Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court – split along ideological lines – upended the Chevron doctrine in its ruling on the case of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (Loper Bright). The 1984 Chevron doctrine, which has served as the bedrock of administrative law, held that where a federal agency is tasked with enforcing an ambiguous statute with multiple reasonable interpretations, a court must defer to the agency’s expertise.
One prominent example of the doctrine’s application is the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Net Neutrality orders. Under President Trump, a Republican-led FCC rescinded the Net Neutrality rule, which was issued during the Obama Administration and the courts deferred to the agency’s expertise. Fast forward to the Biden Administration’s FCC, which pushed a new Net Neutrality rule. Again, the courts deferred to the agency’s expertise. Critics of the Chevron doctrine will often point to Net Neutrality as an example of how it breeds regulatory uncertainty.
The Court’s new ruling in the Loper case explicitly invalidated the Chevron doctrine and stated that the 1946 Administrative Procedures Act (APA) requires federal courts, not administrative agencies, to independently assess whether an agency’s actions fall within its statutory authority as expressed by Congress. This shift in the character of judicial oversight is a win for the opponents of federal regulations. It heralds the beginning of an era characterized by intensified examination of agency decisions. That is because federal courts will now decide whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority where congressional intent is ambiguous.
In the Net Neutrality cases above, this means that courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court, will decide whether the FCC has the authority to issue a Net Neutrality rule. A conservative court is likely to rule that an aggressive Net Neutrality rule will have overstepped the FCC’s statutory authority, which means that Congress will have to pass specific authorizing legislation for the FCC to move forward.
Welcome to legal limbo
While the implications will play out for decades, there are some important near-term impacts for publishers and the tech industry. For starters, we are likely to be in legal limbo for the next few years. The upending of Chevron means that federal judges must now interpret whether a federal agency has overreached its statutory authority.
Many predict a flood of new litigation to challenge existing and pending regulations. Indeed, some groups have already hinted at their plans to do so. That said, not all federal judges share the same philosophy. Therefore, we can expect conflicting rulings in the near term as various judges will interpret the breadth of an agency’s authority differently. Ultimately, those conflicting rulings will make their way to the Supreme Court, though that will likely take a few years. In the short term, companies may be left with a patchwork of regulations with which to comply. For media companies, this could mean conflicting legal guidance on what kinds of personal data can be collected and used by advertisers and ad tech companies among other things.
Throttling the FTC
Beyond the general legal uncertainty, we should also expect a significant curtailment of the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) rulemaking. For better or worse, the FTC’s main statutory authority resides in Section 5 of the FTC Act, which charges the agency with enforcing against “unfair or deceptive” business practices.
Under Chair Lina Khan, the FTC has used this broad authority to aggressively pursue data brokers and publish new regulations to curb collection and use of sensitive data. However, that authority may come under scrutiny now that Chevron deference has been swept away.
Here are some specific FTC initiatives worth watching:
Commercial Surveillance Rule. In 2022, the FTC requested comments on whether it should issue a rule to regulate the ubiquitous collection of consumer data across the web. Ever since, we have been expecting the agency to issue a proposed rule to regulate the “commercial surveillance” economy. Given the importance of third party and webwide data collection to the largest tech companies, any FTC rule is now more likely to be met with an immediate lawsuit challenging the agency’s authority to issue such rules. What’s more, the undoing of Chevron may change the FTC’s decision about whether to proceed with the rule at all since a court challenge will be expensive and could lead to a damaging precedent.
COPPA enforcement. Congress granted the FTC specific authority to issue rules and enforce the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in 1998. Over the years, the agency has routinely updated its guidance on how companies should comply to include limits on what kinds of data companies can collect. Even though the FTC has clear statutory authority to enforce COPPA, In the wake of Chevron’s undoing, we are likely to see some industry groups file suit to argue that the FTC exceeded its authority to block some types of data from being collected and used.
Artificial intelligence. The FTC has announced investigations into various leading AI companies with an eye toward better understanding the relationship between tech giants and AI companies. The agency is concerned that undisclosed or creative partnerships among a few large companies could lock out competition in the burgeoning AI marketplace. However, Congress has not passed any AI legislation much less anything that would grant the FTC jurisdiction. As a result, the FTC investigation may not yield much and, even if the FTC were to move forward with fines and/or remedies, we should expect a well-funded tech sector to challenge the FTC’s authority in court.
Significant impact for the future
Even though the Court’s ruling is still new, the full impact on federal rulemaking and, subsequently, on the tech sector is likely to be massive. In the short-term, confusion will be prevalent and media organizations may struggle to balance the various legal rulings and interpretations that impact digital businesses.
As more and more regulations are scrutinized and as lower courts issue new rulings based on the Supreme Court’s new guidance, we could see regulations dialed back or eliminated altogether that could open a new era of aggressive data collection and marketing. All of this serves as an important reminder that Congress needs to act now more than ever on issues like data privacy, AI and competition.
Podcasting — it’s been a hot business since Serial became a cultural phenomenon back in 2014, spurring SNL skits and inspiring satirical spinoffs on streaming networks. In the years since the true crime megahit launched, there’s been a podcasting goldrush among publishers, and for good reason.
There’s a hunger among audiences for quality audio content. More and more people are tuning into podcasts: Last year alone, nearly 100 million Americans listened to podcasts every week, according to Edison Research.
But as an increasing number of media companies, brands, and individuals have ventured into a growing sea of audio productions (there are 450 million podcasts out there in the world), the water has become rough and murky. Last year, the audio industry saw mass layoffs, canceled productions, and shrinking ad revenue.
It’s led some to question whether podcasting itself was just a passing trend, a la the disastrous 2015 media industry “pivot to video.” Yet, as the audio industry and the publishers who create podcasts come off a “year of reckoning,” it’s clear that one brand seems to have figured out a way to build something solid from podcasting.
