News media has reached a turning point
As fake news becomes old news, Fairfax's chief revenue officer Matt Rowley looks at the future of trust in news media.
We humans are poor at predicting inflection points, we prefer forecasting in straight lines.
However, I believe there is evidence that we are at a turning point in the way consumers view and value news media.
At the heart of this change is our understanding of the roles professional content creators (publishers) play versus platforms.
Until the back end of 2016, platforms – notably Facebook through the era of the Arab Spring – were largely seen as forces for good. It was all about the democratisation of voice; giving everyone a podium.
That perception changed with the US election last year, when fake news ‘trumped’ real news on Facebook.
It’s left us with a leader of the free world who can paralyse his country with a single, unverified tweet (which he does with terrifying regularity).
This was seismic in recalibrating the way we all value media and the aftershocks have continued to rumble since. Just this month we discovered evidence of direct Russian meddling in that election as well as target advertising segments including ‘jew haters’ – both on Facebook.
Consumers now realise that an algorithm isn’t a guardian of truth, having a platform doesn’t make you a publisher because it doesn’t give you the most valuable quality of all – trust.
This isn’t just a convenient story for publishers. Last month the Deloitte Consumer Media Survey for 2017 showed consumers voting with their thumbs, via a significant decline in use of social media as the primary source of news.
This wouldn’t have gone unnoticed by Facebook, considering commenting on news is the single biggest source of engagement on the platform according to the survey.
The millennial cliff myth
But is this a blip in time? One of the reasons given for the inevitable demise of established publishers is that the smashed avo eating, social media obsessed youth of today don’t value them and so we are rolling toward a millennial cliff in readership.
In fact, counter to this accepted wisdom is that not only are millennials moving away from using social as first port of call for news (see above), for the first time the bell weathers of the social revolution – leading millennials – have started to consume less social media overall. Indeed 46% of them have temporarily or permanently deactivated social media accounts.
Perhaps this is because in a world of record amounts of BS propagated at increasing velocity, they place more trust in traditional forms of media than the generations before them, as demonstrated in this research just this month.
Even if you put this down to the optimism of youth, the differentials show that millennials value publishers versus platforms at least as much as any other age group. They too place value in truth.
Put this together with an increasing propensity for younger generations to pay for digital content and the future may well be far from bleak for publishers of trustworthy content.
Carpe diem
What this all means is that the door is ajar for publishers to reassert their direct connection with readers, but to do that they need a competitive editorial, technical and commercial product. Considering most publishers have chased the promise of scale from platforms by commoditising content and ceding product control to those platforms, this isn’t easy. At Fairfax, we’ve re-built our tech and product stack from scratch to enable us to do just this.
Hampering the situation for publishers is that while consumers are realising where true value in accessing news media is, the advertising market is careening in the opposite direction. At some point (the sooner the better) we’ll collectively look back on the last few years of marketing and say “what were we thinking?”.
Some of the biggest voices in marketing are already saying it. Take Marc Pritchard, P&G’s global brand officer last week at Dmexco:
“There’s no question ads should never be on ISIS recruiting videos. But how many cat videos should we advertise on? If you’re watching cat videos, do you really want to see a toothpaste ad?”
and
“People use social media to share things about their lives with each other. And let’s face it, ads are annoying in that context.”
There’s a lot of money being spent in that context; most of it chasing short term sales using attribution models so wrong they’re worse than no attribution model. In the meantime, sales growth, as Pritchard points out, has stagnated. The explanation for this period of marketing history will be ‘but it was easy and cheap’.
Unfortunately there is no technological playbook passed back from the future. We have to figure it out as we go and that’s just what both users and publishers have done with platforms.
What’s now is not what will continue to be, no matter how unshakeable some of the protagonists appear.
Just ask Blackberry or Nokia.
Matt Rowley is chief revenue officer at Fairfax Media.
Matt Rowley will be speaking on a panel at Mumbrella’s Publish Conference on the Future of publishers’ relationships with social giants. To find out more and buy tickets, click here.
The irony is rich here – the Obama administration was tapping Trump Tower, it was confirmed last week when it was revealed Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign manager, was tapped.
But you keep repeating the lie that the tapping story is fake news dude… some will believe you.
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“What this all means is that the door is ajar for publishers to reassert their direct connection with readers, but to do that they need a competitive editorial, technical and commercial product.”
The competitive editorial was sucked out of Fairfax when The Guardian set up shop here in Australia. not to mention the sheer amount of editorial prowess that was flipped out of the business. The result for users was auto-play video’s which are not actually ‘video’s, (they are photo’s with a voice over, but you do not get to watch them because of an advert, that never loads…) – That is Fairfax Digital to me. The quality tanked in a very big way.
The issues at Fairfax was / is that you put the $’s first. You put the ad impressions first. (Not just Fairfax, more so over at News Corp.) You have both forgotten what a fine balance publishing is. You need a leader who understands that you will get greater engagement and therefore higher advertising yields by producing quality journalism, the ability to engage the journalism easily and be apart of the journalism. Plus of course, to be able to browse this content without having to think. Fairfax didn’t think big enough. Fairfax did think, to be fair, with Domain. Scale is one of the areas that baffles me. Why wouldn’t you scale Domain globally? Why wouldn’t you also look to publish journalism globally? The Guardian seized that opportunity. NYT’s is having a go… Fairfax has been so insular here.
