Generating key takeaways...
When it came to the switch from print to digital, the news media spent a long time pretending that it wasn’t really happening and carried on much as it had always done. Partly this was the result of the decline of print being slow and, for a long time, profitable.
One of the messages from Newsrewired, organised by the relaunched and renamed JournalismUK this week in London, was that the current revolution will not allow that luxury of time or inaction.
In her opening address, Lucy Küng, a strategic adviser to many news companies, talked about how traditional media was being squeezed from one side by creators, to whom some advertisers are already allocating 50% of their budgets, and generative AI solutions on the other. “The party is happening without classic media,” she said.
She was stark about the challenge ahead. “We need to unlearn everything we learnt with digital – that transformation was slow, it took 25 years,” she said. “The media led its consumers [to digital platforms] to a degree; now the customers are there in the creator ecosystem already. Things will move faster.”
The trick for established media will be to co-opt creators, who are already showing the signs of burnout that afflicted the early bloggers: producing content daily over weeks, months and years inevitably takes its toll. Or to adopt their operational model.
Put simply, that is to focus on a “magic triangle” of products around a niche subject, as Küng described it. For breadth of audience, you use newsletters; to add depth, you start a podcast (or two); to really serve your superfans, you run events.
It’s a simple model but of course it will require news companies to move further into areas – podcasting and events – for which they will need to find new skills, people and budgets.
This will require a new way of operating, one that embraces change and is unafraid to jettison the past.
Anita Zelina, another respected media adviser, spoke about how the age of AI will place new pressure on the industry’s leaders, who she said in her experience currently see the challenge as “overwhelming”.
She outlined five behaviours that strong AI leaders will need to exhibit:
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Reduce noise – particularly they need to stop sending links to articles and saying “Interesting. Should we be doing this?”
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Create clarity – strategies are too often communicated once in a town hall, she said; they actually need “consistent, permanent” reiteration
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Rebuild workflows – ”we can’t just sprinkle AI over existing workflows like we did with video, social and, indeed, digital”
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Psychological safety – in a messy era, we are going to have failures and we need to accept that and have honest conversations about them
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Portfolio mindset – projects need to be identified that will provide short-term wins to keep morale and momentum for the medium and long term
This seems like a very sensible list, but also one containing qualities that have not always been present in newsroom or news organisation leadership. I asked Zielina about this and she admitted that she was “sceptical that the current ways of leading will survive”.
She also said what many media executives are saying in private: that they fear that the pressure of AI will lead to “a bloodbath” of media companies.
If ever there were a reason to accelerate a change programme it was up on stage at Newsrewired.
Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory. We help organisations navigate the transformation of content businesses, from finding the right strategy to producing the right content. Contact us for more information at [email protected]
