10 questions news publishers need to answer

A speaking gig at a Readly roundtable brought me some clarity

I attended a very agreeable lunch for publishers hosted by Readly on Wednesday. I was asked to outline the questions they should be asking right now to ensure they come through the next few years in good shape.

It’s a useful exercise for anyone to undertake as it reveals the areas you need to give greater attention, alongside some reassurance (you hope) that you’re thinking what everybody else is thinking.

For me, sessions like this are invaluable because as I prepare for and lead the conversation I find new clarity about what I think too.

The discussion was under the Chatham House rule, so what follows is more my side of the conversation than everyone else’s.

1 Are you ready to say goodbye to traffic for ever?

Like Hemingway’s description of going bankrupt, news publishers’ loss of traffic happened gradually and then suddenly. Social referrals were falling for years before search joined the downward slide more recently and now the average publisher is reporting traffic down by more than a quarter. Some have been affected much, much worse. We can’t expect the high traffic days to return and, to a degree, nor should we want to. Many publishers spent huge amounts of effort chasing “drive-by” traffic – visitors who were “one and done”. For too many publishers their average user came once a month and read one article. But the traffic habit is hard to kick. Even now I hear of newsrooms under pressure from business-side colleagues to “boost traffic” to underpin ad returns. The problem is this is often the wrong traffic from people who will never pay. It will be painful but smart publishers are reorienting entirely around building known and engaged audiences who will be smaller but ultimately more lucrative.

2 Do you see your future as a destination or as an AI service company?

I was astonished when Robert Thomson, the ceo of News Corp, said that the company’s future was as an “AI input company”. This seemed to go against everything I knew about the business, where I worked for 20-odd years and which has always been committed to promoting its journalistic products. But that seems a pretty deliberate choice. On the other hand, you have the New York Times which is suing OpenAI and remains committed to being a destination to which people come for their news (and puzzles, recipes and sports news, of course). These are two different futures. In one, you are primarily a place people choose to come to. In the other, you mostly supply content and data into interfaces other companies own, through licensing, syndication and partnerships. I say primarily and mostly because publishers will, I expect, end up doing some of both. Can you do both successfully? Probably. But I’d argue that you need to prioritise one or the other for reasons of internal clarity.

3 Do you know who your competitors are?

The answer to this question used to be: “No, it’s not your traditional rivals, but anyone who is vying for your users’ attention, whether that be Netflix, TikTok or Candy Crush.” Now that has shifted to anyone, or anything, that can answer a user’s question, whether that be “what does the midterms result mean for US foreign policy” to “should I buy an iPhone Duo?” or anything in between. It’s the move from the attention economy to the intention economy. In this context, publishers need to work out what they do for users that cannot be replaced by an answer engine that is faster, cheaper and arguably better at answering commodity-style questions. Alongside that, they need to work out who else is trying to do the same thing and what is your point of advantage.

4 Is your niche nichey enough?

I would far rather be a niche publisher than a general one at the moment. Catering to someone’s professional needs or their passions is far more likely to survive the AI-led commodification of news if such a specialist can become the go-to space for that particular user need. The ability to really understand and communicate a subject, and build a community around it, will remain valuable. But increasingly you’ll have to go deeper and deeper. I was speaking to the editor-owner of a specialist site this week who was worried that the bloggers and creators around his subject made his efforts look a bit too generalist. The trick is to find the balance between depth and user interest. For general publications that’s going to be harder but they need to find areas to go deeper within their breadth.

5 Do you know how people see your brand?

In the AI age, having a clearly defined brand is going to be increasingly important for news publishers as they fight disintermediation. And yet many base their understanding of their brand on its legacy and internal understanding rather than how users experience it. In the 2010s I was one of the few people who worked for both The Times and The Sunday Times. It amused me that people at each title could talk for hours, and passionately, about what they saw as the significant differences between the two brands. And yet to most readers they were the same. When The Times backed Remain in the Brexit referendum in the Saturday paper and the next day The Sunday Times backed Leave, readers thought we’d lost our minds. “You changed your mind overnight? What happened?” Publishers need to get a dispassionate view of their brand, its strengths and perceived weaknesses and make sure their output matches its promise.

6 Does your newsroom have the right skills?

I’m honing in on the newsroom here because I think the business functions of publishers have been much quicker to change to accommodate the multi-layered transformations happening around them. Many newsrooms were reshaped over the past 15 years to produce volume for the web, and some of the skills that built – fast rewrites, SEO-led production,social packaging – are decreasing in value. Among reporting and editing staff, what matters more now is genuine subject expertise and contacts, which AI cannot emulate (not yet anyway). In other words, the complete antithesis to where the world of volume publishing led us. Alongside that you need data literacy, product thinking, format skills such as audio, video and newsletters, and the judgement to know where not to use AI. Newsroom leadership is going to need to be knowledgeable, flexible and decisive. Is your newsroom’s staffing fit for the next war?

7 Do you understand the true value of your content?

There are pockets of excellence when it comes to content analysis at publishers, but they remain just that. Mostly the focus is on the top performers and the bottom performers. The reasons for the success or lack of it for the 95% in the middle goes unexamined. When we do our content reviews at HBM Advisory we use AI-powered tools to dig deep into a publisher’s whole output, looking at articles’ format, tone, headlines and structure as well as topic. A sad truth is that a large share of many publishers’ output does little measurable work. What does work, across title types and continents, is journalism that is exclusive, expert or emotive. Each title has its own qualities and quirks. Understanding them will be crucial as we move into a world where you need to gauge what to keep for your audience, what to licence for others, and what is its value.

8 What are you prepared to hand over to AI?

Again this is a question for newsroom leadership (are you noticing a pattern?). Almost everyone now uses AI for headlines, summaries and tagging, and some are using it to find stories in structured data. The harder questions sit further up the value chain of producing journalism. Should it take over the process of checking copy? Should it actually write it? And if so, how can you charge people for copy written by a bot? These are decisions that newsroom leadership should consider in the round. They should also be aware that the use of AI in their newsroom is likely far more prevalent than they think.

9 How long have you got?

Does your owner want to grow or maintain your business? How much cash or debt do you have? How exposed are you to search and advertising? Publishers need as good answers to these questions as they can get because they need to know the time horizon in which they are operating as we face such tumultuous change. Being honest about your runway – 18 months, five years, 20 years – changes which bets make sense. A short one argues for focus; a longer one allows investment in product and brand. One of the smartest editors I know said that the problem with newspapers was that they “declined too successfully” so didn’t make the hard decisions about the digital transformation early enough. Transformation is now business as usual but publishers must guard against the gradual decline that hobbled them before.

10 How radical are you prepared to be?

Some publishers have reinvented themselves almost entirely, moving away from journalism into events, data or accreditation. Others will lean hard into video or audio. Many are recasting themselves as intelligence businesses rather than journalistic expertises. Not every one of these will be right for everyone, but the point is that we can still choose our future rather than let it happen to us. The important thing is to make it an active choice rather than a passive one.

This list of questions is no doubt incomplete and I’d love to hear from people who have others that should have made the list.