A podcasting business with sustainable revenue
Slate dove into the podcasting business with the Slate Political Gabfest in 2005, back when people were still listening on iPods, which is how the medium got its namesake. Since the early aughts, the Slate Podcast Network has put out dozens of shows. Its audio catalog currently boasts more than 20 titles, including listener-loved and award-winning programs like Slow Burn,Decoder Ring,and Death, Sex, and Money.
Today, podcasting accounts for a whopping 50% of the company’s advertising revenue. But audio isn’t only about ad sales for Slate. “We know membership is a huge part of keeping our business diversified overall, and podcasts are a big part of that,” says Heidi Strom Moon, Slate’s Director of Subscriptions.
The Slate Plus membership program started in 2014, and podcasts have been woven into its fabric since the jump. In each of the Slate Podcast Network’s shows, podcast listeners will hear on-air hosts encouraging them to join Slate Plus, via the Slate website, or hear pre-recorded ads directing listeners to sign up.
To support the company’s overall subscription business, “We do things like run remnant inventory ads (for Slate Plus) across the network to let people know about different shows and episodes that we’re doing,” says Strom Moon.
When signing up for Slate Plus, a member can get a three month trial for $15.00, and a full subscription runs $119.00 per year. You might be wondering: Why, exactly, would someone stop listening to a free podcast to sign up for a paid subscription? The answer is built into Slate’s strategy.
“Within each show, we talk a lot about what the benefits you’ll get by joining Slate Plus,” says Heidi Strom Moon. “Those include ad free (listening) benefits, extended listening, and premium episodes that you’ll get as a member. And a lot of that is what drives people to subscribe. Across many of our shows, we have exclusive episodes, extended episodes, and other kinds of bonus content, which we’ll be doing even more of in the weeks and months to come. ”
And the strategy is working. Last year, company revenue from Slate Plus increased 33%. Strom Moon says that AMICUS, Slate’s podcast on jurisprudence and the law, is one of the Slate Plus’ stand-out success stories.
Using podcasting exclusivity to drive paid subscriptions
“AMICUS is one of our big drivers of membership,” she says. “They do weekly standalone bonus episodes for members. So (on air), they’ll talk about what members can get in their bonus episodes each week.”
When listening to AMICUS, the benefits of the Slate Plus membership program are touted, and some of those benefits are intrinsically tied to content strategy. As the Supreme Court reached the end of its term this year and dropped major, bombshell decisions every week of June, AMICUS hopped into action to cover and dissect the rulings in weekly emergency podcast episodes — unscheduled content designed to react to the breaking news — and integrated Slate Plus into the strategy.
“For example, just going into that regular weekly cadence of having a standalone Slate Plus exclusive episode, especially when we do the emergency drops, we’ve seen a 146% increase in (Slate Plus) conversion since we’ve gotten to that regular weekly cadence (covering new Supreme Court decisions),” Strom Moon says.
So how does Slate Plus work from a technical standpoint? When members sign up on the Slate website, Slate Plus listeners get exclusive podcast feeds — the place where new episodes appear and live within a listening app ecosystem. The exclusive feeds can be accessed through the Slate mobile app, or anywhere listeners are already getting their audio content.
“Slate Plus members can subscribe directly on the Slate website, and from there if you’re already using a podcast app that you love and you wanna continue using, you can go ahead and add your premium feeds to any of those apps,” Strom Moon says. “We have partnerships with platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts to make it easier for people to subscribe on those platforms, if that’s where they’re listening and subscribing. We offer all of those options so that people can pick and choose what works best for them.”
While AMICUS may be offering listeners something immediate — quick reaction to what’s going on with Supreme Court rulings on a given day — Slate Plus is also tapping its audio back catalog to drive subscriptions.
“One thing we recently did is we resurfaced an evergreen series that we had done a few years back, calledThe Queen,” Strom Moon says. “We decided that was really good content that people would be interested in again. So we resurfaced that, and that has led to new conversions as people rediscovered this really interesting story.”
Gaining control of your audience through podcasting
While podcasts are a huge driver for Slate Plus, audio is only part of the success story.
“So it’s a combination of benefits for both listeners and readers,” Strom Moon says. “So on the written side, because of the metered paywall (on the Slate website), Slate Plus members get unlimited access to everything Slate — hundreds of articles a month, plus our extensive written archive of almost 25 years of content. We also have member exclusive advice columns. So if you’re an advice fan, and a lot of our readers are, you get even more advice as a Slate Plus member. We also have a member newsletter and a Facebook group.”
For Slate, it’s all about creating multiple touch points and offerings to get audiences to sign up.
“Slate Plus continues to be a big priority because we do think there’s a lot of opportunity for growth there,” Strom Moon says. “It’s the line of business we have the most control over.”
The data is clear: a chasm exists between what traditional news offers and what younger audiences crave. Decades of research haven’t bridged this gap, and proposed solutions often fall short. Blumler and McQuail’s (1970) Need for Gratification Theory suggests people use media to fulfill specific desires. You do have to wonder if the problem a mismatch in needs. Perhaps traditional news fails to satisfy younger generations’ hunger for in-depth analysis or a more positive outlook, driving them to seek information elsewhere. This disconnect demands a fresh approach – one that bridges the gap and fosters genuine connection.
A Spring 2023 Harvard Youth Poll reveals that young Americans prioritize economic concerns like inflation, healthcare, housing, and job availability, alongside social justice and environmental issues like reproductive rights, climate change, and immigration. This focus mirrors global trends. However, traditional media coverage often falls short on these topics. The rise of “alternative platforms” and the demand for short, relatable, and authentic content signals a broader shift in news consumption. Furthermore, Gen X’s declining interest and the perception of traditional media content as distant, pedantic, and delivered on outdated platforms underscore the need to completely rethink how we deliver news.
Despite the challenges, a bright future awaits news media built on growth and audience engagement. The key lies in a shift towards hyper-local coverage. This doesn’t mean abandoning national and global news. Rather, it means prioritizing content that resonates with the local audience. Imagine relatable journalists delivering stories on local issues through engaging formats like social media posts, listicles, explainers, and high-quality video content. This focus has demonstrably built loyal readership and increased audience size for news organizations around the country.
