Startups: Innovation, entrepreneurship, and new ways to make it in media

BY NILE BOWIE | ILLUSTRATIONS BY ERIC TOSTEVIN

If popular narratives around the current state of journalism are anything to go by, some might argue that there is a contradiction at the heart of the industry. There are reports of shrinking newsrooms, heighted job insecurity, falling revenues for media organizations, and eulogies for truth. Overall, much of the data available paints a disquieting picture.

Others claim we’re living through a golden age for reporting — especially in-depth reporting. In the United States, outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post are reporting record numbers of digital subscribers, while readership for digital native platforms like BuzzFeed, Vox Media and Politico are in the tens of millions and growing.

“It all comes back to putting your reader or user or audience or viewer first.”

Even with competition from social media feeds and on-demand streaming entertainment, record readership suggests the public appetite for news — be it long-form, video or podcast — continues to rise with vigor. It follows, then, that problems faced by journalism today don’t pertain to any lack of relevance, but with technology’s impact on business models.

The dominance of tech companies such as Google and Facebook have, in part, devastated the American local newspaper industry with their platforms becoming the front page for millions in the digital age. Their services have absorbed a huge share of advertising spending and many upstart outlets now set aside a budget to pay them to grow their audience.

While digital disruption has helped to instantly satiate questioning minds by making news and information vastly more accessible, the twin specters of authoritarianism and viral falsehoods are putting new strains on journalism. Some of the places most arguably impacted by the consequences of these developments are countries in Southeast Asia.

The region boasts some of the world’s highest internet penetration rates. Its media space has traditionally been dominated by legacy media companies that are either government-owned, party-owned or are part of a non-media conglomerate. Governments there are also tightening civic space by championing sweeping laws aimed at combating “fake news.”

To get a better sense of how journalism can meet the challenges of our era, a look at how the region’s startups are facing adversity, innovating their operations, and staying in the black can be instructive.

Ping Tjin Thum and Kirsten Han, the founders of New Naratif, a member-funded multimedia website for Southeast Asian journalism, art and research, are prominent critics of legislation to combat online disinformation recently proposed by the government of Singapore, which they say enables the city-state’s government ministers to become de facto arbiters of truth.

“New Naratif basically is a movement for democracy, freedom of information, freedom of enquiring in Southeast Asia,” Thum told N3 Magazine. Though he and Han are Singaporeans who reside in and work from the city-state, the pair was unable to register New Naratif as a legal entity in Singapore, complicating their work as a young media startup.

“They just shut us down entirely from the beginning by not allowing us to register,” said Thum, a historian and former national swimmer. “We are under no illusions that we have any leeway to operate. We know that the government definitely does not like us and has already accused us of being ‘contrary to Singapore’s national interest’.”

Launched in 2017, New Naratif is registered in the United Kingdom and employs 16 total staff across the region, from Malaysia and Indonesia to Cambodia and Vietnam. “We don’t just do research articles and long-form journalism. We do comics, videos, podcasts, and photo essays. Everything goes out in a Southeast Asian language,” he said.

“The goal is to have Southeast Asian voices, local voices telling stories that are important and meaningful to them. We are not a news organization,” Thum says. “We are a movement, not a profit-making organization, and producing news, producing information is one of the ways in which we promote democracy.”

About half of New Naratif’s running costs are met by paid membership subscriptions that start at US$52 per year, though 10 percent choose to pay above that figure to show their support. Singaporeans make up the largest contingent of the site’s nearly 700 subscribers, though the most read articles on the site are actually those published in Bahasa Indonesia.

“This idea of a paywall and paying for news isn’t a habit for Southeast Asia in general,” Han told N3 Magazine. “The way our paywall works is that, if you go to the site directly, there is a hard paywall, but members have unique URL that they can share that will allow non-members to click through it and read. We share these URLs ourselves.

“It is our way of compromising between reminding people that this sort of work costs money, but not wanting to block access to anyone because if we want to be a movement for freedom of information we can’t have a hard paywall,” she said.

New Naratif is one of several startups in the region pushing a reader-revenue model.

“We’re seeing models being built around crowdfunding, subscriptions, memberships, events — stuff to address demand-side needs. It couldn’t be more exciting,” said Rishad Patel, co-founder of Splice, a newsroom transformation consultancy whose mission is to drive radical transformational change by supporting bold, forward-looking media startups in Asia.

“Subscription models are beginning to work well. The carnage we’re seeing is with large organizations that are trying to support infrastructure and teams to move inventory that was created to serve advertising dollars that don’t exist any longer,” Patel said. He points to “design-thinking” as an exercise media firms can use to make an impact on their operations.

