Two summits

BY sevanti ninan| IN Media Business | 17/10/2013

Thanks to shrinking newspaper markets and the relentless march of tablets and mobiles, some things are set to change forever.

If that scenario has not come to India yet, it will, says SEVANTI NINAN

TALKING MEDIA

Sevanti Ninan

Two international media meets took place last week. Media owners from the West went to Beijing to engage with the Chinese in the hope that they will open up their media markets further. And their editors went to Berlin to exchange notes on the changes to journalism that were taking place, and to learn how to cope with them. Thanks to shrinking newspaper markets and the relentless march of tablets and mobiles, some things are set to change forever.

The first was the presidium of the World Media Summit, something the Chinese floated a couple of years ago to seek their rightful place in the media world. "The WMS aims to build an efficient platform for the global media to communicate with one another and pool collective wisdom, discuss survival and development, and talk about cooperation and the media's future," says Xinhua. Fuzzyspeak that says nothing about the state of press freedom in China.

But Newscorp's Rupert Murdoch and Arthur Sulzberger are happy to go and play the game, as are others. Everybody was in attendance – The Associated Press, Reuters, ITAR-TASS News Agency, Kyodo News, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Turner Broadcasting,, Google, Al Jazeera, NBC News, and ofcourse, our Kasturi and Sons Limited.

The Chinese proposed global journalism awards, their guest concurred without a hint of irony. India might consider itself a free press Mecca, but its rival knows that the size of the market it offers is enough to have the free press everywhere eating out of its hands. How times change. The New York Times offered to host the next summit, Al Jazeera the other after. Foreign investment in media may be restricted in China, its media may be largely state controlled, but pragmatism wins the day.

The host for the presidium was Xinhua whose many news releases on the occasion conveyed rather less than the Hindu correspondent’s two despatches. The latter reported Rupert Murdoch calling on the Chinese government to follow India’s example and open up the country’s restricted media sector, as well as urging the Chinese government "to open its digital door".

Why western markets may need the Chinese more than ever before was in evidence at the second summit taking place around the same time, the Newsroom Summit organised by WAN-IFRA in Berlin. (World Association of Newspapers.) Between shrinking markets and changes in the way news in accessed, newspapers face an increasingly digital future. News organisations are spending hugely in developing new digital markets which will have global potential.

Editors and nerdy innovators who gathered there heard stories like the following:Canada’s French language daily La Presse spent four years and $40 million developing a daily iPad edition which is free and is now attracting 800 new viewers a day. The US publishing company Advance is getting its newspapers to move to a four days in the week home delivery schedule. The rest of the days there wil be a newstand edition for readers to pick up.

The Evening Standard of the Independent Group has multiplied its circulation manyfold by simply handing out free copies at the tube station and hiking its advertising rates. Globally print advertising has seen a 39 per cent decline over the last six years. The news model has to change. No wonder Mr Sulzberger in China was announcing an NYT website for the Chinese.

The summit then was about this changing model, and what it will do to journalists and journalism. Thirty three per cent of news traffic worldwide now comes from mobile. What are the implications of that?

It heard Raju Narisetti, Senior Vice President and Deputy Head of Strategy for the New News Corporation say that Wall Street Journal now has 37 percent of its news accessed through mobile, but only eight people assigned to mobile news. The profound challenge for 2013-14 he said, was in combining journalism and technology teams. He also quoted Arthur Sulzberger as responding to a question on what he might have done differently, by saying, he would have hired more engineers. Two issues here, producing news for mobile, and knowing how to tailor your regular news to mobile. What happens to the important journalism you do, was a question asked aloud at a session where other panellists were makers of moble apps like Circa and Liquid Newsroom. How will a terrific story written with anecdotal lead when accessed on a smartphone? Poorly, because it could take 40 screens of a Blackberry to get through it Narisetti said in his example of a particular story, and as many as seven to get to what the story was about.

Circa is a news app for android which employs 10 writers to write news for mobile. Its editor in chief was saying: "We all love longform. But there is a time and a place for it. We atomise the news. Boil facts down to points." And the maker of Liquid Newsroom was explaining how they use metrics to predict the news. Second worrying question to come up at this summit: how will important journalism fare when metrics decides most things? Answer: if you only follow metrics you cannot have serious news.

Checking out the Indian angle on this, post summit, one found that news services here getting into the mobile news business have to get used to being just one part of a value added service package for telecom operators, and quite low in the pecking order. As IANS CEO Mahesh Daga puts it, The approach to the news is by telecom circle, which means that it is essentially local. It is for the mobile audience, which means it is for the 15-25 age group and tailored to their interests. Telecom operators prefer the news to be non political, to play safe, and assume the young audience wouldn’t care for hardcore political news anyway. As for revenue, there are no set rules of the game. The operators are very much in the driving seat and are in a position to dictate terms And a media house taking your service could use it on TV, web and mobile, but not pay separately for each.

Journalists in the new world will increasingly find themselves part of a new order. News organisations in the West are both buying technology and creating editorial structures where a journalist no longer serves a single outlet in his group. The Independent and Evening Standard now have a group content director, Chris Blackhurst, whose job is to make sure that journalists get out of the "tribal mindset" of just working for one publication. And, he told the folks at Berlin that the days when a specialist writer wrote his story and went home are gone. "You need guys at the top with titles like mine to pull them out of their tribal mindset."

Reporters will now file stories across publications, through content management systems tailored to a total news group rather than one publication, and learn to give SEO (search engine optimisation) friendly headlines.

If that scenario has not come to India yet, it will.

This is an expanded version of a column which appeared in Mint on October 17, 2013.