Well, no. Publishers are finding themselves at the wrong end of an uneven, unhealthy bargain, which is bad news for both news business economics and quality, pluralistic information.

“This is a really depressing, dystopian way to think about publishers and platforms. It only really makes sense if you view writing as a fungible commodity,” says John West in Quartz. For the synergy logic to work, a piece of journalism must be viewed as an ad unit, its value being no more and no less than how many clicks it generates. Even more depressing for West is that Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and all other platforms view journalism in this way – they can see the cost (or potential revenues) of quality content, but not the value – and “that’s going to smother journalistic independence and the open web”.

The platforms have created such seamlessly efficient ways to deliver content that news publishers will soon have no need even to have a website. Facebook’s Instant Articles, Apple News, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, Twitter’s Moments, Snapchat – they provide comfortable, contained experiences, perfectly tailored for mobile, which is the direction audiences are headed. While the bare audience numbers make sense in the short term, warns West, “it will cost you”.

By granting control of content to Facebook and its like, publishers are turning platforms into the world’s gatekeepers to information, and these risk-averse megacorps already have a less than glittering track record of speaking truth to power and promoting diverse views.

It also means that publishers become ever more reliant on clicks: they only have worth to the platform if they bring in the traffic. The implication for quality is clear: as publishers become wire services for platforms, they lose their unique voice, their identity and their connection with their own audience. Editorial output has to match the platform’s audience, so publishers are incentivized to create bland, populist or clickbait brand of news. This means that a publisher’s traditional audience trusts them less and, with the context removed (knowing that an article was produced by The Guardian or The New Republic is an important part of the reading experience), an article has less meaning.

West also laments that “we’re also losing the organic and open shape of the web. It’s becoming something much more rigid and more hierarchical.”

“The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy,” he concludes. “We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention. This means that publications will have to abandon the rapid-growth business models driven by display ads, which have driven them to rely on Facebook for millions of pageviews a month.”

John Herman in The Awl take a look at another aspect of the unfolding battle between publishers and platforms. Platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and Google are creating their own editorial spaces and, in some cases, standalone apps, but are wrestling with what content to put there. With the platforms not having a clear content plan or even what audiences they want to serve, it leaves publishers with the headache of having to ask: “What do these platforms want from us? What will they then want for themselves? What will be left for the partners?” This is an uncomfortable place for publishers to be.

Herman points out that over the past few years, publishers have been providing platforms like Facebook with huge volumes of free content in exchange for big audiences and, occasionally, revenues. However, he warns that Facebook is simultaneously intent on destroying this same advertising system.

Platforms are sucking in the ad revenues that used to go to web advertising that helped support publishers. “These new in-house editorial projects located at the center of the platform, rather than at its edges, will succeed or fail based on how they assist in that project—not according to how well they replicate or replace or improve on publications supported by a model they’re in the process of destroying.”

Publishers be warned.

Both on the speaker’s dais and among participants, there were several clear themes for news media publishers – “big data”, paid content, branding for news media, content packaging for targeted audiences, as well as clever approaches to creating new revenue from print.  All of these themes support the view presented by Earl Wilkinson, INMA global CEO during his closing presentation.  Wilkinson underscored that digital is here to stay.  The presentation, distribution and management techniques characterized by successful digital media companies will progressively dominate in the media management world.  Wilkinson emphasized that the adoption and evolution of these techniques are at different stages of development around the world.  But in every case, digital content creation and distribution and the supporting tools will be the key to future success in digital as well as print.

First among the digital themes has to be “big data” and its role in developing advertising and audience.  Frode Eilersten, Schibsted’s newly appointed Executive Vice President for Strategy and Digital Transformation presented the media group’s investment in data acqInnuisition and analysis to support advertising sales, product development and marketing.  Eilersten who recently joined Schibsted from US consultancy McKinsey highlighted the investment required in data acquisition and analytics, but also the need to build an internal business culture to make use of the data to solve complex business problems.  Data in particular was the “secret sauce” in advertising networks that allowed a publishing company to create extra value from the advertising presented to their audience.  Data and research was presented as one of the required success factors in the development and launch of paid content at sites as different as the New York Times and the TB+ premium content model developed by Tønsbergs Blad, from a small town southeast of Olso.

Content marketing or native advertising was another important area of discussion.  In content marketing, the role of advertiser and publisher are increasingly blurred. Advertisers are now supplying, choosing or at a minimum approving content for publication on news media websites in exchange for an “advertising” fee.   The advertiser recognizes that strong editorial brands offer special “brand benefits” to their audience.  By associating themselves closing with strong news brands, advertisers enhance their own brand credibility and recognition.  There were many potential implications of this discussion.  The movement of advertisers to create their own media and sidestep news media for brand advertising was one important implication.  Bennetton’s Colours magazine or Google’s advertising and marketing quarterly Think+ were cited as examples of this trend.  For publishers, content marketing creates the need for a clear and well articulated plan for how to create and present “advertiser content” in order to maintain the overall credibility of the news brand.  Finally, speakers highlighted how publishers will increasingly need to think about investing in the brand of their news media in order to create value in the publishing brand not in just the audience for an individual story.

