Ifra Conference: Beyond the Printed Word 2007, day 1, morning: ntSummaries
8-9 November, Citywest Hotel, Dublin, Ireland
427 participants from 43 countries
Conference co-chairs: Meredith Artley, executive editor, Latimes.com, USA; and Elan Lohmann, publisher, News24.com, South Africa
Multiblog: ifra-nt.com/multiblog/beyond
Summaries by Steve Shipside, Ifra correspondent
Thursday, 8 November
Morning Session
Opening comments
Reiner Mittelbach, Ifra CEO, followed by Co-chair Elan Lohmann, publisher, News24.com
Reiner Mittelbach started by welcoming the participants, segueing neatly from the theme of Beyond into the importance of having a strategy for coping with the future and from there to a recap of some of Ifra's latest projects, including Where NEWS?, eRev 2011, and eNews 2010 . With some twenty companies (including Amazon) preparing e-readers, eNews 2010 is a timely group learning experience with the first workshops starting next February.
Elan Lohmann also welcomed the attendees in a variety of languages before noting that this year's 'Beyond' -- the 15th of these digital publishing conferences -- revolved around the theme of connecting with the digital consumer and in particular with Web 2.0, diversification, and the quest for profit. For Lohmann the answer to all of this lies in creating interest around the content. “Things are changing fast,” he noted, “boundaries are breaking down and we all face challenges but there are also huge opportunities.” In particular he cited MSNBC's recent purchase of Newsline.com and Microsoft's investment in Facebook - a site that didn't even merit a mention at last year's conference.
“The web is becoming increasingly open while traditional media businesses are by nature more closed so one of the big questions is not just how we compete, but how do we figure out who is friend and who is foe.” Observing that the assembled gathering represented dozens of countries and markets, Lohmann expressed his desire that attendees could network, share, and learn from one another.
Keynote: from Consumer to Prosumer
Dr. Jo Groebel, Director, German Digital Institute
“Traditional media you might hear or see”, began Groebel, “but with digital media increasingly you experience it and with the experience comes a bigger impact and greater learning.” Groebel's presentation explored the idea that we have progressed further than our wildest dreams and in the digital domain enthusiasm should be higher than it was in the '90s. Yet there is a certain hesitancy about it. There is, he observed, a major challenge facing business and politics alike that in the past when we addressed media we meant a dominant medium, be that TV or radio, but for the first time we have numerous platforms and players that have to be addressed -- “a jungle of challenges and multiple communications. But challenges are fun.”
While we are struck by the speed of the Web's development, Groebel noted that the development and distribution of printing devices in the 15th century was faster than that of the Net. He also stated that while the importance of short-term developments are over-estimated, those of long-term developments are equally underestimated. “To those who say that blogs and the new journalism are just hype, I have to say that it isn't so. Traditional media will probably survive but in a very different way. One thing for sure is that the age of uni-media focus is over; people increasingly want all kinds of content on all different platforms. Interoperability will be one of the key questions of the future. We're talking not just laptops but the mobile world.”
The importance of papers, explained Groebel, is that their bold headlines and presence in the streets help define what is important at that moment in time. “It's not about being informed but about having a physiological kick and the need to be emotionally stimulated – even the quality papers .”
The big three factors now are capacity, mobility and community. The explosion of broadband means you can broadcast everything as the capacity expands. Mobility is key since while the newspaper is the oldest mobile medium, now every medium is planning on going mobile, and thirdly community is still key. What the users want to see delivered on these platforms, are the 'kick', the emotion, information, communication, transaction, community and democracy. “If you want to teach people something you always need emotion. Those who believe text books and quality papers can do without emotion are wrong; even if your goal is to inform, you need that involvement.”
Groebel then explained that people themselves are changing along with their media habits with verbal intelligence (the ability to handle abstract concepts) having decreased over the last 30 years and visual intelligence (making form and narrative from images) notably increasing. Another point is that people are simply not always paying that much attention - “most of those we have analysed have the TV set on and at the same time are on the Net. I guess that most of those here do the same, so it's not an either/or situation. There are periods during the day when people are willing to interact but there are others when they are not.”
Age is another factor that strongly influences audiences with baby boomers proving fairly passive in their media consumption, Generation X demanding options all the time, and Generation 'Y' (the current youth generation) purely and solely interested in community. That in itself raises the point that with UGC (user-generated content), the mass of the population is not creative but those that have talent have enough to “feed the mass.” The trick, says Groebel, is to find those talents.
With regard to UGC versus professional journalism, Groebel concludes that “one of the major findings of studies (and one confirmed by IBM) is that politicians all say we need professional journalists for their credibility and professionalism, but guess what? Ask the younger generation what is the most credible source of info and they answer 'it's the community'. People have built up a resistance to professional communication. Regardless of politics or country of origin they see professional communicators – be they politicians or journalists – as having vested interests in their backpacks.”
Educational differences in terms of media have largely disappeared. Once key defining factors of who chose what media educational differences are now being replaced by situation and mood – people in the morning have a completely different mood from the afternoon and that defines their media use. That, it seems, is where we now need to do our research.
