Media leaders want to take steps to “protect news content online”. It is a fight against the wall. Media’s former monopoly role as gate keepers is gone long time ago. Now is the time to open up.
It has been very interesting to follow the blog discussions after Associated Press this week announced its initiative to rein in sites using its content. In its press release AP said it would “pursue legal and legislative actions” against those who do not use its content properly.
I believe it is a fight against the wall. And it is an approach which runs counter to what media companies need to do today.
Newspapers and other mass media used to enjoy the benefits of what was in practical terms an information monopoly. They were gate keepers of news, deciding what was important and what was not. People would go to the mass media to be advised about what news and topics they should have an opinion about.
The media still has an important function as gate keepers, but it is no longer a monopoly and this role of the media is diminishing quickly. Instead numerous new sources of information have become available – and many other sites, such as search engines and news aggregators, have taken on the role as gate keepers as well.
Having been a journalist for the last 25 years I could of course choose to observer this trend with a sense of sadness. It runs counter to everything I learned in journalism school at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington, USA. We were taught about the important gate keeper role. As journalists it was our job to select stories on behalf of the public and present them to our readers in order of importance. We had been given a sacred task to sort through a complex reality and balance everything in the right manner.
At that time, in the 1980s, no other institutions had the resources and competence to compete with the mass media and the journalists. We pretty much had a monopoly in defining reality for the broad masses.
Not any more.
Today there are numerous information sources. Everybody can produce and distribute content for free. And many more than journalists are doing this in a very professional manner. In fact, of among 80 RSS feeds I follow in Google Reader, I think less than 20 are produced by professional journalists.
Does that mean I trust the other sources less? Not necessarily. The reason that I follow them is that they have demonstrated a high level of competence in a niche field I like to follow. Most of them are in areas of expertise which are too specialized for most mass media companies.
Also Google Reader has become my gate keeper. That is where I browse content from a large number of sources.
Would I visit all of these 80 web sites daily if I did not use an aggregator service like Google Reader? Of course not. Probably I would only visit 5 or 6 of them. For the rest of the sites, Google Reader makes it possible for me as a reader to keep an eye on their content, and occasionally visit their web sites when an information item caches my interest. Both for me as a reader and the web sites as information providers this is pure bonus as compared to the old days. The same goes with the books I buy on Amazon: These are mainly purchases in addition to what I used to buy from Norwegian book stores 10 or 20 years ago.
To sum up so far: Technological improvements have made it possible for everybody to produce content and it has given me as a user access to numerous more information sources.
- What will happen to newspapers: 10 predictions
- Crisis advice for newspaper executives
- The state of the Mediasphere
What does this mean to media companies?
First of all the media must realize that they no longer enjoy the benefits of having a monopoly as information providers and gate keepers. And readers today have numerous ways to access your content.
You only need to look at traffic statistics for major news sites and you will see that a significant portion of the traffic are users who don’t even visit the front page. Take my own country, Norway, as an example. Norway’s largest news site is VG. Last week (week 14, 2009) it had 3,23 million unique visitors. But 27 per cent of these visitors did not visit VG.no’s front page. The same goes for the other main news sites: One quarter of Dagbladet.no’s visitors did not visit the front page and 35 per cent of the visitors to site of my own employer, Aftenposten.no.
Second: Online news has become a free commodity for users. There seem to be no viable business model charging for news content on the web. Instead media companies need to find other ways to monetize this content. Charging for more specialized content may still be an option, though.
Third: Users expect their news to be available to them wherever they find it convenient. Rather than forcing their users to visit their sites to get the main news headlines, media companies must push their content to wherever their users choose to be.
Fourth: Media companies still have great credibility as trusted news sources. With unlimited sources of information users become even more dependent on the few trusted ones to guide them. Many media companies still have brands associated with trust and credibility. This is their biggest advantage, and also means that many users still will entrust the gate keeper role to the media sites.
So what should the media companies do?
My approach would be the opposite of Associated Press: Rather than build a wall around your content, you should open up and make it easily accessible wherever your users are. Not necessarily the full content, of course, but headlines, leads and thumbnail photos. Your first priority should be to make it easy for your end users to find your content.
That means you should be happy that Google and aggregators index your content. It only brings extra traffic to your site. So be it that some of the users may find that the headline and lead paragraph is enough. In total you will still get many more visitors than if all of them had to visit your site first.
The alternative, not being indexed by Google and news aggregators, only would bring less income.
Associated Press raises one extremely question: How to monetize news content? That’s a tricky one and obviously media companies are struggling these days to find the right answers. As a journalist I am very concerned about this question: Who should pay for good journalism in the future?
The answers are still not clear and viable business models are yet to be developed. Advertisements clearly is not enought. But looking to the past models instead of the future will not help us answer this difficult question.
As Ariana Huffington points out:
“The key question is whether those of us working in the media (old and new) embrace and adapt to the radical changes brought about by the Internet or pretend that we can somehow hop into a journalistic Way Back Machine and return to a past that no longer exists and can’t be resurrected.”
Fellow journalists: Let’s bet on the future!
Some of the blog postings from this week:
- Online journalism review: No one owns the news
- The Big Money: Death a la Carte: It’s not Google that’s killing the media
- TechCrunch: That Whining Sound You Hear Is The Death Wheeze of Newspapers
- Daggle: Google’s Love For Newspapers & and How Little They Appreciate It
- paidContent: A Solution To The Newspaper Industry’s Battle With Google
- Media Futurist: 8 key trends and some foresights for the next 5 years
- Nieman Journalism Lab: Five tips on charging for content
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