Finally, the conference came back to its roots and presented some interesting programs to enhance the reception and profitability of the printed product.  Two examples of this approach stood out.  First, presenters from Die Welt Kompakt and NRC.Next presented content packages developed to target young professionals.  But other examples targeting children as well as women reminded the conference that targeted content well-delivered can still create an audience attractive to advertisers.   The second approach to the product development came from Sandy MacLeod, Vice President Consumer Marketing and Strategy at The Toronto Star who presented several examples of well researched and well delivered content products like improved TV guides and puzzle books provided for a price.  MacLeod made the compelling case that there is still revenue available for the print product, if you look for it.

The INMA European News Media Conference provided a wealth of examples for regional media companies to pursue.  For many in the audience the challenge is how to minimize the risk to developing, customizing these models to their different media markets.  For large companies like Schibsted, Axel Springer or Sanoma Corp, there are ample corporate profits available to experiment without too much risk.  Internally these companies have the ability to raise internal start-up capital and to recruit and train media managers with digital capabilities.   The challenge for smaller companies lies in finding resources, both talent and capital, to develop experiments.  But the need to continually experiment, measure, improve or discontinue new products was presented repeatedly as one of the fundamental requirements to success in the emerging multiplatform world of news media.

Major emerging markets and regions will power the next five years of growth in media and entertainment, and in these rapidly growing markets, growth will come not just from digital but also from traditional media such as television and newspapers, according to an annual media forecast by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Globally, digital media will continue to be the prime driver for growth. PwC defines digital revenue sources broadly, including not just advertising but also consumers buying digital content and digital access. The report finds that:

By 2017, digital revenues (including consumer spending on digital content, digital advertising spending and spending on Internet access) will account for 47% of the total, up from 35% in 2012.

However, digital media is not the only growth story in the report. PwC forecasts that eight core markets – China, Brazil, India, Russia, Middle East and North Africa, Mexico, Indonesia, and Argentina – will see growth rates double that of the entertainment and media sector as a whole over the next five years.

And in many of these markets, especially in Latin America and Asia, television and newspapers will contribute to the growth as well a digital.

Key digital trends for emerging markets

It’s hardly surprising that over the next five years digital entertainment and media will continue to power forward. However, dig more deeply into the global, top-line figures, and media leaders in emerging markets can find a lot of strategic insights.

• Classified advertising – Just as they have in developed markets, the report says that “online classifieds are set to take over from their print equivalents in developing economies in the next five years”.
• Search advertising – On Knowledge Bridge, we’ve covered extensively how targeted search and social media advertising often dominates digital advertising. The report says that search will remain dominant with an important caveat. If Google is not a major player in your market, search advertising isn’t necessarily the king of digital advertising.
• Mobile access – The future is not only digital but mobile – and we cannot stress this enough. Emerging markets are playing a huge role in this shift. “Brazil, China, India and Russia alone will account for 45% of fixed-broadband subscriptions and 50% of mobile Internet users by the end of 2017,” the report found.
• Mobile advertising – Do not be timid about embracing mobile because you don’t see the advertising opportunity. “Mobile advertising is finally set to take off properly, with growth forecast across all regions over the next five years,” according to the report, and by 2017, mobile advertising will account for 15 percent of all internet advertising revenues.

Traditional media to continue growth in emerging markets

While digital access, content and advertising will be one of the highest areas of growth over the next five years, growing middle classes in emerging markets will also drive growth in revenues for traditional media including television and newspapers, especially in rapidly growing markets in Asia and Latin America.

Thus far, TV has been very resilient to the digital disruption rocking other media sectors such as newspapers, magazines, music and books. As the PwC reports says, it continues to deliver not only the mass audiences but also the attention that advertisers crave. The next five years will see little change in that. Free-to-air terrestrial channels will continue to deliver the bulk, 70 percent, of TV revenues, only down a few percentage points from the current mix.

Again, the only real news here is that emerging markets will see the fastest growth. Kenya, India, Indonesia, Brazil and Nigeria will see the fastest rise in TV advertising revenues. Indonesia, Kenya, Thailand and Vietnam will see the fastest growth in terms of pay TV subscriptions.

Another important trend that the report highlighted for emerging markets is the opportunities for regional media to reach diaspora audiences. As Jeff John Roberts says in paidContent, tapping into diaspora audiences in mature markets can be a rich source of revenue for emerging market media players. He highlighted this from the report:

As expatriate communities grow, distributors are increasingly crossing geographical borders to address them. Examples include iRoko, which targets the African diaspora in wealthier markets and has more customers in London than Lagos.