Groebel finished on the subject of money, observing that “in the old online world, people were unwilling to pay for anything, but with multiple platforms and the mobile world we have a situation where people are willing to pay and it's a little easier to make a bit of money.”
In conclusion, the media world of tomorrow is integrated with content and platform merging. It is immediate and it is digital, international but deriving its strength from being local. It is about being part of the 'inner circle' and a sense of information coming from the bottom up which will require an alliance between UGC and professional journalism.
Integrating Web 2.0 tools into news sites
Matthew Buckland, General Manager, Mail & Guardian Online, South Africa
Whilst admitting that he winces every time he hears the words 'Web 2.0', Buckland is forced to concede that the phrase is “useful in capturing the culture of the web and marketing its ideas to the mainstream.” Buckland feels that the beauty of Web 2.0 as an approach is that it means building web applications cheaply and collaboratively by harnessing web users' collective intelligence. As a means of appreciating the difference between the old and new approaches he compared the relationship he has with Facebook with that he has with CNN.com. “Facebook knows all about me; CNN doesn't know I exist. That's an opportunity where a publishing network can come alive as a social network. Getting closer to your readers and building a community is what papers always used to do really well, but somewhere along the line we've lost that. Now in the Net era and specifically with Web 2.0, we have the opportunity to rekindle this relationship.”
The role of the media company is (or should be) changing with the publisher able to act as so much more – a facilitator, an aggregator, a blog publisher and effectively and ISP. Or as Buckland puts it, “Why let Google have all the fun?”
While stressing the importance of UGC, Buckland has made it a sacred rule that all content is edited, but that doesn't limit them in their experiments with new online brands and “crazy things to keep the CEO awake at nights.”
Despite having one of the most expensive telecoms environments in the world, South Africa manages to rank as the sixth biggest country on Facebook by registered users, so the demand is there for online content. “Despite a changing and challenging environment where everyone is a writer and photographer, there is one constant, which is that people want quality which means stuff that's relevant, useful, and compelling. The clutter and overload is the enemy of quality, and despite pressures from Web 2.0, media should never abandon its role as gatekeeper.”
Buckland went on to show a raft of UGC sites including Newsinphotos (http://photos.mg.co.za/); Amatomu, which ranks and rates the South African blogosphere; and Amagama, a blog provider. Content also comes in to the Thought Leader site, which invites contributors to share a platform with journalists and publish directly into the paper's CMS, again via an editor. “People write better when they know that article is going to go through an editor, and you can build an audience quickly by making influential people part of your site offering.”
In total, these projects generated 700,000 words in three months without incurring a cent in costs, although to ensure sustainability the Mail and Guardian is now considering paying its bloggers – possibly on a per hit basis.
They said what? User content on news sites
Danny Dagan, Head of Online Communities, News Group Digital, UK
Dagan began by introducing the Sun newspaper - the best-read paper in the English speaking world with a circulation of 3.2 million and website with 10.6 million monthly unique users. What's important about that site is that the paper has a strong identity, and as Dagan notes “[a blog on a newspaper site] isn't the same as having a blog on Blogger or Yahoo. When you write a blog on a tabloid site you are making a statement - you are coming to something with a personality of its own and that in turn makes a statement about who you are and your alignment with the brand of the paper.” Consequently the Sun has a strong position on policing the contributions to its site, both for legal and brand reasons. That's no mean feat with a major story able to generate 120,000 contributions to the discussion and 3 million views.
“With UGC there are many questions. In your terms do you allow kids under eighteen to enter the site? What do you do about parental controls? How does it affect your brand? If you decide to moderate, what does that mean for the content – will users accept that it may take a day for content to appear when they are used to immediacy? There are no clear standards. There is no set methodology.”
Dagan insists that good community management is to RGC (Reader Generated Content) what good editorial is to journalism, and that requires resources to pre-moderate. “People worry about personnel, resources, and costs, but my standard reply is to compare the number of people I have in online to the number on the editorial floor and then compare the number of readers of the paper to the number of visitors I get. If you don't invest, it will only cost you more. One libel case can wipe out all your profit.”
To build a policy, Dagan's preparation is exhaustive. “I like to gather as many lawyers as I can into a room and see what cases they feel strongly about, so I provide them a set of examples, I gave them 100 pieces of text and images – and ask them how long they are willing for that content to be on the web site before it's taken down. And the answers to these give a definite approach to each application at a time and helps generate a moderation policy. Ours is 250 pages long and our moderators are tested on it once a quarter – which affects their bonus.”
To which he insists that the secret of success is to “ensure you have a clear escalation path, that the board understands they don't have control over everything on the net, and that you have communicated your policy very clearly to users.” He also rejects mechanical moderation, as even a small amount of inappropriate content could cause severe damage for the brand. In an environment where the current legal expectation for takedown of material is measured in days, the Sun is committed to remove in minutes, with the average being around 2-3 minutes before reported material is removed.
> To the summaries of the Thursday afternoon session
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