This is what media innovators are doing in 2019
Get ready to take notes! This is what media innovators at the Financial Times, CNN, The Guardian and Condé Nast International are doing to push journalism forward.
The media is changing quickly and media innovators have lots of work to do. Journalism is now facing challenges that are going to impact on its future for years, if not decades. Paywalls are on the rise but will they save journalism alone? Will they create a new divide between people who can afford to be informed and those who cannot? Can publishers expand their audiences while creating loyal communities of readers? Will journalism be able to fight back at disinformation and propaganda online? And will we finally establish a healthier relationship with social media platforms?
We don’t have all the answers and we are not going to make predictions. The Nieman Lab and Nic Newman, senior research associate at the Oxford Reuters Institute, have collected some very interesting predictions about the future of journalism that are worth reading.
As much as the future seems uncertain, we don’t know if journalism will find a solution to its problems. We know what media innovators are doing today to find some answers. This is what major outlets like the Financial Times, CNN International, The Guardian and Condé Nast International are doing.
Robin Kwong (FT): “This year will be about shifting newsroom culture”
I lead a team of digital editors at the Financial Times (we call them Creative Producers), and our team’s mission is to help reporters and editors think about the digital presentation of stories from the beginning so that we can involve graphic, interactive news and video colleagues earlier in the process. We are also working with the Audience Engagement team to bring more data-informed decision-making into our newsroom.
My team is a completely new team, so 2018 was very much about laying the right foundations in terms of recruitment and onboarding. 2019 will be about showing how we can make a difference in shifting newsroom culture. We’re planning to do this by enabling new forms of storytelling and creating spaces for learning that will hopefully lead to a more adaptable newsroom.
Beyond the creative producers working directly with reporters on certain stories, this boils down to three specific initiatives:
Story Playbook
Last year, we created a Story Playbook: a new set of templates covering some common story types (i.e. Charticles, for chart-based explainers, or Profile Cards, when introducing a group of people). This year we will spread their use, iterate on existing templates, and create new templates.
Desk-by-desk analytic reports
Together with the Audience Engagement team, we are introducing weekly desk-by-desk reports that get us beyond the headline pageview numbers to more actionable insights (for example, to see if there are well-read stories that aren’t getting enough promotion). Creative Producers will be looking at these reports weekly and feeding insights back to their respective desks.
Digital Lightning Talks
We are introducing 5-minute presentations by FT journalists to share lessons learnt, bust myths, and inspire new collaborations. These will take place at the weekly news editors’ meetings. Examples: “How we did it: Congo election fraud story”; “5 myths about weekend publishing” etc.
Robin Kwong is Head of Digital Delivery at the Financial Times.
Blathnaid Healy (CNN): “We are pushing to present stories in the most innovative and accessible ways”
Growing CNN’s international digital audiences is the key focus this year. Together with the EMEA digital team, we’ll continue to obsess about the news agenda and looking for smart ways to tell the biggest stories of the day, week and month. We’ll also keep leaning into enterprise reporting and stand-out storytelling, building on the award-winning journalism we did in 2018.
Mobile and visual storytelling are at the core of what we do and the team is constantly pushing and striving to present their stories in the most innovative and accessible ways.
A good example of this enterprise reporting is As Equals. The series, which focuses on gender equality in the least developed parts of the world, has been extended into a second year. Already in 2019, we’ve published an investigation about pregnant women in India working up to their due dates to bring people tea and an empowering feature about a young Senegalese businesswoman who is helping to transform the health of her nation.
International audience growth doesn’t happen through good journalism and storytelling innovation alone, it relies on the energy and ideas of many teams throughout CNN. It requires the talents of our audience development analysts who can help us understand what the audience on our platforms are looking for and it also depends on CNN’s international newsgathering teams who can help us report from around the globe. Collaboration will continue to be key in all of our endeavours.
Blathnaid Healy is Director EMEA at CNN Digital International.
Chris Moran (The Guardian): “The five principles of our journalism”
Like most publishers, a huge amount the Guardian’s focus in 2019 is on establishing and refining reliable and stable new revenue streams to support our journalism.
This involves a huge amount of thinking around the products themselves (what can we uniquely offer people that persuades them to pay for our journalism?), the optimisation of payment streams (how can we make it easy to pay and how do we detect someone might be willing to pay?) and carefully feeding data around this into the newsroom in a responsible and positive way.
More broadly we are aiming to develop our journalism around five principles established by our editor-in-chief and therefore we will:
- develop ideas that help improve the world, not just critique it;
- collaborate with readers, and others, to have greater impact;
- diversify, to have richer reporting from a representative newsroom;
- be meaningful in all of our work;
- report fairly on people as well as power and find things out.
Chris Moran is Strategic Projects Editor at The Guardian.
Federica Cherubini (Condé Nast International): “Newsletters can drive loyalty and a personal relationship with the audience”
The focus of my work this year is on editorial initiatives that drive audience loyalty. My main priority is to understand what makes our audience come back to our content and engage with it, again and again. Applying the three pillars of Conde Nast International’s audience growth approach — content, distribution and community — I will be working throughout the year on strategies to grow our loyal base and foster engagement with it.
As an industry geek who specialises in understanding the processes and dynamics of journalism, I am currently quite obsessed with exploring the motivations and behaviours at the heart of the relationship between journalists and audiences.
Amongst various loyalty initiatives, I’ve spent the last six months concentrating on editorial newsletters.
Having recently experienced a renaissance (emails are not really a new product), newsletters are an important driver of loyalty and a great vehicle to build a more personal relationship with the audience.
To me, the ideal newsletter strategy considers content and product to be two faces of the same coin. Editorial strategy, processes and execution, product and delivery are all essential factors of a successful newsletter strategy and are often executed by interdisciplinary teams. Specifically, with regards to newsletters, these elements are all so intertwined it can be difficult to look at them separately.
Federica Cherubini is Audience Projects Editor at Condé Nast International.
Originally published at www.interhacktives.com on February 25, 2019.