A decline in news interest among Gen X and Millennials, as reported by the Pew Research Center, and a growing preference for authenticity in news presenters, according to Reuters 2022 Digital News Report, paint a clear picture of the current news consumption landscape. Addressing these audience preferences and tailoring content to local issues can foster greater trust and engagement with news media.
The solution seems straightforward: connect the dots between state or regional events and their impact on local communities. However doing this effectively is harder than it seems. News outlets must transition from high-level reporting to a more responsible and objective approach. This means translating complex issues into clear, concise explanations that highlight the specific impact on people’s daily lives. For example, a national story on rising gas prices might be tailored locally to show how much transportation costs have increased in your city and how residents are coping.
Take, for instance, the Miami Herald’s recent spring climate change article on sea levels rising. This article uses multimedia storytelling to explore the rising sea level’s impact on Miami, a city particularly vulnerable to coastal flooding. The article features data insights from local scientists and researchers and explains how climate change is affecting the city’s infrastructure and communities. By connecting the global threat of climate change to the specific challenges faced by Miami, this article highlights the urgency of addressing sea level rise. This focus on local impacts can potentially empower younger audiences to engage with the issue in their city, and “actionability” is something that is particularly resonant with this group.
As we navigate the evolving media landscape and changing news consumption habits, traditional media must redefine its role. It should not only inform, but also serve as a vital resource for today’s and tomorrow’s generations. This shift is crucial for both local and national news outlets as they strive to bridge the generational gap and earn trust.
Younger audiences increasingly seek news that offers practical and useful information for their daily lives. This demand highlights the need for journalism to evolve beyond reporting. News organizations must provide guidance and resources on various topics, offering actionable insights that empower readers.
The challenge lies in transforming news into actionable resources that not only inform but also empower and engage audiences. Organizations like NPR have shown the way by expanding their coverage to include comprehensive guides and interactive tools on topics like financial planning and mental health resources. These resources equip readers to make informed decisions and take meaningful action based on factual reporting.
By providing practical resources alongside factual reporting, news organizations can empower readers with deeper understanding and the tools they need to take action. This ensures content remains informative while upholding journalistic integrity. In an era where accessible knowledge and meaningful impact are highly valued, this approach fosters informed decision-making and strengthens audience engagement.
Embracing hyper-local coverage and authentic storytelling will enable news organizations to bridge the chasm that separates them from Gen X and Millennials. Focusing on issues that directly impact these audiences’ daily lives fosters a sense of relevance and connection. Authentic voices, relatable formats, and clear explanations that empower readers with actionable insights will cultivate trust and engagement. This also translates to a more valuable audience for advertisers, potentially leading to increased revenue streams.
In essence, a focus on local issues and a commitment to genuine storytelling that makes issues personally relevant represents a strategic investment in the future of news. By prioritizing content that resonates with younger generations, news organizations can not only ensure their long-term sustainability but also cultivate a more engaged and informed citizenry. A future where news is relevant, sustainable, and fosters meaningful connections between audiences and journalists is entirely within reach.
Media companies say they want to grow their younger audiences. So, why aren’t executives making more of a concerted effort to lean on that same generation for guidance on how to reach that audience?
Earlier this year, I attended an industry conference event in San Francisco where leading executives from the fields of advertising, marketing, broadcasting and streaming came together to exchange thoughts and ideas on how their industries are converging and where things are headed next.
One of the presenting panelists was Jasmin Corley, a 20-something billed as a “social media influencer” who, in fact, has spent the formative years of her young life establishing and building her own fashion and beauty media brand across social video platforms. Hundreds of thousands of people follow Corley across Instagram, YouTube Shorts and TikTok. Her best-performing clips have north of 1 million views — not an easy thing for anyone to pull off.
Corley shared the stage with executives who hailed from a leading electronics company, a television start-up and an advertising manager from a streaming-focused joint venture. Each of those panelists got more time to speak than she did. In fact, even the moderator — a well-known former reporter for an entertainment trade publication who now covers the free streaming space for a media research company — spoke more than Corley did.
She was asked just two questions, one from the moderator, one from a panelist who sought validation in his own product. The tone seemed to be this: Corley was lucky to share a stage with such esteemed executives in the media and advertising industry. Really, though, they were lucky to share a stage with her. Ultimately, it was a lost opportunity to hear from someone who not only reaches the younger generation on a regular basis, but who walks among them, too.
The same old management
If Corley was frustrated by the experience, she didn’t show it. She graciously exited the stage and went home. I wish I had been as graceful in my 20s. When I was hired to oversee digital initiatives for a Tribune Media-owned newsroom in 2008, I was a baby-faced 21-year-old who was still in college. I thought the company was hiring me for my ideas. Over time, I came to realize they brought me on because I could do a lot of work quickly. And they didn’t have to pay me very much to do it.
Every week, the station assembled different department heads for a meeting. In my first few meetings, I said nothing, though I had a lot of thoughts. Eventually, I spoke up, but it seemed like things were always being shot down. Conversations usually ended with the message that “it isn’t the way we do things here,” or “things are done for a reason,” something along those lines. The meetings did little to accomplish anything, except that everyone seemed annoyed with me toward the end. It was mutual. They mistook my confidence for arrogance; I mistook their arrogance for incompetence.
Times change but too many things stay the same
Perhaps if all sides had gone in with more of an open mind, things would have been different. Back then, media companies had very little to lose — traditional platforms were doing as well, if not better, than emerging digital ones. Today, the opposite is clearly true. Traditional platforms like broadcast radio and television are struggling to address a downturn in their advertising businesses. Meanwhile, next-generation platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram seem to have more money than they know what to do with.
