Views from Dubai-Trusted News platform still sell

Last week in Dubai, editors from across Africa gathered to discuss the changing media landscape. In many newsrooms this has become the major issue as publishers struggle with finding the best business model that will help them survive in a fast changing world where technology has made it easy for innovators to disrupt and in some cases wipe out whole businesses.

But there is some good news for media practitioners, says Yolisa Phahle, the CEO Video Entertainment at Multichoice. There is a strong thirst for trusted news on trusted platforms despite the proliferation of platforms that people can access news on, she said in a presentation at the digital dialogue.

The rise of social media means that more people are consuming news than they have ever consumed in the history of the world. But this has also opened room for producers of fake news to thrive. However, fake news is like gold platted metal. It looks attractive but offers no value.  Actually, fake news can be toxic. It misleads and misinforms the consumer and it is often detrimental to the information health of the consumer.

The toxic nature of fake news and its proliferation means that trusted news platforms have become important and most people are turning to them for their news needs. Phahle says this is why trusted news platforms will continue to excel despite the proliferation of news platforms.

She explains that the fundamental problem facing the world today and also the media, is the battle between News and Noise. This battle is easily seen on a platform like Twitter, where there is so much sharing of information from so many individual sources with each source claiming to be an authority. This also applies on most social media platforms. The consumers on these platforms are often left to try and decode what is noise and what is news, news being defined as verified information in this case. So while the internet has become a good source of information, it is also now the biggest source of misinformation or disinformation.

Yolisa explained that content or news will continue to be the lifeblood of any media organisation. What a newspaper or a TV station sells is its content or news. In the face of so much noise in the digital space, the battle for media organisations now becomes what to do to build trusted platforms.

But there is also the bigger challenge of how to distribute the trusted news content on the available platforms in a way that they overcome the noise and get to the consumer. Media organisations must as a matter of necessity, leverage technology to ensure that the content or news generated climbs above the noise in the digital space to reach their desired audience.

Yolisa explains that people, content or news and technology are critical in the new media age and media producers will have to learn to manage all three to survive. Paul Papadimitriou, Founder of Intelligencr who spoke immediately after Yolisa, noted that technology is all around and is growing superfast. To show how disruptive technology can be, he gave the example of how WhatsApp wiped out the lucrative SMS business of telecom producers.

 Now, almost everyone uses WhatsApp to communicate, where they would have sent an SMS. Skype has dome a similar thing to international calls with 50 percent of all international calls now taking place on Skype. Paul notes that technology is reaching more and more people, faster and faster. The spread of technology is being facilitated by declining cost of technology products, diverse platforms and the networks created on these platforms. One line of code, Paul notes, can impact billions of people.

Paul also rightly notes that news or content has become like any other commodity. But he says with data, the media can offer content or news with a ‘magic’ touch. The magic touch comes in knowing what the consumers want even better than the consumers know about themselves and then offering it to them. Acquiring data, especially first party data, is how companies are able to scale their operations, he explained.

The biggest companies, currently, Amazon, Google, Facebook, have all been able to scale up their operations because of their ability to use their access to first party data to scale up their operations. But Paul offered a very important insight at the end of his presentation and that is the fact that people are not necessarily in love with technology but with how technology makes them feel. This, for the media, means that the acquisition of technology should be aimed at using technology to help tell better stories, stories that create an emotional connection with readers or viewers.

We are in an ‘attention economy’ Anthony Lilley, Professor of Creative Industries at Ulster University and Director, Magic Lantern Productions explained in his own presentation. The proliferation of content means that viewers and readers are bombarded with content from all sides and at a very fast pace. The biggest challenge for content or news producers therefore is how to get the attention of readers. He said what is now scarce is not content but people’s attention. So, for a content producer, the bigger challenge is how to attract and retain people’s attention in the current media space. Broadcasters have found out entertainment works but for news publishers, perhaps well written investigative stories will work. Unique impactful stories also make a difference.

This is because what gives any product value in an economy is scarcity says Anthony. But in the current media industry, content is no longer scarce, therefore it has no value per se, which explains why content is given freely online at zero cost to the reader or viewer and at a loss to the producer of the content. However, in the long run, no media can survive by generating content and giving it out for free online. This is why most media houses are building pay walls or asking for donations to cover their cost of generating news or content. But for those seeking to put in place pay walls, the challenge now becomes generating what is worth paying for and putting it on a platform or brand that is trusted. This is where investigative stories make a difference. Also, unique and impactful content and financial economic intelligence.

With unique content, Anthony says, you build a fan base, not just readers or viewers. A fan is someone who has a connection, he said. The one who wants to identify with something, in this case a media platform, because the platform enables them to connect with other fans and then it becomes the basis of a relationship with another person. In this case, a fan base that confidently says, we all read BusinessDay. The idea, he says, is to create brand affinity and this is driven by quality and the building of trust. He concludes by saying that ‘Good brands know that in the long run, what you are looking for is sustainability. It is not just about revenues. This will require building a brand that can be trusted.

ANTHONY OSAE-BROWN