Television advertising hasn’t moved online quickly, and PwC thinks that it is wrong to over-estimate the shift from traditional paid TV delivery systems, such as cable, to so-called over-the-top (OTT), internet-carr lanedelivered services. OTT services will remain a small portion, only 6 percent, of paid TV revenues by 2017.

The digital transition has not been so kind to newspapers, and it is important for publishers to note the shift from print to online classified advertising even in emerging markets. However, newspapers will continue to grow over the next five years across Asia and Latin America. Growth in Brazil, India, China and Indonesia will offset declines in newspaper circulation in mature markets such as the US, UK, Japan and Germany.

Leverage data to benefit from the multi-screen shift

PwC painted a picture of a connected but also a confused consumer. Digital has increased consumer choice, but Roberts at paidContent said:

the report (citing people in Singapore who pay for pirated content even though a legal version was available for free) also suggests that the volume of content is leaving consumers “confused.”

With so many choices, customers might be confused, they might be overwhelmed by the options to them, but the level of choice has led them to expect “my media” rather than “mass media”. The future is increasingly one of multiple screens – TV, tablets and smartphones – but this will pose challenges to media companies. To deliver this personalised content and also targeted advertising to consumers, media organisations will have to constantly innovate, especially when it comes to data about their audiences. Again, Roberts pulled this highlight out of the report about the type of data that media companies will need to use:

granular, small data— derived through analytics—that gives insights into customers’ actual and likely behavior in response to a particular message or experience.

It will not be enough to know who your audience is but also what they are likely to do. As advertisers look to increase the return-on-investment for their clients, they will want to know not just the size of your audience and their interaction with your content but also much richer behavioural data. This is why Amazon has just announced that it will be leveraging its vast mountain of e-commerce data to help target advertising.

While paid content has been a major focus in the past year, PwC still sees a huge opportunity for advertising revenue, but media companies will only realise this opportunity if they embrace a multi-platform approach that leverages not only content but also customer data.

The report looks at a range of smaller, local publishers rather than the big national and international news brands. The smallest newspaper, the Columbia Daily Herald in the south central US state of Tennessee, has a circulation of 12,744, and the largest of the media groups was The Deseret News, with a circulation of 91,628, in the western state of Utah.

While the transition to digital media can seem like an unending stream of grim headlines, it’s good to see forward-looking industry leaders starting to develop new business models to support journalism. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but we’re seeing these leaders create unique models to meet the challenges and take advantage of their specific audiences and markets.

Diverse strategies for diverse audiences and markets

Before digital, the model for a successful media business was relatively similar. For print, it was a mix of subscription revenue plus various types of advertising including display and classifieds. About the only difference in the model between markets was the mix of subscription and advertising income. The US market was heavily reliant on advertising. Digital advertising has grown rapidly in the US, but US newspapers have been unable to grow their percentage of digital advertising. It is one of the reasons that the newspaper business has suffered so greatly, especially after the financial crisis caused a near collapse in print advertising.

Successful business models are emerging, but they are specific to their particular environment. There is no one-size-fits-all model but rather a number of strategies that reflect the diversity of audiences and markets for these newspapers. Here are some of the strategies.

Develop niche content – Just as the business model was much the same before digital, the content model was also broadly similar, and apart from language, this model was more or less the same around the world. That model is also changing. The report found that success with digital content often involves developing niche, specialist content beyond the broad categories of business, sports and lifestyle that have been traditional non-news content for news organisations.

The small Daily Herald has “rolled out more than a half dozen new revenue ideas in 2012 alone, some in print, but most in digital,” the report said. One of these strategies was developing a monthly health magazine and a “men’s lifestyle magazine”. They have done this despite having a small staff, and the health magazine has been “very profitable”, according to the publisher at the newspaper.

The Deseret News is based in Salt Lake City. The city is the capital of the Mormon religion in the United States, and the Deseret News has always served that community. However, CEO Clark Gilbert, a former Harvard Business School professor, said:

in a world of the web when you are a click away from something better, you have to be differentiated…You can’t do everything. So I am getting out of anything I’m not the best at.

Clark re-positioned the paper to serve the Mormon community. To do that, one of the six core content areas they focus on is faith and family. He said:

We want to own faith and the family the way the Washington Post owns politics.

He sees an opportunity to serve the Mormon community not just in Salt Lake City but nationally. He launched a national Sunday edition, which has helped increase Sunday circulation 90 percent. They also launched a text and video syndication strategy that Clark says “will perhaps be our most compelling form of long-term reach”.