The reasons are numerous, and not too hard to understand. Take TV, for instance. While traditional TV still frames itself around a 30-minute or 1-hour episode, content creators on YouTube or Instagram can go as long as they want, unencumbered by schedules or time limits. They can 30-second clips three times a day, or a 30-minute tutorial twice a month, or any combination or variation in-between. While traditional TV might require a fully-developed script or outline, along with numerous pitch meetings and ad sales justifications, young people can simply grab their phone and create whatever they want to bring into the world.
The proliferation of tablets and smartphones, coupled with the abundance of social video platforms, has lowered the barrier of entry for content creation and distribution. No one understands this better than the generation who grew up with a mature Internet and digital toolset capable of handling those things. And they are taking full advantage of it.
The end result is highly-engaging content that connects with younger consumers, and influences them in many ways, including purchase intentions. A survey by Nerds Collective as reported in The Drum found that 45% of young Europeans who identify as Generation Z “want brands they’ve seen an influencer or celebrity wear,” while just 18% say they’re influenced by what their friends wear.
Young people turn to TikTok
Fashion is one thing. News and information is another. But similar trends apply. Young people are increasingly turning to TikTok and Instagram over Google to find things online (and, to be honest, you can’t really blame them, because Google is a hot mess). When it comes to news and current events, younger audiences are gravitating toward unfiltered personalities and curated experiences that podcasters like comedian Joe Rogan, radio host James O’Brien and French YouTube channel Hugo Décrype offer.
Why is this happening? Over the past few months, I’ve reached out to a number of key figures in media and entertainment to find out. Three executives told me they had to run things up the chain before they could speak with me — suggesting corporate bureaucracy has changed little since I worked in that TV newsroom all those years ago. I managed to secure interviews with three others. But it seemed that they either didn’t understand the situation or could only offer answers that didn’t address the issue at hand.
Change in strategy
I spent more than a month doing precisely the wrong thing: Trying to secure interviews with people with nice executive titles at well-established places, but whose businesses embody many of the problems that this column is trying to address. About two weeks ago, it finally occurred to me that I needed to reach someone who wasn’t involved in media and entertainment, but who spends a lot of time thinking and writing about these problems: Charles Benaiah.
Like me, Benaiah spent his early career working for established media brands before venturing out onto his own. Today, his job as the CEO of Watzan is to observe the landscape and dream up ways for it to improve.
“There are decades of ingrained expectations that are going to have to change,” Benaiah told me in an interview, after I filled him in on the above issues. “It’s not going to change quickly.”
Benaiah agrees that one way to attract and engage younger consumers is to create content that resonates with them. To do so requires hiring young people into key decision-making roles. It also means allowing personality to bubble through. He likens it to the better days of the newspaper industry, where someone might pick up a copy of the daily edition to read the latest clip from their favorite columnist. In the process, they have to flip through several pages of news, and might stop on a story here or there that is connected to, but otherwise separate from, the editorial section.
These days, the editorial page is X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “We’re 25 years into social media, and I’ve always looked at Twitter as being the social media place for journalists,” Benaiah remarked. “Journalists are writing somewhat dry stories, because that’s what they’re asked to do. They’ve got these great, brilliant quips, and they toss them out all day, but they don’t work their way back into the personality of the newsroom — they make their way onto Twitter.”
Personality and connections
Newsrooms didn’t have a chance to embrace the idea of Twitter before young journalists gravitated to the platform on their own. Once news organizations saw that young journalists could attract a blockbuster following on the platform, they encouraged their reporters to link to their stories, as a way to drive traffic to their website.
The growing pains came when journalists really started to stretch out and let loose on Twitter. Controversies followed. Suddenly, a reporter’s off-hand remark or poorly-landed joke became fodder for another reporter’s mini exposé. Newsrooms that had never developed a framework of acceptable use and best social media practices suddenly found themselves cleaning up a lot of messes.
Some news organizations handled that better than others. However, for the most part, the industry really struggled to find an appropriate balance between giving young journalists the freedom to be themselves on a public platform and applying standards and ethics policies in a non-constraining way.
Striking that balance is important, Benaiah says, because newsrooms that are too rigid risk losing authoritative voices, many of which are deeply engaged with younger audiences. But a free-for-all is also problematic, because authority in news requires trust, and to be trust-worthy, one must be honest and believable.
Supporting young leaders
Young journalists can build authority and trust by being mentored by industry veterans who impart the best practices while embracing the idea that the way things have traditionally been done might not be the best way of doing things in the future. It won’t keep a young journalist from making mistakes, but a guiding hand can encourage them that it isn’t the end of the world. The payoff for giving emerging reporters the space to be themselves and the guidance to be accurate and reliable will be recognized in the long term, in a way that benefits both individual brands and companies at large.
Likewise, media companies that want to reach younger audiences have to hire young people into leadership roles and allow them to be an integral part in content creation and audience engagement strategies. That is the first step, and it is a substantial one. Not engaging young professionals as part of the process is a bit like asking someone who speaks English to create a product slogan in Greek. It makes no sense, yet this is what corporate America has done for years. It is not a winning formula.
At the industry conference I attended earlier this year, everyone in the room should have been clamoring to give Corley their card. They should have asked if she was willing to be a brand ambassador, to help put their product or service or company in front of her audience. They should have asked her for a little insight into the secret sauce that makes her content so tastefully appealing to thousands of viewers.
But no one did. Not that it mattered much to Corley. She went home, and immediately started working on her next project: The “Fr$h Editing Bootcamp.” Over the course of 30 days, Corley educated her followers on the best ways to make short-form videos really pop on social platforms. To date, those videos have amassed tens of thousands of views, and likely influenced the next batch of content creators. It is tough to predict what platforms those videos will live on in 5, 10, 20 years — but if traditional media companies are smart, they’ll do whatever it takes to bring those content creators in before they’re left in the dust.
Last month, I co-led a week-long journalism program during which we visited 16 newsrooms, media outlets and tech companies in New York. This study tour provided an in-depth snapshot of the biggest issues facing the media today and offered insights into some of the potential solutions publishers are exploring to address them.
