Digital Publishing: Money Needed

Michael Hedges January 18, 2019 Follow on Twitter

Thoughtful predictions for the coming year in digital journalism and publishing have appeared in recent days. As with recent years, the insight is mostly doleful, evidence persuasive and solutions painful. One thing stands out among all these predictions: money. Easy money from advertising, paywalls, billionaires or, even, governments is not going to save news publishing. Some of it can't be saved, some shouldn't.

The 2019 Trends and Predictions from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism comes largely from interviews with 200 news media executives in 29 countries. About half (52%) are “focused” on subscription revenue streams. Four out of five (81%) said display ads are important though only about one-third are focused on ad revenue.

“Publishers are looking to subscriptions to make up the difference, but the limits of this are likely to become apparent in 2019,” wrote Nic Newman, principal author of the Reuters Institute report. “Taken together, these trends are likely to lead to the biggest wave of journalistic lay-offs in years.”

“For most news organizations, this is a fundamental shift, far more demanding than simply putting up a paywall and hoping people will subscribe,” wrote Reuters Institute director Rasmus Kleis Nielsen for the Nieman Journalism Lab collection of predictions for 2019. “Much of the news currently published online is simply not worth paying for. Some of it is hardly worth our fleeting attention, let alone hard-earned cash.”

Publishing has come a long way since Rupert Murdoch announced in 2010 a “new business model for the internet” that resulted in hard paywalls for the digital outcroppings for his UK and Australian newspapers. “The argument that information wants to be free is only said by those who want it for free,” he announced with virtually every publisher in the world following the lead.

“Subscription barriers could end up annoying consumers further and giving people another reason to turn away from news,” wrote Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. Consumers shun frustration, we have learned over the past few decades. The digital age, as it evolves, has only made this more acute. Forcing people to pay first for a digital bit they only want to skim is a hard sell. Subscription video on demand (SVoD) service Netflix just announced (January 17) a 8.8 million subscription boost for the final quarter of 2018, 7.3 million outside the US. Consumers can tell the difference. Netflix subscription rates for US customers will rise.

Those digital platforms are not your friend, notes both digital publishing reports. While Facebook and Google are investing in their separate journalism initiatives, the results are chiefly to benefit the ad sales business models of Facebook and Google. “The news industry is losing patience with Facebook, and publishers are re-focusing attention elsewhere,” wrote Nic Newman. Then, of course, there is fake news.

Publishers are responding to all this, perhaps indirectly. “We have seen a marked shift in consumer behaviour from newspaper to mobile consumption of news and content and must adapt accordingly,” said Irish publisher Independent News and Media (INM) chief executive Michael Doorly in a staff briefing on a new three-year strategic plan, quoted by independent.ie (January 18). The new plan, he said, involves “digital capacity building,” vaguely, and job cuts, concretely. “We need to put our customers at the heart of everything we do.”

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