<\/p>\n
This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor\u2019s picks. Sign up here<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019ve been turning to existential questions in recent days. Why are we here? What are we doing? Who will miss us when we\u2019re gone?<\/p>\n To be clear, I\u2019m not asking these questions about the human race \u2013 though they feel more apposite at the moment \u2013 but news providers.<\/p>\n I think my introspection has come because I\u2019ve been getting my head around the issues of numerous clients and prospects and the general mood music of an industry whose old certainties are disappearing fast. And it\u2019s clear that there are many different, and wildly varying, answers to the questions.<\/p>\n I remain surprised at how many people still want to describe their purpose as being a \u201cpaper of record\u201d. I understand the instinct because it speaks to our profession\u2019s desire for accuracy, authority and completeness. Now audiences build their own view of the world from dozens of sources, often surfaced by platforms or AI. In that context, the idea that any one organisation can be the definitive record feels hard to sustain.<\/p>\n Robert Thomson, the ceo of Rupert Murdoch\u2019s News Corporation, said the other day that his business was an \u201cAI input company\u201d whose purpose was to provide trusted and verified news for AI giants to distribute. That feels rather depressing and not something to jump out of bed for. But maybe we do need to look at business models to find our essence.<\/p>\n After all, newspapers were historically advertising businesses with an editorial product attached. The journalism created attention, habit and a reason to pay a cover price (which paid for the journalism), but the economic engine was something else. That model has been under pressure for years as reader revenue has taken on more weight. AI is simply accelerating the need to be much clearer about where the value really sits.<\/p>\n It\u2019s become a clich\u00e9 to describe the New York Times as \u201ca games company with a news operation attached\u201d. But is that such a bad thing if the games can help pay for the growth of its news operation, which by my back-of-an-envelope calculations pays for itself anyway?<\/p>\n This has also long been the case. When we looked at engagement on the early tablet editions at The Times, a disproportionate amount of its much-celebrated hour-long dwell time was coming from the crossword. We used to joke that we were \u201ca crossword business with a newsroom attached\u201d.<\/p>\n I think those examples should inspire us to think laterally. Recently, we were talking to a B2B publisher about their audience. On the surface, they produce journalism for a defined professional group. But when you dig into the real value, it\u2019s about connecting one set of readers with another. In that sense, they\u2019re closer to a dating agency than a traditional publisher.<\/p>\n So let\u2019s break out of our traditional thinking. There\u2019s been some thoughtful work mapping this out more broadly. Juan Se\u00f1or from Innovation Media has outlined a range of potential models \u2013 from IT provider, educator, events organiser and brand licensor to ad agency and affiliate marketer. The point isn\u2019t which one you pick: it\u2019s that none start with \u201cwe do journalism\u201d.<\/p>\n If you take away the legacy description, what is the job you actually do for your audience? Where do you sit in a landscape where discovery is fragmented and increasingly intermediated by AI? What is your real advantage \u2013 trust, expertise, access, utility? And how do you turn that into something that people will pay for, one way or another?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think there\u2019s a neat answer. But it does feel like the organisations that make progress over the next few years will be the ones that are prepared to answer that question properly, rather than defaulting to what they\u2019ve always been.<\/p>\n Alan Hunter is a co-founder of HBM Advisory, which helps organisations navigate the transformation of their content businesses, from finding the right strategy to producing the right content, and of course everything AI. Contact us for more information at [email\u00a0protected]<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This first appeared in our weekly newsletter Editor\u2019s picks. Sign up here I\u2019ve been turning to existential questions in recent days. Why are we here? What are we doing? Who will miss us when we\u2019re gone? 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\nBut what does \u201cpaper of record\u201d mean in a world where almost no one consumes news from a single source? Even at their height, newspapers were never neutral chroniclers of the world. They were edited products, shaped by judgment and bounded by the size of the paper.<\/p>\n