Multi-platform sustainability – As we’ve said, multi-platform sustainability – developing content and revenue strategies that embrace both traditional and digital platforms – will be one of the major themes for the Knowledge Bridge this year, and The Deseret News is pursuing this model successfully. Their revenue mix includes 40 percent from television, 35 percent from print and 25 percent from digital. The Deseret News CEO makes one of the best arguments for a multi-platform strategy that I’ve heard.

In Gilbert’s theory of media evolution, the Deseret News print product is the crocodile, a prehistoric creature that survives today, albeit as a smaller animal. He believes the News, which has already shrunk significantly, is not doomed to extinction if properly managed. Deseret Digital Media is the mammal, the new life form designed to dominate the future. Armed with graphics, charts and a whiteboard that looks like it belongs in an advanced physics class, Gilbert speaks with the zeal of the cultural transition evangelist he has become. He argues that the path ahead does not involve merging the crocodile and mammal cultures, but maintaining them separately.

The results of this strategy are tangible. Digital media revenue has grown on average 44 percent over the last three years and will make up 50 percent of group revenue by 2016, according to Gilbert.

Manage print and digital separately – This was a key lesson not just at The Deseret News but other successful papers in the report as well. The smaller papers did not manage their print and digital businesses separately, but Gilbert believes that this is key to transforming the business. His two-step transformation strategy includes both repositioning the existing business but also in creating “a separate, disruptive business to develop the innovations that will become the source of future growth”.

Gilbert not only believes that it is important to manage print and digital separately, he also believes that to manage digital, it is important to bring in people from outside the newspaper industry. Gilbert himself is an industry outsider, and he hired people from digital companies such as Yahoo! and e-commerce site Overstock.com.

Create a “digital agency” – Two of the four examples in the report created an entirely new business, a digital agency that sold digital services to advertisers and others in their communities. The Columbia Herald in Tennessee and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat in California have both pursued this strategy. In Columbia, the agency builds websites for merchants and provides social media training. Santa Rosa, being a larger paper, has a fuller range of services, offering not only web development but also e-mail marketing, video production and search-engine optimisation services. As of January 2013, the Media Lab in Santa Rosa was providing a quarter of all digital revenue, and revenue at the agency is projected to grow 60 percent this year.

Operate a culture of nimble risk-taking – All of the leaders of these papers showed not only vision but were able to inspire necessary cultural changes in their staff. Dave Neill, the publisher of the Naples Daily News in Florida, said:

We are afraid. We need to be fearless.

Even the small Columbia Herald was able to foster and develop new products and revenue initiatives. The report said, “they see the ability to continually produce new projects as integral to the organizational DNA and central to the paper’s ability to survive at a time of harsh economic conditions.”

Print is not dead – Print has suffered decline but, as Gilbert puts it, while the business is smaller, it isn’t dead. It just needs to be managed well. In some of the markets, print remains strong, and the successful strategy involved protecting the print business. The newspaper in Naples is in a relatively wealthy retirement community in Florida. Older Americans still read newspapers so it wouldn’t make sense to pursue some of the digital strategies that the other newspapers are using.

Leadership – What comes through loud and clear throughout the report is that to develop these strategies, it took a clear vision and strong, inspirational leadership.

the leaders at these papers are risk-takers who concluded that the biggest risk was not rethinking their business models.

The change necessary is not trivial, and the report said that it took perseverance to get the buy-in necessary.

Indeed, 10 of the 13 newspaper executives interviewed for Pew Research’s March 2012 report [the original 40-newspaper report] identified internal tensions between the legacy and digital cultures as the biggest challenge to business success.

However, getting people to accept change is easier when you can point to success, and this report delivers that. Once you’re armed with some successful strategies, then it is down to execution, and as Gilbert says that strategy is only ever 49 percent of the solution. He added, ” For us to get where we want to go will require execution at the highest levels.”

A Salvardoran using the QR code to take part in El Faro

Before the digital transition, news organisations could focus on one platform, whether that was print, radio or television. Workflow, staffing and organisation were all focused and optimised for that one channel. In the early days of digital, news organisations had another platform, the internet, to focus on, but now with mobile phones, tablets and IPTV, it suddenly feels like we have more mouths to feed and are able to focus less clearly on what we see as our strengths.

However, as we’ve seen with the El Faro project in this month’s Digital Briefing, multiple platforms can be a strength not just a challenge. El Faro showed that with some creative thinking about the project you want to create, the resources you already have and also about your own editorial identity, you can deliver a project across multiple platforms that delivers journalism with impact and builds on your brand as an independent news outlet.

El Faro had wanted to see how social media could support its brand of independent journalism. While news organisations have turned to social media to canvas public opinion or engage in citizen journalism projects, El Faro and their ad agency partner decided that Twitter was the perfect way to gather ideas from Salvadorans on how to make their country better. They could have stopped there and simply posted the ideas on their website, but they decided to add to the project by taking the tweets and having their political cartoonist, Otto Meza, illustrate the best 200 ideas. He transformed 140-character ideas into powerful, engaging images for a book. The campaign caught the imagination of Salvadorans, and citizens in the country and in 100 countries around the world offered up more than 3,700 ideas. By creating a book, they could deliver a people’s manifesto to the country’s political leaders.

