News Media INNOVATION 2020
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news media INNOVATION 2020 Centre for Media Transition Jacqui Park is a journalist, media strategist and social entrepreneur. She is the Senior Fellow for Asia-Pacific journalism and innovation at the Contents Centre for Media Transition, University of Executive summary ....................................................................................... 4 Technology, Sydney, and founder and principal Introduction: Why this report? ..................................................................... 8 of Engagement By Design Pty Ltd where she advis- Chapter 1 What do we mean by innovation? ............................................. 10 es on strategic development, coaches startup teams Chapter 2 Where are we now? How did we get here? .............................. 12 and publishes a fortnightly newsletter on media Chapter 3 Innovation in the journalism ...................................................... 20 Chapter 4 Innovation in the business model ............................................. 26 startups and innovation in Asia-Pacific, The Story. Chapter 5 Innovation in distribution .......................................................... 36 Subscribe here: http://bit.ly/TheStory-AsiaPacific Chapter 6 Innovation in product development .......................................... 40 Chapter 7 Challenges ahead – and some tentative solutions ................. 48 news Media Case studies ................................................................................................. 52 Innovation Works cited ................................................................................................... 64 2020 Interviewees .................................................................................................. 66 Jacqui Park About the Centre for Media Transition (CMT) ............................................ 67 She was the founding director for the Splice Beta a note about Written and researched: Jacqui Park festival for Asian media startups and innovators in Layout and design: Kevin Kearney THIS REPORT CMT project lead: Peter Fray Chiang Mai, Thailand, 2019. Previously she was CEO Additional research and writing: > Short ‘bios’ of the news media Chris Warren, Jacqueline Robson of the prestigious Australian Walkley Foundation organisations cited in this research Copy editing and reading: Katie Pollock, are contained in stand-alone Rosa Alice, Derek Wilding, Chrisanthi Giotis for journalism where, among other initiatives, she boxes. Many of organisations and and Sacha Molitorisz projects are further profiled in the Referencing: Gabriel Yakub, Jacqui Park, Charlotte Lian Illustration & photography: Rocco Fazzari and iStock created an innovation fund and incubator for media case studies section, pages 52-62. > Quotes not otherwise cited come Suggested citation: Park, J. 2019, News Media startups. She was also Asia Pacific director for the Innovation 2020, Centre for Media Transition, from interviews or discussions University of Technology Sydney, Australia, cmt.uts.edu.au International Federation of Journalists, and in conducted as part of this research. Quotes or information from speech- This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribu- 2016 was a Knight fellow at Stanford University. es or interventions at conferences tion-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 not otherwise published are refer- This report draws on her work over the past year International License. To view a copy of this licenses visit: enced to the conference in the text. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ researching and interviewing media innovators in Australia, New Zealand and across Asia. 2 news media innovation 2020 news media innovation 2020 3 Executive summary Disruption and innovation is the call and response media: do you have what it takes to hold the audience’s and what we know we don’t know. As futurist Amy Webb of the modern world. News media is caught shuttling attention? The situation calls for an innovation response says, deep challenges need deep questions, so these helter-skelter from one to the other, attempting to juggle that captures the audience with compelling content, pack- learnings – and the suggested ways forward – must al- Six Takeaways the impact of disruption while innovating to create a new aged and delivered in the right way at the right time. ways have a touch of the tentative about them. Being agile media ecosystem. It’s hard and exhausting work. The goal is R.E.A: repeat engaged attention. has become something of a cliché. It is also a necessity. Disruption of news media has come from outside. Because a vibrant news media in a democratic society is Innovation is about remaking news media from But disruption is not a matter of having to deal with new It has taken a long time to understand that too important for us not to prepare to embrace solutions, 1 the inside. technological tools or the platform-based internet. The beyond the business model, social distribution and to jump in and experiment. The stakes are too high. disruption of news media lies in the abrupt turnabout in technology, the biggest disruption has been to the The disruption is not about the technology. It’s not the information and the attention economies. Previously, audience: their habits, needs and expectations and Coming to grips with the centrality of the audience even about the business model. It’s about the clash information – and access to information – was relatively how they value information. This calls for an audi- marks the third overlapping innovation cycle in news 2 between living in a world of information abundance and scarce. It could be corralled, packaged and sold. But ence-focused response, and an understanding that media this century, following the first cycle of process having only a finite amount of time to pay it attention. now, information is everywhere. It strains to be free, to just as disruption is at the heart of the business, engineering that transplanted the old mass market ad- be ubiquitous. And where supply is effectively infinite, innovation too has to be at the centre of everything. vertising-supported model to the web, and the second Innovation in news media has circled through three demand for each individual unit falls. Business as usual is not an option. cycle of mass and targeted distribution through search overlapping cycles: digital-first publishing, social and social media. 3 media distribution and, now, audience-centred publishing. On the other hand, attention – the time any one person Practically, this means aggregating, identifying or creat- has to consume information – is all too finite. As all the ing an audience with a holistic approach: creating journal- This audience-centred dynamic is creating a diverse It has taken these three cycles to understand what other magnets for attention come rushing in to compete ism they value, designing distribution tools to reach them ecosystem, made up of traditional players, start-up media, is at the core of the disruption challenge: audiences. with news media, the attention available for journal- where they are and developing the products that embed public broadcasting and global players seeking a local 4 ism has dwindled. Journalists are engaged, whether the business strategy to complement the journalism. footprint. There is good reason to be excited about the Practically, putting audiences at the centre means they know it or not, in a global fight for attention, from This report tries to take the first step in responding to journalism that it’s generating and the business processes having a holistic strategy that combines innovation competition within their own industry and from outside it. these innovation challenges: to catalogue what we know, and distribution that are underpinning it. 5 in content, business models, distribution and product. Once, information scarcity allowed news media to mo- nopolise significant blocks of attention, with the morning The case studies in this report reveal how new newspaper over the breakfast table or the television It calls for an innovation response that captures the audience 6 and established media organisations are placing news in the evening. Now, the challenge is to win that audiences first. attention through the power of journalism. And that is with compelling content, packaged and delivered in the right the core question posed by the digital disruption of news way at the right time. The goal is R.E.A: repeat engaged attention 4 news media innovation 2020 news media innovation 2020 5 Innovating the business model – aka: where’s the money coming from? Traditionally that’s been advertising. But grabbing a slice of the pay in the age of Google and Facebook requires smarts If the business model is about building diverse reve- n give the current generation of journalists (and, for In this report, we draw insights and questions about There’s another distribution trap: your audience wants nue streams with the audience at the centre, innova- universities, the emerging generation) training to drive innovation across the four pillars of product development, it when they want it – not when you decide to give it to tion in product development is about designing news innovation in journalism that meshes the imaginative business models, distribution and, of course, the journal- them: think of time-shifting in video or the rise of the products that people need and want, will seek out and the practical? ism that must continue to lie at the heart of news media podcast. And there’s an emerging challenge: