Innovation Nation

By: Rich Kane

It’s a new year, which will likely bring about more layoffs, cutbacks, and possible shutterings of some newspapers altogether.

But while change is a constant thing in this ever-evolving industry, there’s still room for optimism. New innovations and ideas give journalists reason to be excited about the future –at least until the head of HR calls them into the office—and fresh technologies and digital startups will continue to make news in 2015.

With a look toward the future, E&P rounded up a group of experts to find out who’s innovating in journalism and advertising, and where the industry is heading.

Aleszu Bajak is a journalism instructor at Northeastern University’s media innovation program, where he edits Storybench.org, an “under-the-hood” guide to digital storytelling.

What’s working? Finding the audience where they are. Open-sourcing tech and code to improve workflow and storytelling (ChartBuilder, from David Yanofsky at Quartz, is a great example). Building projects and templates that can be applied to multiple contexts, i.e. Miguel Paz’s government accountability project Poderopedia being replicated across Chile, Venezuela and Colombia. The iterative design process in news apps and newsroom workflow.

On the advertising side, I think we’ll see more in-house native ad design like we’re seeing from Quartz. Their focus is on the seamless integration of beautiful ads into a news feed.

I think we’ll see lots of innovation in drone journalism. It just won’t be in the United States. With wearable tech, we’ll see a lot of Dick Tracys around. It seems mobile is the only place where news can grow.

In 10 years, a handful of outlets will continue to preach ethical journalism, but most news will be bite-sized and bastardized. We need to look at what people outside of news organizations are doing to share information and tell stories. And we can’t deceive people into reading news. We need them to want to read news.

John Bracken is vice president of media innovation at the Knight Foundation.

We’re seeing a trend in bringing together freelance creative content storytellers and finding ways to build storytelling networks that includes revenue generation. We’re also seeing more data analytics and user analytics being applied to reach audiences.

The expansion of video is also becoming huge. At some point soon, video will be what people will be going to the Internet for, so we’ll see more exposure of short- and long-form video. BuzzFeed and Huffington Post are expanding their video capabilities, so expect other media outlets to follow.

Places you’ll see success are the publications that look beyond their own site, adapting well to be on different platforms. Mobile is pretty huge, and the majority of Americans have a smartphone. People aren’t just using mobile to consume journalism. In the app marketplace, the competition for attention is really high, so newspapers can’t think about just competing with their crosstown print rivals, they’re also competing with Netflix and video games.

That carries over to the tablet space. Getting on that real estate is a real challenge. Newspapers need to do a good job of taking control of their own real estate, taking advantage of Instagram and Twitter and adding value at those short lengths.

The way Americans engage in news media is changing. At Knight, we’re seeing a lot of activity and new ways of engaging with communities and institutions, like libraries. We’re also working on data transparencies and open government issues as well.

Lon Haenel is vice president of digital media and circulation for the Janesville (Wis.) Gazette and its parent company, Bliss Communications.

News orgs have to invest in digital, they just have to invest in digital now. Any of these initiatives take time to ramp up. Are they wildly profitable in their first year? No. Publishers need to give themselves a year-and-a-half to three years so their digital products can mature to their full potential.

I believe the most successful innovative companies are where account executives on both the print and digital sides all work together. I just don’t know as an industry if we do enough of that. No one is really talking to each other to find out what everyone else is doing. We’ve got to have a better understanding of what our customers want, and talk to them and listen to them.

I see the development of outside contributor networks growing. Huffington Post does it well. Instead of growing your newsroom from 50 to 250, you can have the contributor network be the main mechanism for your user-generated content. That’s a very interesting thing to follow.

The newspaper industry can’t continue to create inches and pages at the ever-increasing costs we’re seeing today. With digital, all the content needs to play as well as our hardcore journalism does, and needs to generate as much return traffic as possible through engagement and social media. The types of content we see doing great right now, it’s the city bus that ran into the duplex. Sometimes it’s really negative news that plays well. That content finds us.

Some of the evergreen topics have interest. We have a small network of contributors, and some of that DIY content, like gardening tips posted a year ago, those have as much traffic today as content we’ve posted an hour ago. A retired mayor or politician might want to create content. There’s no better person to write than someone with expertise, like a college professor who knows tech, maybe they could provide two or three pieces of content a month.

