Panelists at a session of the East-West Center’s 2018 International Media Conference in Singapore have expressed their concerns over the ongoing problems with media’s revenue in the internet age, and rebuilding public trust.
They have pitched for alternative models such as membership or subscription fees, saying journalism as usual would not work.
The three-day conference being co-hosted by East-West Center [EWC], Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and Singapore Management University ended on Wednesday.
Jopshua Benton, Director of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, at a panel discussion said the news industry is finally coming to “belated acceptance of the fact that digital revenue will never replace print and broadcast”.
The result, he said, has been “increasing reliance on the reader to pay the freight, with more and stricter paywalls.”
In some ways, Benton said, this can be beneficial, encouraging news organisations to focus on the kind of reporting that attracts tong-term monthly subscribers, rather than flashy ‘click-bait’ stories aimed at one-time online advertising.
“If you want content that’s going to go viral and create the maximum amount of page views, that encourages a certain kind of journalism,” he said.
“But if your goal is, ‘I want to create content that is so valuable to people that they’re willing to pay money for it every month,’ that encourages a different, and overall probably better, kind of journalism.”
But it also means that “more and more of the bounty of information that has been on the Web for the last 20 years is going to be walled off,” Benton told moderator Irene Jay Liu, who is the Asia Pacific lead for Google News Lab.
“As a result, we’ll have more and more of a premium news environment for people who have the financial means, time and interest,” while others will continue to see more random, less “civically useful” news that they “just bump into on social media because their friend posted it”.
One of impacts of the shift to online news, Benton said, “is that we’re likely to see big winners at the national level, but it’s everything below that level that worries me”.
“The New York Times and Washington Post are going to be fine, but that’s only a very small portion of US media. We have 1,400 daily newspapers in the US, and the subscription model is working for only maybe six of them.”
Alan Soon, co-founder and CEO of the Singapore-based, Asia-focused media news site The Splice Newsroom, said even more important than debating revenue models is the need for news organisations to take a fresh look at “what they have that’s valuable to people … I think a lot of news organizations still haven’t figured out exactly what they sell.”
Soon told Liu one of the best things companies like Google and Facebook can do to help foster quality journalism is to help news organisations better understand how to do audience targeting.
“Everyone is basically still pushing content out into a digital black hole somewhere,” he said.
“But with better support and training from media tech companies, we could be targeting the audiences we want. I think micro-targeting is a very important way of looking at audiences that not many media companies are doing, because they don’t know how.”
Benton agreed that news organisations established before the advent of the Web “really haven’t done enough to re-evaluate the way they do what they do: their content strategies, how they format the news, the way they distribute, how they define what a beat is, what makes a story.
“At every step of that process, they still have a really significant hangover from way it used to be.”
To be relevant in the new era, he said, these organisations need “a really vigorous re-evaluation of the thinking that goes into what they produce and how they serve the needs of their audience”.
Established by the US Congress in 1960, the East-West Center promotes better relations and understanding among the people and nations of the United States, Asia, and the Pacific through cooperative study, research, and dialogue.
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