With six months of planning and multiple partners, this type of project is not something you’ll be able to do frequently, but it holds a lot of lessons about how you work on a day-to-day basis. In fact, projects like this will be invaluable as you develop digitally, and they will provide cross-platform experience to editors, journalists and commercial staff, as well as building important social connections between digital and traditional employees.

Projects like this also give you the opportunity to engage in focused experiments and learn valuable lessons about how best to leverage the strength of new and traditional media channels. Most news organisations start thinking about digital in terms of how they can reproduce and distribute their existing content to digital audiences, but by working on multi-platform projects, you can begin to think about how platforms support and complement each other and deliver the best experience for audiences regardless of the platform.

Think of multiple platforms from the start

In the early phase of making the digital transition, most news organisations either add digital elements at the end of the editorial planning process or platform editors plan separately. This has to change, and it takes time for a news organisation to develop multi-platform planning expertise. However, projects are a great way to start developing cross-platform planning.

Fairfax Media of Australia, owner of such major titles as the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne, is seeking to remake itself as a multi-platform journalism business. To support the move, they involved managers, editors and staff in an editorial review process (PDF). This was much more of a transition to a digitally-led, multi-platform than genuine multi-platform project planning, but it holds lessons for how to do project planning as well. They captured problems that the more than 100 staff identified. They saw silos across platforms, and one participant said:

Whole story planning needs to be done at the start.

Projects, like El Faro’s Twitter campaign, give you a chance to change your planning process in a controlled way. It is much easier to try a new multi-platform planning process on a project rather than changing the way you work on a day-to-day basis. However, what you learn on projects can later be used to improve the way you work together every day.

El Faro created its own campaign, but many news organisations create projects around news events that they can plan for, such as elections, festivals or sporting events. Multi-platform project planning for upcoming events again has the added benefit of improving your long-term planning, an area which most news organisations could improve.

Set goals and key development objectives for each project

Before the project begins, think of what you want to achieve, not just editorially but also organisationally. Often, when I was working at the BBC and The Guardian, we would look at different projects as a way for us to explore a certain editorial technique. In both 2000 and 2004, the projects I was involved with around the US elections gave us a chance to explore interactivity and audience involvement, first through video in 2000 and then with blogs in 2004.

For El Faro, they wanted to see how social media and participation could complement their brand of independent, investigative journalism.

When you start a multi-platform project think about goals on several organisational levels:

• For journalists and editors, think of how easy or hard the project would be to replicate.
• Organisationally, were there any ways that you could work together better next time?
• From an audience perspective, did you see increased traffic, and if there was an increase in traffic, were you able to sustain it after the project was finished?
• Did you see an increased following in social media? What social media platforms led to the most sharing, to the most traffic to the site and which social media services had the highest level of engagement with your content, the most page views per session and the highest time on site?
• What was the commercial impact of the project? Did advertisers approach you after the project asking to be involved in future projects?

Setting goals is important, but just as important with cross-platform projects is what you learn afterwards. After the project, compare your goals with your performance. Some projects might not be as successful as you would have hoped but be brave enough to ask yourself why. Make sure to plan for and conduct a post-project debrief with editorial and commercial teams so that you can evaluate the project against your goals and key-performance indicators.

One important thing to remember is that if a project falls short of your goals, the debrief shouldn’t be about apportioning blame but about making sure that the organisation learns. This is about testing editorial ideas, and despite all the best planning in the world, sometimes tests are just as valuable in telling you what doesn’t work editorially, organisationally and commercially.

For this reason, try to keep the costs low. When I was at The Guardian, I often used free web services for experiments because I could test editorial ideas with relatively low commercial risk. If the editorial idea worked, then we could consider investing development and editorial resources into it.

Good campaigns foster cross-platform interaction

El Faro created a campaign that supports its image as an independent news organisation and it did so by reaching beyond its native platform. Similarly in Poland, Gazeta Wyborcza created a campaign asking its readers online and in print looking at the “Seven Sins of my City”. Much like El Faro’s campaign but focused on local government, the campaign brought together online comments but also traditional letters to the editor. The newspaper received some 70,000 letters over the course of the campaign, and just as with El Faro’s project, the campaign gained such momentum that other media started to cover it.

Often digital media is seen as the only media that is interactive, but people were interacting long before the days of Facebook and Twitter. Using both print, broadcast and digital media, including social media and even SMS, allows for greater participation from all of your audience regardless of the platform.

