting to a point where there is too much supply for the current demand?
Yeah, it's a good point. I think I think the reason that publishers have been focussing on both podcasts and
newsletters is because the data tells them that they build connexion and they build loyalty.
And so, you know, if you're trying to increase engagement,
this is obviously critical if you're trying to reduce churn as a subscription publisher, that's also critical.
And so many publishers are either sort of refreshing or trying to iterate and improve those products.
But as you say, the problem is one of scale and retention.
And so the more people piling in with great content, the more difficult it is to attract an audience.
And I mean, in podcasts, I think, you know, the explosion of content is unbelievable in Spotify.
I think three million different podcast shows now.
And so how you stand out is really interesting and this is really where platforms and distribution is going to become much,
a much bigger story because, you know, those platforms are often the gateways to getting that attention.
And that's where, you know, exclusive deals with Spotify might help or with or with Apple.
So I think the role of platforms in the tussle between content and platforms is going to be a big, seamless yet.
Another big theme and a key theme for the year ahead is generational change.
Can you tell us more about what you mean by this generational change and how we're publishers thinking about younger audiences?
I mean, in conversations we've had with publishers, I would say this is the number one issue right now.
And you know, it's important if you know, for example, if you're a if you're a public service broadcaster,
you need to serve all audiences and younger audiences be dropping away.
And if you're a subscription publisher, I think, you know, five percent or less of your subscribers are under 30.
So you know you've got a real problem of the next generation.
And I think the big question is, can you how do you do that? You change your core product.
Is it possible to change your core product or do you need to build a different one?
And you know, some publishers, you know, are essentially saying what we need to do is just change everything in our core product.
So assume less knowledge and create more visual formats that we know work with younger people.
Maybe write more content for four different life stages.
You know, if you're getting a mortgage or getting married or whatever, but other people feel you just need a completely different approach.
You actually have to create bespoke content for specific platforms that is designed for a very specific younger audience.
Of course, there's many different younger audiences. There's Gen Z, there's Gen Gen Y, so you need to be quite deliberate about it,
I think and publishers are really thinking about that, and some of them have some really strong strategies for this year.
I think an issue that plays and resonates particularly with younger audiences
and is one of the most defining issues of why one generation is climate change.
What's the thinking from media leaders in this area?
What can we expect to see in the survey?
We asked them how good they thought the coverage was, and only about a third said that the coverage was currently good.
So there's clearly a bit of a gap in terms of reasons why they felt that climate change could be better.
They talked about, you know, it's just a really difficult subject because, you know,
the slow nature of development means it's just a poor fit with the news cycle on the one hand.
They also say that actually, people often don't read the stories, perhaps because it's too depressing and make people feel powerless.
And partly as a result, there isn't a business case to hire those, you know, specialist journalists who can explain the science.
So I think, you know, this year we're seeing publishers are trying to address that skills gap,
sometimes with foundation funding or other sources of funding. We're going to see more solutions based coverage to try and get away from that,
that that sort of sense of negativity and also giving people a sense and more of a sense of what they can personally do.
So I think more so service journals around climate. And then I would like to see more more data skills as well in newsrooms.
I think this is one story that really could help, you know,
something like the The Rainforest Investigations Network has done an amazing job in documenting real time data about what forests are burning,
where and then driving investigations on that and visualisations.
And I think there's a lot of scope to use some of the techniques we saw uncovered to enhance and make climate change more engaging.
And the final thing is I would point to, you know, cooperation.
I think where we're seeing people realise this is such a big story you can't do on your own.
So if you, for example, facilitation exchanges of information between different countries,
our own Reuters institute taking part in the Oxford Climate Change and network for really
trying to understand the issue better and coming up with solutions to these problems, I think climate is a big focus for lots of reasons.
Of course, we couldn't possibly close an interview about trends in prediction without talking about what comes next with technology and the web.
What can we expect in this area? Will I be interviewing you in the Metaverse next year?
Absolutely. Absolutely. We could have done an instrument less worse this year if we put our heads headsets on.
And I think by this time next year to be a lot more headsets and hopefully they'll be a bit more a bit lighter and more usable.
But yes, I think more relevant to journalism immediately.
I think the other probably the different applications of artificial intelligence, different A.I. technologies.
And I think that, you know, that they're relevant to recommendations, more relevant recommendations to engage people.
That's the number one usage this year, according to a survey, but also commercial uses as well and newsroom automation.
So we're seeing in automation, we're seeing a lot more product tools around transcription,
around SUMMARISATION, around optimisation or automation and text to speech as well.
And I think why that's important as it enables publishers to package up content in different ways that it can then a conversion more more easily.
And you know, when we talk about personalisation,
I think that sort of format innovation and how you can package things is going to be a key part of the future.
And then finally, I think we're going to hear a lot more about the next iteration of the internet this year, so-called Web3.
So the first iteration of the internet was about publishers making most of the content and making most of the
money web to users start to create and then platforms take up that and become the sort of dominant power.
And in Web3, the potential of Web three is sort of more decentralised.
Approach is built on sort of blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies, and in theory,
that gives content creators and publishers potentially more control over intellectual property over data, over making money.
So that's kind of we're going to hear a lot more about that.
Whether it pans out is a completely different matter and whether it has any relevance to journalism is a different matter.
But we'll certainly hear a lot more hype about Web3 as well as know lots to keep looking and looking forward for this year.
Nick, thank you so much for joining us today. Our guest today was Nick Neumann, author of the Generals,
Media and Technology Trends and Prediction 2022 report and lead author of the digital news report that comes out every June.
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