Rethinking The Role Of News

If you explained the concept of the Internet to anyone prior to its invention, you’d expect them to be rather disappointed by what we’ve done with it. We can now access pretty much everything ever known, we can now communicate richly with anyone alive, for free, anywhere on the planet in real time. One would imagine a world with incredible closeness, deep empathy, and mutual understanding. We could live in untold togetherness and collaboration, where ignorance would die like a germ under the sunlight of scrutiny and abundant knowledge.

And yet, here we are. We’re telling people not to eat Tide Pods. We are fighting climate change deniers, and the most entrenched but ignorant opinions we can remember. Nothing in human history has ever offered such hope and failed so badly.

We may laugh, but it’s not funny. The world around us is seemingly more polarised than ever. Arguments erupt endlessly on social media; political parties cater to evermore fringe views; common ground disappears as does the need to build bridges across it. According to Pew Reseach, 81% of both Democrats and Republicans have an unfavorable view of the other. In the contemporary internet, algorithms act fast to feed you more content you are shown to like. Whatever your conspiracy theory, you are made to feel normal, reasonable and supported by numbers. Our primal urges of rage and fear are continually poked. Fake news permeates. Balanced views become too long to read, with hostilities nurtured and challenging views treated as dangerous. This heralds an age where extreme candidates get both airtime, and eventually, these candidates form Governments and are elected as leaders.

Our inability to digest news properly threatens the stability of society. How did it get this way?

We tend to think that technology enables us to behave like we did before, but easier, faster or cheaper. Initially, that’s true, but we soon rewire our brains and we reinvent how things are done. Publishing has changed far more than we ever realize.

One of the questions I dread the most is being asked what publications I read. It’s not that embarrassment comes from the amount or type of content I consume, it’s that I admit being ignorant as to to where it’s hosted, who made it or how I got to it. My relationship has firmly moved away from the curator and bundler of material to being with the subject matter, the author, or the sharer. I consume what I want.

This may not immediately like a huge shift, or one with considerable implications, but I’d say many of the greatest challenges of today stem from this change.

There was once a lot of responsibility in the provision of news. It came with a symbiotic relationship which needed to be maintained. A newspaper It would provide a long-term and sustainable diet of what was good for us and what was near-poisonous, but would make us come back for more. We needed both the hard-to-digest but slow energy release of muesli, along with the sugar and fat instant-hit-and-fast-crash of the McDonalds birthday party.

We had a relationship with the newspaper. There would be enough immediate interest to sell copies on newstands, enough substance to impart deep understanding and depth, but not so much as to be indigestible. Curiosity was rewarded. Editors had the balancing job. Most people had very few news sources, so this one unit needed to cover it all. A good editor would maintain the balance of sales, advertising revenue, subscriptions, and impulse purchases from the newsstand.

We often misunderstand how the internet has destroyed this model. The presumption was that free-at-the-point-of-use content was the main issue, and that digital advertising removed all the money for quality journalism. But, it’s more than that.

The greatest change is that the role of the bundler is now dead. There is no responsibility. We consume news at an article level. Our brains have become addicted to physical and intellectual quick fixes, with makers of fast food and fast articles more than happy to oblige.

Then, mechanisms come in which start to reinforce this. We now see in real time what’s performing well. Attention becomes the currency. Publishers cut down on expensive articles, and ask writers to hit traffic targets. This has become a spiral of decline, and I think we may be at the lowest point.

Fighting Back

I don’t think we can put the horse back in the stable. The success of the newsletter format has been interesting, but we can’t accept Facebook’s algorithm tweets and whatever Twitter becomes to save us.

A key change for me has to be ambition. The industry is haunted by the lazy early assumption that “People won’t pay for news”. Lower revenue led to lower budgets and then the inability to charge for content, so we found other ways. We sold more inventory than ever, which annoyed readers, but we didn’t care because they didn’t pay us. Brands became our clients. We now routinely antagonize readers by pivoting to video because we know while people hate it, it’s worth more to advertisers.

We need to work around modern reader needs, to have the ambition of building long-term, two-way, fair relationships. If publications had sought not to increase traffic, shareabilty and virality, but to increase the perceived value of their content, we’d now have a plethora of publications all changing money for world class content per market. This solution is formed of many parts.

Easy Paywalls

The main cost of paywalls isn’t found on your credit card statement but in the mental burden. Sign-up processes are a mixture of Kafkaesque pricing tiers, of hidden special offers, and of short-time sign-up deals. Make sign-up insanely fast and easy, make the pricing transparent, and be almost boastful about how much your access is worth. Then, ensure that the end reader never has to sign in again.

Bundles

There is nothing more I like more than Chicken Tikka Masala, but I don’t always want to eat it. News is like this. I want the FT, the Economist, the Washington Post, New York Times on a regular basis. Sometimes, however, I end up on sites which I have no interest in subscribing to, but offer me glimpses of the amazing. Please make it easy for me to pay money for this. Spotify charges me $10 for access to millions of songs, not to individual record labels.

Patronage

Patreon is an interesting service, based on the idea that quality content makers can seek direct donations for their work. The Guardian has tried donations, but a paywall seems more sensible. Yet, for niche and ultra-niche quality writers and thinkers, this approach seems interesting. Monthly newsletters are far preferable to websites ruined by display advertising.

Role

Content producers and publishers need to rise above the turmoil and dirt of today. Stop ramming ads down our throats. Retain the barrier between church and state, and keep paid-for, branded content out. Eliminate the upsell. In short, stop eating away at the only thing you ever had: trust.

Leverage this trust. Build and sell expensive conferences. Set up speaking bureaus for your best writers. Offer white papers. Sell books. Magazines should become more expensive and heavier. Lifestyle brands should franchise hotel chains and lifestyle goods. If Monocle can make a podcast, open a store, sell guidebooks and now apartments, then the global publishing giants can do it too.

This is a challenging time for media, as it is for the planet. The way to combat this isn’t to go small and cheap. It’s to declare an intent, to form a path for the future, and to know that our knowledge, beliefs, and attention are the most valuable thing in the world. Step up, step in, and reclaim your unique right to help shape them. Your audience needs you.