Finally, a hint of clarity

Press Gazette’s gathering suggested an industry finding itself

The autumn news media conference season has begun. If Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology event held yesterday in central London is anything to go by, organisers are going to have to work hard to generate true debates.

The reason is that there is what feels dangerously like a consensus emerging about the path forward. An industry that frankly has seemed a bit all over the place – reach over here, subscriptions over there; hating AI on the one hand, using AI on the other – seems to have found a hint of clarity.

If I had a pound for every time a speaker on the stage said they were prioritising “direct relationships” with their users, I’d be a rich man indeed. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a criticism: I think this is a very good thing indeed – direct relationships with customers are the thing on which the future of the industry depends. (Let’s set aside for now the question of how many publishers they will sustain.)

Jon Slade, ceo of the Financial Times, put it well in the opening session. “We don't want to be beholden to building audiences off-platform, and we don't want to be beholden to search traffic and the vagaries of algorithmic changes,” he said. “The majority of our traffic to our site, the majority of the monetisation, comes from having a direct relationship with our readers.”

He is prepared to invest for the long term to build those relationships, saying that the FT is now focusing on “recognised users”, those who aren’t subscribers yet, but who, having given their email address and permissions, are future prospects. Slade said the FT wants to get 850,000 recognised users who are under 35 by 2030. This requires a shift in the business’s typical time horizon, he said: “We are not necessarily going to convert them into subscribers overnight. It's going to take time.”

This idea of building relationships with readers permeated the sessions that followed. Dan Rua, ceo of Admiral, the relationship management company, said we should treat the process like cultivating a relationship in real life. You don’t get married right away, he said – and likewise you need to introduce yourself to your users, let them get to know you, as you get to know them, and find out where your interests overlap with theirs.

On a more practical level, The Times talked about getting new subscribers to download their app to drive engagement while the Guardian focuses first on getting users to subscribe to a newsletter, sign in and then download their app in attempts to build habit.

The other thing that struck me was that when talking about the impact of AI, publishers seem to be moving along the classic change curve – from denial and anger towards acceptance and integration. The objections to AI were practical not philosophical.

Tom Jackson, chief technology officer of News UK, said the publisher was continuing with its “woo and sue” approach. “Ideally, we want to have relationships with all of these [AI firms] and get fair value back,” he said. ”However, if they come in and steal that content, we will sue them and we are suing them.”

Slade said the FT had accepted that in an AI world it could be both “the data and the destination”. By “the data” he meant it was prepared to do licensing deals with AI firms if its content was respected and displayed in a tightly controlled manner. And for itself, it wanted to be a destination for experiences you can’t recreate in a chat environment. He noted that this was “more of what we’ve always done, but more focused”.

Carly Steven, director of SEO at the Daily Mail, said the title was also now focusing on original, boots-on-the-ground journalism to distinguish itself from AI interfaces. Almost every speaker talked about the importance of their content being distinctive in one way or another.

I think this is a good starting point – perhaps actually a return to a past aspiration for journalists and journalism – and it is great that this is now apparently the consensus view, at least from yesterday’s sample. Nevertheless it was also clear at the conference that there are many challenges facing the industry.

How does it cope with the bots swarming over its content? Slade said the FT experienced one trial account, apparently registered by a person, generating more than a million access requests, which is not human behaviour. Jackson said a fifth of News UK’s traffic came from bots.

How does it deal with agents? It remains unclear how publishers will get paid for allowing agents access to their content, and also how that content will be surfaced to users. Dominic Ponsford, editor of Press Gazette, mentioned a doomy prediction by some that this could leave journalists working in the equivalent of “dark kitchens”.

These are questions for another day, but it was good to emerge from a conference with some insight into how publishers are confronting their challenges rather than just hearing them described.

On which subject, there will be more insights and case studies on the London study tour we are running for WAN-IFRA at the end of October. We will be visiting some of the most innovative newsrooms in Britain. There’s more information and registration details on the WAN-IFRA website here.