We met with everyone from traditional media players – like The New York Times, Associated Press, CBS and Hearst – to digital providers such as Complex Media and ProPublica, as well as conversations with academics and policy experts. Based upon these visits and conversations, here are four key takeaways about the state of media and content publishing today.
1. Hands-on AI experience matters
Not surprisingly, AI dominated many conversations. Although recent research shows the American public is both skeptical and surprisingly unaware of these tools, the emergence of Generative AI – and the discussions around it – are impossible to ignore.
One mantra oft repeated throughout the week was that everyone in the media will need to be conversant with AI. Despite this, research has shown that many newsrooms are hesitant about adopting these technologies. Others, however, are taking a more proactive approach. “I like playing offense, not defense, Aimee Rinehart, Senior Product Manager AI Strategy at the Associated Press, told us. “Figure out how the tools work and your limits.”
With many media companies having to do more with less, AI can help improve workflows, support labor-intensive work like investigative journalism, as well as streamline and diversify content creation and distribution. By harnessing these AI-powered functions, smaller outlets may benefit the most, given the efficiencies these resource-strapped players may be able to unlock.
Reporting on AI is also an emerging journalistic beat. This is an area more newsrooms are likely to invest in, given AI’s potential to radically reshape our lives. As Hilke Schellmann, an Emmy‑award winning investigative reporter and journalism professor at NYU, told us “we used to hold powerful people to account, now we have to add holding AI accountable.”
Echoing Schellmann’s sentiments, “every journalist should be experimenting with AI,” one ProPublica journalist said. “We owe it to our audience to know what this is capable of.”
2. Demonstrating distinctiveness and value is imperative
One fear of an AI-driven world is that traffic to publishers will tank as Generative Search, and tools like ChatGPT, remove the need for users to visit the sites of creators and information providers. In that environment, distinctiveness, trustworthy and fresh content becomes more valuable than ever. “You need to produce journalism that gives people a reason to show up,” says Ryan Knutson, co-host of The Wall Street Journal’s daily news podcast, The Journal.
In response, publishers will need to demonstrate their expertise and unique voice. That means leaning more into service journalism, exclusives, and formats like explainers, analysis, newsletters, and podcasts.
Bloomberg’s John Authers, exemplifies this in his daily Points of Return newsletter. With more than three decades of experience covering markets and investments, he brings a longitudinal and distinctive human perspective to his reporting. Alongside this, scoops still matter, Authers suggests. After all, “journalism is about finding out something other people don’t know,” he says.
Media players also need to make a more effective case as to why original content needs to be supported and paid for. As Gaetane Michelle Lewis, SEO leader at the Associated Press, put it, “part of our job is communicating to the audience what we have and that you need it.”
For a non-profit like ProPublica that means demonstrating impact. They publish three impact reports a year, and their Annual Report highlights how their work has led to change at a time when “many newsrooms can no longer afford to take on this kind of deep-dive reporting.”
“Our North Star is the potential to make a positive change through impact,” Communications Director, Alexis Stephens, said. And she emphasized how “this form of journalism is critical to democracy.”
The New York Times’ business model is very different but its publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, has similarly advocated for the need for independent journalism. As he put it, “a fully informed society not only makes better decisions but operates with more trust, more empathy, and greater care.”
Given the competition from AI, streaming services, and other sources of attention, media outlets will increasingly need to advocate more forcefully for support through subscriptions, donations, sponsorships, and advertising. In doing this, they’ll need to address what sets them apart from the competition, and why this matters on a wider societal level.
“This is a perilous time for the free press,” Sulzberger told The New Yorker last year. “That reality should animate anyone who understands its central importance in a healthy democracy.”
3. Analytics and accessibility go hand in hand
Against this backdrop, finding and retaining audiences is more important than ever. However, keeping their attention is a major challenge. Data from Chartbeat revealed that half the audiences visiting outlets in their network stay on a site for fewer than 15 seconds.
This has multiple implications. From a revenue perspective, this may mean users aren’t on a page long enough for ad impressions to count. It also challenges outlets to look at how content is produced and presented.
In a world where media providers continue to emphasize growing reader revenues, getting audiences to dig deeper and stay for longer, is essential. “The longer someone reads, the more likely they are to return,” explained Chartbeat’s CMO Jill Nicolson.
There isn’t a magic wand to fix this. Tools for publishers to explore include compelling headlines, effective formats, layout, and linking strategies. Sometimes, Nicolson said, even small modifications can make all the difference.
These efforts don’t just apply to your website. They apply to every medium you use. Brendan Dunne of Complex Media referred to the need for “spicy titles” for episodes of their podcasts and YouTube videos. Julia D’Apolito, Associate Social Editor at Hearst Magazines, shared how their approach to content might be reversed. “We’ve been starting to do social-first projects… and then turning them into an article,” she said, rather than the other way round.
Staff at The New York Times also spoke about the potential for counter-programing. One way to combat news fatigue and avoidance is to shine a light on your non-news content. The success of NYT verticals such as Cooking, Wirecutter, and Games shows how diversifying content can create a more compelling and immersive proposition, making audiences return more often.
Lastly, language and tone matters. As one ProPublica journalist put it, “My editor always says pretend like you’re writing for Sesame Steet. Make things accurate, but simple.” Reflecting on their podcasts, Dunne also stresses the need for accessibility. “People want to feel like they’re part of a group chat, not a lecture,” he said.
Fundamentally, this also means being more audience-centric in the way that stories are approached and told. “Is the angle that’s interesting to us as editors the same as our audiences?” Nicolson asked us. Too often, the data would suggest, it is not.
4. Continued concern about the state of local news
Finally, the challenges faced by local news media, particularly newspapers, emerged in several discussions. Steven Waldman, the Founder and CEO of Rebuild Local News, reminded us that advertising revenue at local newspapers had dropped 82% in two decades. The issue is not “that the readers left the papers,” he said, “it’s that the advertisers did.”
