Startup story part 1 or: How the News is slowly dying and we are trying to save it
I’m pleased to be working with the team over at Founders Factory on this startup journey. If you’re interested in founding a startup, perhaps they’ll be right for you?
We are two people (me + Fred) working alongside a number of talented folks dedicating a portion of our lives to exploring problems and opportunities in the news media. The following was written as a snapshot of our thinking so far and felt like a good time to open up our ideas to critique to see if others find this space as interesting as we do.
Something is broken
There is a deep disconnect between news providers and the generations of younger people growing up with an increasingly sceptical view of the media.
People under-35 are less likely to get and seek out the news than ever before.
Not only has this had a devastating effect on news providers’ business models, but — crucially—also on attitudes and behaviours relating to the consumption of news.
At the same time, by various measures, we are in a golden age of news consumption, with rates of news-reading at higher levels than ever before, even by so-called millennials.
How can both be true simultaneously?
Millennials consume news and information in strikingly different ways than previous generations, and their paths to discovery are more nuanced and varied than some may have imagined.
This generation tends not to consume news in discrete sessions or by going directly to news providers. Instead, news and information are woven into an often continuous but mindful way that Millennials connect to the world generally, which mixes news with social connection, problem solving, social action, and entertainment.
–How Millennials Get News — The Media Insight Project, 2015
Reading the news is increasingly a passive act. ‘Reading the news’ has become a feature of Twitter and Facebook. Something is broken.
Scrolling through your newsfeed, sandwiched between 18 photos from your niece’s trip to the zoo a week ago and that cute otter video from 2010 your Mum has shared from “Funny Animals”, is a link to a BBC article about historic child abuse by catholic priests. Are you really in the right frame of mind to stop and read a detailed article about such a topic? There’s something about the juxtaposition of such whimsical content and hard news topics that sits uncomfortably.
From providers to platforms
Over the last decade or so, consumer relationships have shifted away from news providers and towards platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. These platforms invest heavily in establishing behaviours, specifically habits, which keep their users coming back. With a mix of network effects and psychology, they are a gateway to a vast amount of news content.
We also know that Facebook in particular rewards polarising content. News is more likely to drive engagement on Facebook if users find it agreeable or highly disagreeable. So much for the echo chambers and filter bubbles!
The slowing in growth of news consumption on Facebook in 2016–2017 can broadly be attributed to changes in Facebook’s algorithms following the ‘fake news’ backlash. Users were being presented with less news and more posts from family and friends.
This nakedly demonstrates the centralised power of Facebook‘s ability to control how news is consumed.
News providers are too important for this trend to continue
Part of the role news providers plays in society is to hold power to account. This shift from news provider relationships to platform relationships, and the resulting behaviours, means the news media is in a diminished position to perform this role. When news providers are not strong, it increases the likelihood of demagoguery and autocracy. A world perhaps most of us would prefer not to descend into (any further).
Modern ideas from technology, design and psychology have not sufficiently permeated the news publishing industry to enact appropriate change for their business models to be viable in the long term.
So although industry figures are able to cherry-pick metrics to make claims such as ‘people are reading more news than ever before!’ — this belies the destructive effect platforms have had on news providers’ business models.
The adjacent problems of broken business models and diminishing ability to hold power to account, particularly in the eyes of younger generations, is what we are on a mission to fix.
Coming in part 2: how to fix it 💪
We are rebuilding relationships between people and the news as a discrete activity, to help ensure a future for the news provider in decades to come. Establishing new behaviours with young people, allowing them to get the most out of the journalistic process, will lead to a revolution — maybe not a proper one, but I wouldn’t rule it out. I’ll post more about this next time.
Edit: Part two now published here 🚀
If you’re interested in anything I’ve written here, I’d love to hear from you 👋 you can find me with open DMs over on Twitter.
Thanks for reading!
