We have the ideas – show us some action

The news industry must increase its metabolism

It’s nearly 12 years since I attended the first Paid Content summit, an invite-only event organised by the German publisher Axel Springer for those news publishers around the world who were charging for content. Back then, we could easily fit in one room in their Berlin headquarters; now you’d almost need a football stadium.

The model everyone in Berlin was using was subscriptions and this week Michael Brunt, my business partner, wrote a piece headlined The paywall pivot for Tomorrow’s Publisher reflecting on how this is now becoming the default model for news publishers. The precipitous decline in both traffic and advertising CPMs make it seem a far more attractive business than previously.

It does, however, need a new kind of discipline. I won’t re-rehearse his piece here, but it is definitely worth a read as you would expect from one of the world’s foremost experts on subscriptions.

He wrote it in the wake of last week’s announcements that The Observer was launching a paywall and the Manchester Evening News was now offering premium subscriptions. The latter is particularly significant as Reach, its owner, has long positioned itself against paid news content, arguing that not everybody could afford it and that this could produce a democratic shortfall.

Needs must though. The first Paid Content felt like a group counselling session: even the New York Times had nowhere near a million subs and was struggling. We joked that we’d know that subscriptions were taking off when The Guardian, a particularly vehement advocate of “news demands to be free”, attended. That happened in 2019.

Michael’s article inspired me to look up the memo I wrote my bosses from the conference and they were interesting. One thing I wished I’d followed up on was my assertion that “history is the new news” – if only I’d launched a podcast or two. But mostly what was interesting was how long ideas take to implement.

Here were my three main takeaways from the conference:

“1 Practically every news organisation is reorganising its newsroom to integrate print and digital into a single reporting and editing structure. In most [of them] that should really read 'digital and print', as the former is first in their thoughts.

“2 The publishers that have been charging for digital for longest are analysing closely what types of articles sell subscriptions and are setting targets of subs sales per day or week for individual editorial desks. These are often displayed on dashboards for all to see. They are also timing publication of articles about certain subjects to maximise sales.

“3 Everyone is looking at personalisation of content based on a user's previous reading behaviour, rather than opt-ins.”

You could argue that most newsrooms in the world have met points one and two, after a fashion, but it has certainly taken a long time. But very few would claim to have lived up to point three – and that’s after 12 years!

Of course, personalisation will become a lot easier if you use AI to implement it, so hopefully we will catch up in short order. But I think the wider message is that we need to speed up our metabolism. We need to innovate more quickly. It took a long time to agree that we needed top focus on reader revenue as our bedrock – we cannot be as tardy to find out what works in an AI-mediated world.