You don’t want to run so many campaigns that people become numb to the effect, but as independent news organisations, getting your audience involved in important political issues supports your mission of fearless journalism, engages your audience more directly in that mission and involves citizens more directly in the democratic process.

Rethink how you use your existing resources

Just as you can rethink interaction so it includes traditional media as well as digital media, cross-platform projects also give you an opportunity to rethink how you use your existing resources. El Faro thought of how they could amplify their readers’ ideas and looked to their political cartoonist. That’s just one way to rethink how you use your existing resources in new cross-platform ways.

Gazeta Wyborcza hasn’t been simply passive in taking in comments via letters to the editor. In one campaign that asked Poles to assess their healthcare system, they also printed a feedback form in the paper. The same form can easily be added using Google Docs forms to your website. In this way, interactivity becomes part of your cross-platform strategy, not simply something you do on your website.

Common threads tie together multiple platforms

That’s not the only way you can link together multiple platforms. A strong visual sensibility and effective branding can also tie together projects across platforms. For instance, involving political cartoonist Otto Meze, not only gave El Faro an opportunity to extend the digital campaign into print, it also gave the campaign a strong visual sensibility across platforms. His caricatures appeared on the site, in videos, on billboards and street signs. That was important not just in terms of the content but also in terms of marketing the project.

Magazines with a history of photography are finding that their strong sense of design and imagery, like Slovakia’s weekly news magazine Týždeň, work well in digital as well as in print. Many magazines are finding that look and feel are just as important in their tablet editions as in print.

El Faro’s strong sense of its own brand of independent journalism translated into a powerful visual and editorial project across channels. Again, project thinking allows you to take a step back from the day-to-day demands of journalism and more clearly define and communicate your brand.

Have a strategy for capitalising on success

El Faro saw increased traffic and the campaign bolstered its profile. This is a perfect opportunity for your sales teams to take advantage of that exposure and seek out new advertisers, sponsors and commercial partners. If a multi-platform campaign takes off, be prepared to sell advertisers on your ability to reach audiences regardless of the platform. Make sure to have a multi-platform sales strategy ready to support your cross-channel success.

Multi-platform projects give you a great opportunity to experiment with new editorial and commercial ideas. They give you a chance to rethink your journalism beyond print or broadcast and think about how to maintain your identity beyond your traditional platform. Moreover, they help build bridges across editorial and commercial teams, and they give you a great chance to learn, improve and grow.

This raises questions for how traditional media should respond and position themselves to serve audiences that are increasingly looking for not only content, but also conversation online.

To help us understand not only the growth of the RuNet, but also the impact that this is having on media and government regulation, we spoke to Sam Greene, the director of the Centre for New Media and Society at the New Economic School in Moscow. At the centre, “we are trying to understand how new media is changing the way we live, the way relate to each other, politics and the economy,” Greene said. The centre is connected with similar efforts across Russia and around the world, with partners in the US, UK, India, China, Hong Kong and South Africa to try to understand how the internet and new media is changing our societies.

“It is not possible to ignore the internet as a source of information anymore,” Greene said. It has moved beyond being a specialist media or a media for the elites, with between 30 to 40 percent of Russians now using the internet as an important source of information, he added.

It’s not just that more people have access to the internet, but as broadband access rapidly expands around the country, more people can consume and create video, audio and other media. “It gives (the internet) the immediacy that radio and television have and the same emotional connection you get from radio and television,” he added.

With this growth of RuNet as an important source of information, it is also having an impact on those who do not use it. The internet is not yet on par with television in terms of agenda setting, but it’s getting there, Greene said. News is more than just what we watch on television, hear on the radio or read in the press, news also informs our everyday conversations. “Even if your babushka, your grandmother, is not on the internet, their views are being shaped by what they hear from their grandchildren,” Greene added.

Cross-platform experimentation

With this rapid growth in internet use being a relatively recent phenomenon, the advertising market in Russia remains relatively strong when compared with other parts of the world, which means that it is still possible to make a lot of money in print media, local newspapers and television in Russia, Greene said.

Despite the current strength in the traditional advertising-supported media model in Russia, there is already a realisation that newspaper and television audiences in 10 years won’t be as high as they are now. That is leading to a lot of cross-platform media development as people are increasingly keen to bring their message to audiences online, Greene added.

And readers are responding. Russian readers have always been keen to let editors know what they think, but the internet has added to this interactivity.

“It makes it more difficult for those who want to control the information space, it makes their job much harder because the reaction space on the internet is much faster,” Greene said.

Digital technology has also added an important element of citizen reporting in Russia. The most dramatic example of this was during the flooding this summer in Krymsk, which killed more than 170 people. The region wasn’t a place where most major news organisations would have a bureau or staff, but people told their own story using photos taken on their mobile phones.

“A lot of journalists are now finding that it is their job to consume and filter what readers are sending in and translate that into verified and trustworthy news,” Greene said.