For Waldman, the current crisis is an opportunity not just to “revive local news,” but also to “make better local news.” This means creating a more equitable landscape with content serving a wider range of audiences and making newsrooms more diverse. “Local news is a service profession,” he noted. “You’re serving the community, not the newsroom.”
According to new analysis, the number of partisan-funded outlets designed to appear like impartial news sources (so-called “pink slime” sites) now surpasses the number of genuine local daily newspapers in the USA. This significantly impacts the news and information communities receive, shaping their worldviews and decision-making.
Into this mix, AI is also rearing its ugly head. While it can be hugely beneficial for some media companies—“AI is the assistant I prayed for,” saysParis Brown, associate editor of The Baltimore Times. However, it can also be used to fuel misinformation, accelerating pink slime efforts.
“AI is supercharging lies,” one journalist at ProPublica told us, pointing to the emergence of “cheap fakes” alongside “deep fakes,” as content which can confirm existing biases. The absence of boots on the ground makes it harder for these efforts to be countered. Yet, as Hilke Schellmann, reminded us “in a world where we are going to be swimming in generative text, fact-checking is more important [than ever].”
This emerging battleground makes it all the more important for increased funding for local news. Legislative efforts, increased support from philanthropy, and other mechanisms can all play a role in helping grow and diversify this sector. Steven Waldman puts it plainly: “We have to solve the business model and the trust model at the same time,” he said.
All eyes on the future
The future of media is being written today, and our visit to New York provided a detailed insight into the principles and mindsets that will shape these next few chapters.
From the transformative potential of AI, to the urgent need to demonstrate distinctiveness and value, it is clear that sustainability has to be rooted in adaptability and innovation.
Using tools like AI and Analytics to inform decisions, while balancing this with a commitment to quality and community engagement is crucial. Media companies who fail to harness these technologies are likely to get left behind.
In an AI-driven world, more than ever, publishers need to stand out or risk fading away. Original content, unique voices, counter-programming, being “audience first,” and other strategies can all play a role in this. Simultaneously, media players must also actively advocate for why their original content needs to be funded and paid for.
Our week-long journey through the heart of New York’s media landscape challenged the narrative that news media and journalism are dying. It isn’t. It’s just evolving. And fast.
Not too long ago, the consensus was that a significant digital reader revenue strategy could only work at two or three outlier news organizations. The New York Times had the breadth and depth and quality of content for which the average person highly engaged with the news might pay. The Wall Street Journal had a large potential base of readers who needed its specialized content for their jobs and who had expense accounts that would cover it.
Beleaguered regional newspapers such as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Boston Globe eventually proved this wrong. Voice of San Diego and dozens of other local and national nonprofit newsrooms found they could have public radio-like success with small donations from readers who understood the altruistic mission of accountability journalism.
Beyond the business side
Local news organizations are right to pursue the formula. We’re past the debate over whether a significant number of readers will pay to support strong journalism. It’s been proven they will.
Industry leaders and journalism funders continue to put crucial focus on testing and improving revenue models. Many cohorts of local publishers have been trained in the business-side factors involved in a reader revenue strategy. Help on achieving the level of journalism that will capture an audience and move them to give or subscribe has been much harder to come by.
And that’s the elephant in the room: The media support system – the dot orgs, foundations and funding organizations – need to figure out how to help make the journalism at under-resourced newsrooms strong and impactful enough to generate the kind of support that will make them sustainable. (And ultimately lead to more such journalism.)
This isn’t a question of building a business model or fundraising. This is about staffing and data acumen and the knowledge and tools it takes to create powerful journalism and a user experience that audiences value and support.
As they long have, amazing training opportunities exist through organizations such as IRE, ONA, SPJ, the Ida B. Wells Society and more. But the barriers for small and under-resourced news organizations to actually take advantage and put that training to use are high.
Small is the new normal
Zooming out, we see a local journalism landscape dominated by hundreds of very small newsrooms: local independent online startups that are one- to three-person operations and legacy Black and brown news organizations. They have limited resources or are chain-owned daily newspapers whose staffs have been reduced to one or two reporters.
First and foremost, these newsrooms need more direct operational funding to employ more journalists. This is something that the massive Press Forward initiative created by a coalition of journalism-supporting foundations is seeking to address.
But the industry also needs to have teams equipped for the future. Newsrooms like these will benefit from a system of training, resources and mentorship to support “capital J” accountability journalism in news ecosystems that are now decentralized.
Readers are well-served and grateful for coverage of the day-to-day news of the community. However, every newsroom yearns for the space and resources to also do work that goes deeper, that holds the powerful accountable, that has impact and drives change. It’s the kind of work that elevates the stature of your brand, that exposes your organization to more people, that is the catalyst to subscribe or give for many.
We need great journalism
I’d argue that the same dynamic applies to advertising at many news organizations, even if they don’t realize it. They can’t compete with the price, reach and targeting of the digital ad tech that drives the biggest online platforms. But small newsrooms can make a hell of a case to local advertisers that they want to be adjacent to and associated with the kind of journalism that has the community appreciative and engaged.
This has happened in incredible (even Pulitzer Prize-winning) ways and it is exciting how quickly collaborative journalism has been embraced. But it’s never completely organic. This movement has happened in large part through the facilitation, research, training, convening and cheerleading of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Solutions Journalism Network has built training programs into its facilitation of regional and topical journalism collaboratives. And ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting/Reveal, ICIJ and my alma mater, the Center for Public Integrity, helped show a new generation of investigative and single topic-focused nonprofits how having collaboration in your DNA allows you to punch far above your weight.
Meanwhile, Report for America is building training, mentorship and additional editing support into its process, to make sure that its ambitious goal of putting hundreds of additional reporters in under-resourced local newsrooms across the country has the intended impact. And the Investigative Editing Corps is pairing small newsrooms with experienced editors to provide support for enterprise and investigative reporting that goes beyond their typical daily news coverage.
