Publishers need platforms. They benefit from, and pay for, advertising and technological solutions from Google and Amazon. They use Facebook and Twitter to reach new audiences and sample our work. But they came back from the dead only by inches, after the Zombie Platform Race of the post-2008 crisis years. So 2019 should be year 1 of a new journalistic heterodoxy that has been breeding on different fronts, to succeed the platform orthodoxy of the past years. And that is excellent news for all — Big Tech included.
During the platform orthodoxy period, publishers optimized themselves for distributing their content and increasing reach. They desperately sought to be loved by the platforms. And they measured success, and the impact of their day-to-day journalism, with quantitative metrics. It was probably rational because journalism and advertising go hand in hand and will always. But it became unreasonable, given the negative impact it had on their journalism and their business model. It hindered their position in the market, and in society. Many factors have triggered the ongoing realignment — a new journalism-centric digital orthodoxy — between information, revenue, and technology. In the U.S., there’s Trump and the #fakenews debate. In Europe, there’s the end of a decade-long crisis and the EU’s regulatory actions in the digital market.
If I had to pinpoint a single variable to explain the transition from a platform-centric paradigm to a journalism-centric one, it’d be Facebook’s relative decoupling from news. A new, more balanced era has arrived. And we should celebrate…and carry on. We’re optimizing ourselves to be a destination again, with newsletters, subscriptions, editorial marketing, and good (new) old journalism. We now seek the love of our most loyal readers first, while we work to remain popular in the social village. And we measure success with more complex models, better introducing quality, impact and attention in the mix.
The debate around metrics and analytics for our industry has been one of the most fascinating and crucial in this challenging journey. But it is the universalization of the subscriptions or membership models that enshrines the greatest potential of this new journalism-led digital orthodoxy. Subscriptions are not salvation. But a diversified digital revenue mix for publishers, with quality advertising and reader monetization at its core, might be.
Users are not readers are not citizens. We need to be good at capturing users to feed our growth, advertising revenues and ranking positions. But we also need to excel at keeping loyal news readers coming back and logging themselves into our sites. Most crucially, we need to nourish and cherish our position before the increasingly critical citizenship of the societies we serve.
At Vocento, all of our local and regional newspapers will be offering a subscription proposition to their communities of readers by the end of next year. In 2019, it’s expected that others in the Spanish national press will join the movement. It’s changing our daily news menu, the way our newsrooms work, and the role our editors and reporters play. It’s made us better at handling big data and catering to our readers’ and customers’ needs. And it’s bringing revenue home, with more and more citizens in cities around the country paying to be well-informed. Isn’t it great that it’s all about journalism… again?
Borja Bergareche is the chief innovation officer at Vocento.
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Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
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Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
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Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
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Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
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Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
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Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
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Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
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Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
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Joshua P. Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
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Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
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Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
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Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
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Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
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Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
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Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
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Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
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Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
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Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
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Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
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Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
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Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
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Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
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Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
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Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
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