Government moves to control the internet

While these changes make the internet harder to control, the government has changed its stance on the level of control that it wants to exert over the internet. He said:

Early on in Medvedev’s presidency, now we’re talking five or six years, when people were criticising the lack of independent television and lack of diversity in mainstream media, Medvedev and the government were perfectly happy to point to the internet as the place where you could have pluralism. … There was a feeling, ‘well, we’ll let the internet do what it wants to do, and we’ll let people do there what they want to do.

Now they don’t feel that they can look on it as benignly, with as much distance, as in the past.

Despite this shift, Greene doesn’t believe that the government will move to a systematic form of control like China. Not only would it be expensive to develop such a system of control, but the government also realises that there is a risk in rolling out a state system of control. While it’s not possible to tie denial of service attacks against the sites like the popular Live Journal blogging platform, everyone assumed that the government was involved and reacted angrily.

How should news organisations respond?

With the internet growing rapidly and government policy changing, it poses challenges for news organisations in deciding how they should respond to these developments.

Greene said:

The first thing is to get the journalism right. Good journalism is good journalism whether it is online or offline. (The audience) might come because you built nice bells and whistles, but they are going to stay with you because you are bringing them a service.

But at the same time, he also said that news organisations need to realise that the internet is more than just a place for people to read what you have written or watched what you have recorded. The internet is an interactive space, and it can create a new, positive, more engaged relationship between journalists and their audiences.

To realise the internet’s full potential for journalism, he encouraged journalists not to be scared of technology. So much can be done without a lot of investment thanks to a range of new, low-cost and no-cost tools and services.

Success is not about building expensive websites but about “getting conversations started and participating in those conversations”.

Digital technology is radically remaking media, and while many people focus on the changes brought to the newspapers, publishing and music industries, digital technology is bringing about one of the most fundamental transformations in the history of television. First, digital technology radically expanded multi-channel television via cable and satellite. Now live streaming and video on demand via mobile, tablets, internet and smart TV platforms looks set to radically reshape viewing habits by giving consumers unprecedented choice of when, where and how they will view TV. If you want to see a glimpse of the future of TV, you only have to look at how the BBC delivered what they called the “first proper digital Olympics” and how consumers responded.

The BBC’s London 2012 Olympics coverage was not only properly digital, but properly multi-platform and properly comprehensive. The BBC described this as a four-screen strategy, reaching viewers via PC, mobile, tablet and internet-connected TV. The public broadcaster delivered nearly day-long coverage on five of its nine linear channels and every minute of every event, 2,500 hours of coverage, via live, HD streams via desktop computers, smartphones, tablets and internet protocol TV (IPTV) platforms. This was a thousand more hours of coverage than they provided for Beijing in 2008, and the 24 HD streams were six times more than they delivered four years ago. It was a monumental task that required months of testing before the games.

The BBC delivered a smartphone app built specifically for the games, and the broadcaster launched a new video player via its Sports website that allowed people to view and time shift 24 streams of video. Users could easily move back and forth through the live video stream to see previous events via clear navigation that broke the stream into events, highlighting the ones in which British athletes took part. It was more like visually navigating through the chapters of a DVD than the normal online video presentation that only provides the ability to rewind without a clear sense of key moments.

IPTV platforms have matured dramatically in the UK since the 2008 Beijing Olymics, the BBC used these platforms to ensure the widest distribution of its Olympics coverage. The BBC used its IPTV platform, iPlayer, to stream live coverage of its three network channels. Additionally, BBC delivered the same 24 live and catch-up video streams to internet connected TVs, such as Sony Smart TV, PlayStation 3, Virgin Media TiVo, through an (IPTV) service called “Red Button” that gave audiences more flexibility and interactivity as the Games happened. On free-to-air digital TV service, Freeview, the Red Button feature is used to access digital text services and also extra programme channels. After the Olympics, the BBC will be focusing on IPTV services on the Red Button service.

How consumers responded

The scale of delivery is something that very few broadcasters apart from the BBC could achieve. However, this monumental project provides us valuable insights into how consumers will consume video-on-demand services on new platforms.

British viewers definitely embraced the BBC’s multi-platform offering. Taking into account both website traffic and digital video streaming, “the BBC delivered 2.8 petabytes, with the peak traffic moment occurring when Bradley Wiggins won Gold and we shifted 700 Gb/s”, Cait O’Riordan, Head of Product, BBC Sport and London 2012, said.

In total, the BBC received 106m video requests across its digital platforms. This was more than three times the 32m online videos requested during the 2008 Games, and the most BBC has ever received. The majority of these online video requests, 62m, were for live-streams, while only 8m were for on-demand live streams and 35m were for short-form clips.

One challenge in designing the service was to allow viewers to not only time-shift within a video stream but also to quickly and easily move between streams of the various sports on offer. O’Riordan said.