Emphasis on essentials
Technology is also playing a part in making more advanced reporting possible in smaller newsrooms, from data journalism resources such as The Accountability Project and Big Local News to the document and records-access tools of Muck Rock.
When the Center for Public Integrity focused its mission four years ago on investigative reporting that confronts inequality in the U.S., we thought about how to scale that work beyond what our 25-person newsroom could do. When we obtained secret White House documents showing the true extent of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. We shared them directly with journalists across the country, and it saved lives. After spending thousands of hours obtaining and cleaning more than a decade’s worth of data about polling place locations and closures, we made it available to power not just our own reporting, but others’ work ranging from small local news organizations to NPR, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
A lightbulb went off when we were publishing “Unhoused and Undercounted,” an investigation that proved public school districts across the country were failing to identify and serve homeless students as required by federal law. We realized that this story, using our data analysis, could be written in almost any local community in the country and have a high potential for very direct impact in helping kids.
We were offering the data and the formula of questions to ask. How could we get it — and similar investigations — into the hands of any/every willing local newsroom able to tackle it, in a way that allowed them to have impact with few resources but also an entry point to go far deeper into the topic in their community if they could?
Decentralized journalism calls for decentralized solutions for seeding and supporting the kind of work that will spark a virtuous cycle of revenue that rewards the most impactful journalism. Our media ecosystem is supported by a robust network of organizations that are focused on keeping newsrooms afloat. But like all things digital, even this support must continue to evolve. Revenue models are only as effective as audiences’ willingness to support journalism. It’s time to focus on empowering under-resourced newsrooms to deliver the highest caliber journalism, to support society – and to inspire audiences to support them.
About the author
Matt DeRienzo is a veteran newsroom leader whose work over the past four years as editor in chief of the Center for Public Integrity was recognized with a national Edward R. Murrow Award for general excellence. Previously, he served as vice president of news for Hearst’s Connecticut newspapers and as the first full-time executive director of LION, a national nonprofit supporting local independent online news organizations. He can be reached at [email protected].
These days, digital media companies are all trying to figure out how to best incorporate AI into their products, services and capabilities, via partnerships or by building their own. The goal is to gain a competitive edge as they tailor AI capabilities to their audiences, subscribers and clients’ specific needs.
By leveraging proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) digital media companies have a new tool in their toolboxes. These offerings offer differentiation and added value, enhanced audience engagement and user experience. These proprietary LLMs also set them apart from companies that are opting for licensing partnerships with other LLMs, which offer more generalized knowledge bases and draw from a wide range of sources in terms of subject matter and quality.
A growing number of digital media companies are rolling out their own LLM-based generative AI features for search and data-based purposes to enhance user experience and create fine-tuned solutions. In addition to looking at several of the offerings media companies are bringing to market, we spoke to Dow Jones, Financial Times and Outside Inc. about the generative AI tools they’ve built and explore the strategies behind them.
Media companies fuel generative AI for better solutions
Digital media companies are harnessing the power of generative AI to unlock the full potential of their own – sometimes vast amounts – of proprietary information. These new products allow them to offer valuable, personalized, and accessible content to their audiences, subscribers, customers and clients.
Take for example, Bloomberg, which released a research paper in March detailing the development of its new large-scale generative AI model called BloombergGPT. The LLM was trained on a wide range of financial data to assist Bloomberg in improving existing financial natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, news classification, and question answering, among others. In addition, the tool will help Bloomberg customers organize the vast quantities of data available on the Bloomberg Terminal in ways that suit their specific needs.
Launched in beta June 4, Fortune partnered with Accenture to create a generative AI product called Fortune Analytics. The tool delivers ChatGPT-style responses based on 20 years of financial data from the Fortune 500 and Global 500 lists, as well as related articles, and helps customers build graphic visualizations.
Generative AI helps customers speed up processes
A deeper discussion of how digital media companies are using AI provides insights to help others understand the potential to leverage the technology for their own needs. Dow Jones, for example uses Generative AI for a platform that helps customers meet compliance requirements.
Dow Jones Risk Compliance is a global provider of risk and compliance solutions across banks and corporations which helps organizations perform checks on their counterparties. They do that from the perspective of complying with anti-money laundering regulation, anti-corruption regulation, looking to also mitigate supply chain risk and reputational issues. Dow Jones Risk Compliance provides tools that allow customers to search data sets and help manage regulatory and reputational risk.
In April, Dow Jones Risk & Compliance launched an AI-powered research platform for clients that enables organizations to build an investigative due diligence report covering multiple sources in as little as five minutes. Called Dow Jones Integrity Check, the research platform is a fully automated solution that goes beyond screening to identify risks and red flags from thousands of data sources.
The planning for Dow Jones Integrity Check goes back a few years, as the company sought to provide its customers with a quicker way to do due diligence on their counterparties, Joel Lange, executive Vice President and General Manager, Risk and Research at Dow Jones explained.
Lange said that Dow Jones effectively built a platform which automatically creates a report for customers on a person or company, using technology from AI firm Xapien. It brings together Dow Jones’ data that is plugged into other data sets, corporate registrar information, and wider web content. It then leverages the platform’s Generative AI capability to produce a piece of analysis or a report.
Dow Jones Risk & Compliance customers use their technology to make critical, often complex, business decisions. Often the data collection process can be incredibly time consuming, taking days if not weeks.
The new tool “provides investigations, teams, banks and corporations with initial due diligence. Essentially it’s a starting point for them to conduct their due diligence, effectively automating a lot of that data collection process,” according to Lange.
Lange points out that the compliance field is always in need of increased efficiency. However, it carries with it great risk to reputation. Dow Jones Integrity Check was designed to reshape compliance workflows, creating an additional layer of investigation that can be deployed at scale. “What we’re doing here is enabling them to more rapidly and efficiently aggregate, consolidate, and bring information to the fore, which they can then analyze and then take that investigation further to finalize an outcome,” Lange said.
