42 ROUND TABLE The New Newsroom
traditional linear format. At the same time, younger audiences are looking to online and social media platforms for their news, so broadcasters are faced with the problem that they are unable to choose between linear and digital output – they have to deliver both. Whichever format you choose starting out, to maximise the number of eyeballs, you will have to do both at some stage. Additionally, and especially in the instance where there is a limited budget, news automation systems can help with cost efficiency by automating simple processes. Unlike more established news broadcasters, whose workflows were designed for presenting news in a linear fashion, you will have the advantage of building a flexible workflow that can support both linear and digital output. METROVILLE NEWS: News is often thought to be notoriously unlucrative. What business models should we use to sustain ourselves and to maintain a slow but steady growth in the coming years? MARK BLAIR: You have a relatively niche, local audience. We have found that sponsorship and branded content can be much more effective and high yield. Traditional digital advertising is a scale and numbers game. But since this is niche, you have great local brand and sponsorship opportunities with local businesses and you can get much better ROI on that. ALEX FERRIS: Premium content memberships that give subscribers access to additional media would be a good option to bring in a steady income, especially if you’re able to keep the price competitive. If during production you’ve employed the right metadata strategy and have an archive management system then you can easily search and discover media. This means you can find relevant content for any topical events and create complementary or additional programming that gives more insight to viewers. This is what makes premium-quality programming without needing to deploy as many expensive resources for additional media production. CHUCK GARFIELD: News is not unlucrative. Certainly in the United States, the consolidation of broadcast groups has proven very profitable for news, but global news is still of interest to most audiences, and there is an increasing appetite for locally relevant news.
MEDIA ORGANISATIONS AND JOURNALISTS HAVE NEVER BEEN UNDER MORE PRESSURE TO DELIVER COMPELLING STORIES AS THEY HAPPEN
ALEX FERRIS: Free, Internet-based direct- to-consumer strategies are key in today’s market – especially as a news organisation that needs to get media into the hands of users as fast as possible. YouTube or Facebook, for example, can support live and on-demand content and is easily accessible from any platform including mobile devices. Then as the channel grows, renting bandwidth on a content delivery network to deliver programming would be a good option. It’s flexible, the delivery of content is taken care of by a third-party provider and you only pay for the bandwidth you use. CHUCK GARFIELD: This will depend on your target audience. While the statistics show that television-based news consumption is falling, the majority of viewers still access their news in a
you would only be talking to that audience, and you want to be talking to a broader audience and making sure you’re an independent voice. It’s essential you have a platform that you can use to publish to all the different social channels and other niche platforms that are big in your community. But the most important thing is getting content published to your own property, where you can build the audience up and build the value up. You won’t have a good monetisation strategy if you just rely on social platforms. We’re seeing now several publishers that tried social platforms pivoting back to their own video platforms. The most recent example was Hearst Publishing in the UK who are moving back away from social platforms because they just can’t rely on the model and risk the algorithms changing overnight.
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