Our aim was to put audiences in control of their Olympics experience, transforming the way they could navigate through the huge breadth of coverage using the extra features of the interactive video player.

The BBC found that users did indeed take advantage of this option. The corporation’s data clearly shows people moving across channels and platforms to check out a whole host of different events. Whether they were carrying high-profile or esoteric, little-supported events, all 24 of the streams were being used. According to the head of product, O’Riordan, every one of the streams saw at least 100,000 users – a considerable audience for narrowcast events – at some point during the two weeks of games.

O’Riordan also points out how in a four-screen world, consumption patterns shift noticeably through the day as they travel to work, are at work, are at home in front of the TV and then take a tablet to bed. She said:

• PC usage maxes out during the week at lunchtime and during mid-afternoon peak Team GB moments.
• Mobile takes over around 6pm as people leave the office but still want to keep up to date with the latest action
• Tablet usage reaches a peak at around 9pm: people using them as a second screen experience as they watch the Games on their TVs, and also as they continue to watch in bed.

Mobile and tablet accounted for 41 percent of IP video stream viewing during the games, the BBC said, and in the US, NBC said that the figure was 45 percent, showing the dramatic potential for mobile video viewing once the networks are in place to support this kind of activity.

It is also important to note that with all of this digital consumption, the Olympics was a huge draw for traditional TV viewers wanting to cheer on the home team. The BBC announced that a staggering 90% of the entire British population watched at least 15 minutes of its Olympics coverage either on linear TV or via the Red Button service.

The future: Coming to a screen near you

Being able to reach audiences with your programming no matter where they are or which device they are using holds huge opportunities for broadcasters. The BBC’s four-screen strategy for London 2012 shows a glimpse of the digital future, but it is a future that is coming to your market as IPTV platforms proliferate and mobile networks become faster and more robust. Broadcast markets around the world are making the switch from analogue to digital, whether that is free-to-air terrestrial services, digital satellite, IPTV or new mobile and tablet apps.

By 2015, the number of IPTV subscribers globally is expected to grow from 53 million in 2011 to 105.1 million, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.7%,  according to a new report “IPTV Global Forecast: 2011 to 2015 Report” by MRG Multimedia Research Group. The service revenue for the world IPTV market will grow at a CAGR of 20% to reach $45.3bn. The rise in revenue will be driven by dramatic IPTV growth emerging markets, such as Brazil and Russia, albeit from a low base. A 2011 report predicts that IPTV subscribers in Brazil will from 21,000 in 2011 to 1.5m by 2016, according to Pyramid Research.

This future may seem a long way off, but the BBC began to position itself for a digital video future more than a decade ago. In 2001, work began on its ground-breaking TV on-demand iPlayer platform which now spans online, smart TVs, and mobile devices. Whilst the BBC has the advantage of enormous resources and infrastructure, there are important steps that all broadcasters can take to prepare for the digital future.

What comes across loud and clear is that consumers will embrace choice when given the opportunity. Broadcasters and other content creators should remember this as they position themselves to take advantage of digital opportunities. The other lesson is that with multiple screens comes a range of new viewing patterns as video content can follow a viewer throughout the day. Prime time may mean something quite different depending on the device and delivery method. Successful broadcasters of the future will be ready to serve consumers when, where and how they want.

In our last Digital Briefing, we looked at how to develop a product mindset, and if you want to see product thinking in action, you can see it in this summary of how the Farm Journal in the US developed a multi-platform product portfolio and how it manages those products on the web, on mobile and TV, as well as events and data products. The 134-year-old group shows that even established media brands can develop cutting edge multi-platform products.

Since relaunching its website two years ago, Rob O’Regan of eMedia Vitals says the eMedia team at Farm Journal has launched 25 new products. This flurry of digital launches wasn’t haphazard, with each product going through a vetting process.

Part of that vetting process includes a cost/benefit analysis. The process has allowed Farm Journal to develop a mix of revenue from advertisers, commerce and readers. In July’s Digital Briefing, we’ll look at how to develop the right revenue mix, another key step in making the digital transition.

As we said in our product mindset series, this is about setting priorities, editorial and commercial. As you develop this portfolio of products across the platforms you serve, you’ll also need to adapt your management. Mitch Rouda, president of eMedia at Farm Journal gave some insights into their management and product development process:

Importantly, every project must have an owner – generally one of the lead executives for AgWeb, digital advertising, business development, or one of the brand editors. The development team never owns a project – it serves as an internal vendor to the sponsors.

Working with technical teams is one of the early challenges in making the digital transition, but having clear goals and clear ownership of projects is part of developing a successful working relationship with technical staff. Product ownership is also important because it establishes clear lines of responsibility. With Farm Journal set to grow 80% in the next five years, it shows that such a strategy produces results.