“We find that some of the best work that media organizations can do is when they put their audiences first. More often than not, when a media startup identifies a community, sees a specific need, and tests a media product to address that need, they are able to create real value — and a media product that an audience is willing to pay for,” he said.

“Identifying a user group, assessing needs, prototyping a media product to test assumptions, and refining it iteratively with continuous feedback loops can create operational efficiencies that involve small cost structures and, if done well, high-value product lines that create actual communities.

“The old models of mass media are done — or require massive investment in gambles that don’t work anywhere as well as they used to. Advertising still runs many media businesses in Asia, but being held hostage to the whimsy of advertisers’ dollars is a very hard lesson to unlearn. We think smaller micro-audiences are where the future of media success is.”

The Scoop, a digital native media startup in Brunei, is a firm that straddles old and new models at once. As the tiny sultanate’s first digital-only English news outlet, it also positions itself as Brunei’s first media brand for millennials. It was founded by four female reporters who worked together as staff for the now-defunct broadsheet, the Brunei Times.

Once a competitor to the Borneo Bulletin, the country’s oldest print publication and currently the only English language newspaper in circulation, the Brunei Times folded after its publishing license was revoked, a move widely linked to a controversial story it published on visa policies for Muslim pilgrims that garnered complaints from the Saudi embassy.

“It wasn’t our intention to start a new publication, it was more out of frustration that there wasn’t anything worthwhile coming up in the space,” said Ain Bandial, one of the Scoop’s co-founders. “As small as it is, our organization wanted to create that culture where reporters felt they had the freedom to pursue the kind of stories they wanted to do.”

The Scoop was established as a news website in September 2017, but has since branched into doing weekly internet radio segments, YouTube videos, as well as a recent foray into physical publishing with a colorful print magazine. “Print revenue can still be incredibly lucrative in Brunei, where old mind-sets tend to dominate,” she told N3 Magazine.

Apart from dealing with editorial constraints and a press freedom deficit, Ain said the main challenge is perfecting the right business model to achieve financial sustainability. The young startup employs 6 full time editorial staff and has managed to stay in the black by funding its operations entirely through advertising and sponsored content.

“A subscription-based model is really difficult in a market the size of Brunei, especially when people aren’t used to paying for news. We have an advertorial section and a staff that runs that and (it is) our most profitable side of the business at the moment and a very successful revenue stream in a sense that people see the value in those kinds of write-ups,” she said.

“Usually, we work with companies that want to promote events or products launching soon, and corporate entities. Traditional web-banner advertising is not as popular.

“I think everyone knows that media in Brunei practices self-censorship and we have to act within the constraints of the law, but we always want to try to push the envelope to give voice to issues that are underrepresented or not represented in mainstream media,” she said. “Our mission really is to inform our community and empower citizens to be engaged.”

The number of unique visitors to the Scoop as already surpassed the population of Brunei and most of their traffic comes from Instagram. 60 percent of its audience is between 18 to 34. Though these figures speak for audience behaviour in one of region’s smallest countries, the takeaway is they look fairly consistent with others in the region and beyond.

Rising digital reader engagement, says Angie Lau, founder and editor-in-chief at Forkast.News, underscores new opportunities for “applying technology to the practice of journalism and creating value for each and every user,” which — if done right — she says “allows media startups to scale almost immediately.”

“Technology is not only a distribution opportunity, but a structural one for media. Content will drive engagement, and increasingly will be the basis of the relationship between you and your audience. The vision is in thinking how do we as journalists evolve this journey we’ve all been a part of,” said Lau, a former president of the AAJA Asia Chapter.

Like their counterparts in the West, audiences in Southeast Asia — especially the millennial demographic — are making use of journalism and are growing more willing to speak with their wallets to support it. While business models are bound to local contexts, the tactics and tenacity of the region’s startups hint at remedies to the current media industry malaise.

“This is truly the golden age of media,” Patel believes. “The gatekeepers are gone, the capital investment structures don’t necessarily matter any longer, and advertising isn’t the only game in town. Massive tracts of mediocre content for faceless, nameless McConsumers aren’t the answer any longer.

“It comes back to putting your reader or user or audience or viewer first.” 🗨️

Nile Bowie is an American journalist and correspondent for Asia Times, an all-digital outlet dedicated to Asian political, economic and security news. He is based in Singapore and reports on current affairs in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, as well as international relations, trade and diplomacy across Southeast Asia. See more of his work at http://nilebowie.blogspot.com/