Why journalists are now responsible for the business
Earlier this week, a thread on Branch asked journalists what they’d like to see at this year’s Online News Association’s conference, the biggest annual meeting of digital journalists. Many of the responses focused on making things, which is a refreshing new addition for an industry that traditionally just focused on telling stories. But very few of the responses mentioned business innovation and user data, even as the industry’s survival hinges on it.
No more blaming the business side for our industry’s failures. Journalists are now responsible for revenue, too. Let me explain.
In the very near future, most news will be consumed on mobile. Most purchasing decisions will be made via mobile, too. As I recently wrote on Poynter, mobile will disrupt journalism like the Internet did a decade ago.
It all hinges on data. The more you know about a user — her history, physical location, likes, search terms, etc. — the better you can personalize her mobile experience and target meaningful advertising. Facebook is arguably a much better news experience than any news app — “We want to give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper in the world,” Zuckerberg said last month — and perhaps that’s why people spend 11X more time on Facebook’s app than all news apps combined. On the advertising side, all that data adds up to ad targeting that news organizations can’t match.
“The key factor for Facebook here is to capture as much data as possible on Facebook users’ mobile habits,” writes Ewan Spence in Forbes. “That’s why Facebook is involved in mobile, and that’s why they need to keep pace with the ecosystems [Google and Apple] that are capturing all that mobile data.”
So it’s not about simply extending our news experiences into mobile, but leveraging mobile to capture data that we can use to make better user experiences and compete for advertising dollars. The challenge is convincing users to give you their data. And that’s where journalists, who increasingly are the same people who make things at news organizations, come into the picture.
We have to make mobile products that get better with data. Products that solve a problem in such an obvious way, users are willing to tell us about themselves. This is not a responsive design or “just another news app.” With the exception of a small handful of news organizations, paywalls are just a partial patch: they generate data, but barely influence the experience and don’t come close to enabling mobile ad targeting widely available on Google, Facebook and Twitter.
If I may suggest, the next time journalists get together at a big event, let’s throw out the stuff we always talk about and focus on the pressing business and product challenges of mobile and data. It may not be popular, but it’s our survival.