We’re all after site stickiness, and we want to be sure people come back again and again.

Chris Jones is the director of content syndication and distribution for Deseret Digital Media.

There are many exciting developments in and out of our industry that should give us all reason for optimism. Shifts to digital and now mobile offer great opportunity to understand and serve our audiences in ways we never could before.

That said, rather than looking to some new, innovative idea as a panacea that will save the industry, publishers would do well to focus on the basics: organization and meeting audience needs. I shouldn’t still be talking about this as though it were an exciting, new idea, yet as I travel through the industry or meet with teams in our offices, it’s painfully apparent that few organizations have been willing or able to follow suit.

For us, dual transformation and subsequent innovations have produced the following results: We have the #1 TV news website in the country (ksl.com); a newspaper website that grew as much as 50 percent year-over-year in recent months (DeseretNews.com); a combined social reach of more than 100 million followers driving some 32 million page views to our websites from social; and a reach strategy that includes the syndication of content in English, Spanish and Portuguese into about 375 markets in the U.S. and globally.

I’m reluctant to call it an innovation, as it’s been around in various forms for years, but one of our focuses (along with several leading media companies) is the growth of native advertising. While we continue to look at innovative ways to increase ad revenue on mobile devises, native is part of our mobile-ready strategy. I see this as an ideal mobile solution because it doesn’t interrupt the user experience (the sponsored content is delivered natively—but transparently—alongside our other content) while simultaneously offering our audience something of value (when done right).

I had a chance to visit BuzzFeed and several other top innovation shops in New York City and Silicon Valley. I was particularly impressed with BuzzFeed’s use of data to understand their audience. Similar to what ksl.com does with audience insight, BuzzFeed knows where their visitors come from, which pages they visit and which pages they share. They then fuel those behaviors with targeted content.

While many traditional media companies look down on BuzzFeed for the lack of depth to much of their content, I walked away from the visit completely impressed with their data-driven, audience-focused strategy—including their innovative approach to native advertising (ever see a display ad on BuzzFeed? Didn’t think so).

In the spirit of looking to others, I’m impressed with Schurz’s RedPost—an innovative single-copy news kiosk. Hearing it described didn’t compare with seeing one in person on the Deseret News side of our building. It beautifully displays content from inside the paper along with social feeds and ad units.

I believe the newspapers that survive the next 10 years will be those that are organized for digital success and focus on delivering quality content that truly meets their audience’s needs.

 

Amy Webb is CEO of Webbmedia Group, a digital strategy agency that focuses on near-term emerging technology trends.

Algorithms can be programmed to determine the last few minutes of searching, of how long you’re looking at a particular part of a website. Using algorithms, you can determine what’s most likely to keep someone’s attention.

As an example, I have a mobile phone, and using its sensors, you could tell that I’m jogging 11 miles an hour. That way, you could send an audio version of a news story I can listen to while I’m jogging. It’s about figuring out what my behavior is at a particular time.

Security and privacy are other innovation areas. For news orgs thinking about expanding their coverage, if you cover privacy and security, I think those topics will do well, because there’s so much to explain, like when there’s a target breach. It’s just a matter of time before someone gets angry enough at the New York Times or Washington Post enough to hack their sites, and they could do some nefarious things like produce pages with just slight changes. If someone produces a story saying the stock market has started to tank, and if it looks like it was written like a real story, and the market sees that, it could cause a lot of damage. With the Sony attack, a lot more is possible than some people thought.

It’s too soon to determine the future of wearables. They all still require a mobile phone. Not to say that news orgs shouldn’t be thinking about those devices. Same for virtual reality. For news, it’s still too early to tell. For new tech to really catch on, it has to do something where you can’t imagine life before it.

We’ve also been looking at wireless mesh networking. That’s a tremendous opportunity for breaking news. Protest movements in Hong Kong and Iran have been using them. The flip side is that you don’t know about verification or if the sources are lying. It’s becoming easier and easier to fake people out, and because there’s pressure to be fast, journalists aren’t being as diligent as they may have been 10 year ago. That’s not a reason not to use them, it’s just something to keep in mind.