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Hmm, the Guardian may be a meaningful benchmark when it comes to great journalism (or not, depending on where you sit on the political spectrum) but not really a great example of commercial success, despite their global expansion. It consistently loses more than $80m/year , is propped up by a Trust fund, and is now resorting to begging readers for donations. Quality journalism is not necessarily a driver of commercial success…
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How are things over in La La Land Duncan?
First, the FBI was monitoring Manafort, not Trump. The fact that Manafort was under suspicion under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act should be a clue and should have been a warning. Trump then gave Manafort digs at Trump Tower. Again, the clues of a shady past were missed.
Now I guess you are a conspiracy theorist, but the recent White House administrations (up until the current administration) have assiduously avoided interfering with the Justice Department. The Obama link you try to make sits somewhere between fanciful and fallacious.
All of the above is factual. It was also news.
Your diatribe however qualifies as fake news. Oh, except for in La La Land.
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Agree with @Rich Me-Dia and I’ll add that the only valuable subscription product they have is the AFR. Domain are better at monetising, might as well send them the traffic if only the SMH could continue to maintain only a slight decline in audience.
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Fairfax threw away its credibility decades ago. It’s been going downhill ever since it put its editorial policy at odds with the values of its readership – or what was the Fairfax readership, now that so many have given up on it. It could begin its rehabilitation by returning Vice-Regal to the Letters page, restoring the Easter and Christmas editorials, bringing back “Churches and Churchmen”, and finding a cartoonist with the draughtsmanship and sensibility of Molnar. Oh, and beginning all letters to the editor with “Sir”, whether the correspondent actually used that polite form of address or not.
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AFR was a valuable read. Now it’s a comic. Like everything Hywood touches it is shrunk and shrivelled. It’s like he’s channelling something from a horror flick.
Typical of fairfax people today is the jargon and ignorant nonsense in the article. There’s no one left there who has a clue about journalism
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Fair point on the $’s there. It will be interesting to see Guardian financials in 6 months to a years time, based on their fundraising efforts. Guardian could organise epic events and make serious coin. Leveraging their reach.
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Totally agree – the AFR is fantastic and thank goodness we now have The Guardian.
But metro newspapers in Australia ?? have lost their way and no longer have journalists.
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Fairfax has no cred at all on editorial these days. Once it was the leader. Today it is irrelevant. I never thought I’d say this but The Australian is better than any fairfax paper. I very shocking indictment.
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Rowley doesn’t mention journalism.
And Fairfax’s announcement of this new tech stack and website is here – https://www.adcentre.com.au/2017/08/29/fairfax-celebrates-a-decade-of-brisbane-times-with-new-digital-experience/.
Journalists and editors weren’t involved in that, either. “The new Brisbane Times website, designed by a cross-functional team at Fairfax comprising product, technical, marketing and commercial experts, is based on the premise of creating news experiences worth seeking out,” they say.
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“Journalists and editors weren’t involved”
Sounds about right. It actually sounds like chancers ‘having a go’. (New lipstick and let’s try to get the sessions up…) Yep, not a true publisher at the helm by the sounds of things. Somebody who understands what users want and crave and will get addicted too.
It is bloody tough though to be fair. Anyone can publish and promote their broadcast on social media. I get the weather, sports results, news headlines in the mornings from a quick Google search and do not have to click through to a website. Too easy.
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What a predictable self-justification from Fairfax, with its Leftist narrative about its own sacrosanctity. Nobody places “more trust in traditional forms of media” because it’s precisely those media who have betrayed our trust as consumers, by ceasing to objectively report events and corrupting truth with opinion to support a Leftist, identity politics narrative. But perhaps we shouldn’t criticise an article that will serve as one of many eulogies for Fairfax and ‘traditional media’, as they move into palliative care.
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“In a world of constant noise and disruption, we have designed a next generation website to reflect what consumers want from their news experience: a place for access, escape, mastery and community,” said Jess Ross, Chief Product Officer at Fairfax Media. Is she talking about a a News Product here? Sounds more like a Hippy Commune.
And: “Commercially, it redefines opportunities for brands and agencies to connect more immersively with premium Queensland audiences in an ever noisy media landscape.” Er, and what would those opportunties be? For first couple of weeks there were NO ads on the site, and now its same old, same old leaderboards, medium recs etc.
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The “turning point” dear Matt came and went back in 2013 when Fairfax ripped out the editorial heart of the business by sacking 120 journalists. The quality of the content – which was already in decline – took a massive hit and no amount of trade advertising featuring the one or two senior journalists left (Kate McClymont et al) can make up for that fact. The NY Times on the other hand built a paid subscription business off the back of editorial that delivered real value to its audience. Something Hywood missed the opportunity to do. Game over.
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Hywood failed to do anything to make Fairfax sustainable because he never understood or valued the thing readers value. He talks about editorial strength but his personal preference is for celebrity motormouth types and stylists. He was the one who beat up editors that tried to block his diversion of resources to puffery and advertorial. In fact a lot of the cost he cut was his own dumb spending.
Hywood was good at one thing: sucking up. The Fairfax old guard fell for it despite his lack of ability as a reporter and Corbett was a very easy mark, being an ugly man who thinks he’s a genius.
It’s all very unfortunate. But it’s been a long time since Fairfax had informed management.
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Another example of $’s first and not users can be given away in three letters: CRO (Chief Revenue Officer).
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