Regardless of the quality of the generated results, most experts believe that it is important to have a human in the loop in order to maintain content accuracy, mitigate bias, and enhance the credibility of the content. Lange also said that it’s critical to have “that human in the loop to evaluate the information and then to make a decision in relation to the action that the customer wants to take.”
In recent months, digital media companies have been launching their own generative AI tools that allow users to ask questions in natural language and receive accurate and relevant results.
The Associated Press created Merlin, an AI-generated search tool that makes searching the AP archive more accurate. “Merlin pinpoints key moments in our videos to exact second and can be used for older archive material that lacks modern keywords or metadata,” explained AP Editor in Chief Julie Pace at The International Journalism Festival in Perugia in April.
Outside’s Scout: AI search with useful results
Chatbots have become a popular form of search. Originally pre-programmed and only able to answer select questions included in their programming, chatbots have evolved and increased engagement by providing a conversational interface. Used for everything from organizing schedules and news updates to customer service inquiries, Generative AI-based chatbots assist users in finding information more efficiently across a wide range of industries.
Much like The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other digital media organizations that blocked OpenAI from using their content to power artificial intelligence, Outside CEO Robin Thurston explained that Outside Inc. wasn’t going to let third parties scrape their platforms to train LLM models.
Instead, they looked at leveraging their own content and data. “We had a lot of proprietary content that we felt was not easily accessible. It’s almost what I’d call the front page problem, which is you put something on the front page and then it kind of disappears into the ether,” Thurston said.
“We asked ourselves: How do we create something leveraging all this proprietary data? How do we leverage that in a way that really brings value to our user?” Thurston said. The answer was Scout, Outside Inc.’s AI search assistant. Scout is a custom-developed chatbot.
The company could see that generative AI offered a way to make that content accessible and even more useful to its readers. Outside had a lot of evergreen content that wasn’t adding value once it left the front page. Their brands inspire and inform audiences about outdoor adventures, new destinations and gear – a lot of which is evergreen and proprietary content that still had value if it could easily be surfaced by its audience. The chat interface allows their content to continue to be accessible to readers after it is no longer front and center on the website.
Scout gives users a summary answer to their question, leveraging Outside Inc’s proprietary data, and surfaces articles that it references. “It’s just a much more advanced search mechanism than our old tool was. Not only does it summarize, but it then returns the things that are most relevant,” he explained.
Additionally, Outside Inc’s old search function worked by each individual brand. Scout searches across the 20+ properties owned by the parent company which include Backpacker, Climbing, SKI Magazine, and Yoga Journal, among others. Scout brings all of the results together, from the 20+ different Outside brands, from the best camping destinations, to the best trails, outdoor activities for the family, gear, equipment and food all in one result.
One aspect that sets Outside Inc.’s model apart is their customer base, which differs from general news media customers. Outside’s customers engage in a different type of interaction, not just a quick transactional skim of a news story. “We have a bit of a different relationship in that they’re not only getting inspiration from us, which trip should I take? What gear should I buy? But then because of our portfolio, they’re kind of looking at what’s next,” Thurston said.
It was important to Thurston to use the LLM in a number of different ways, so Outside Inc launched a local newsletter initiative with the help of AI. “On Monday mornings we do a local running, cycling and outdoor newsletter that goes to people that sign up for it, and it uses that same LLM to pick what types of routes and content for that local newsletter that we’re now delivering in 64,000 ZIP codes in the U.S.”
Thurston said they had a team working on Scout and it took about six months. “Luckily, we had already built a lot of infrastructure in preparation for this in terms of how we were going to leverage our data. Even for something like traditional search, we were building a backend so that we could do that across the board. But this is obviously a much more complicated model that allows us to do it in a completely new way,” he said.
Connecting AI search to a real subscriber need
In late March, The Financial Times released its first generative AI feature for subscribers called Ask FT. Like Scout, the chat-based search tool allows users to ask any question and receive a response using FT content published over the last two decades. The feature is currently available to approximately 500 FT Professional subscribers. It is powered by the FT’s own internal search capabilities, combined with a third-party LLM.
The tool is designed to help users understand complicated issues or topics, like Ireland’s offshore energy policy, rather than just searching for specific information. Ask FT searches through Financial Times (FT) content, generates a summary and cites the sources.
“It works particularly well for people who are trying to understand quite complex issues that might have been going on over time or have lots of different elements,” explained Lindsey Jayne, the chief product officer of the Financial Times.
Jayne explained that they spend a lot of time understanding why people choose the FT and how they use it. People read the FT to understand the world around them, to have a deep background knowledge of emerging events and affairs. “With any kind of technology, it’s always important to look at how technology is evolving to see what it can do. But I think it’s really important to connect that back to a real need that your customers have, something they’re trying to get done. Otherwise it’s just tech for the sake of tech and people might play with it, but not stick with it,” she said.
Trusted sources and GenAI attribution
Solutions like those from Dow Jones, FT and Outside Inc. highlight the power of a brand with a trusted audience relationship to create deep, authentic relationships built on reliability and credibility. Trusted media brands are considered authoritative because their content is based on credible sources and facts, which ensures accuracy.
Currently, generative AI has demonstrated low accuracy and poses challenges to sourcing and attribution. Attribution is a central feature for digital media companies who roll out their own generative AI solutions. For Dow Jones compliance customers, attribution is critical to customers, to know if they’re going to make a decision based on information that is available in the media, according to Lange.
“They need to have that attributed to within the solution so that if it’s flowing into their audit trails or they have to present that in a court of law, or if they would need to present it to our internal audit, the attribution is really key. (Attribution) is going to be critical for a lot of the solutions that will come to market,” he said. “The attribution has to be there in order to rely on it for a compliance use case or really any other use case. You really need to know where that fact or that piece of information or data actually came from and be able to source it back to the underlying article.”
The Financial Times’ generative AI tool also offers attribution to FT articles in all of its answers. Ask FT pulls together lots of different source material, generates an answer, and attributes it to various FT articles. “What we ask the large language model to do is to read those segments of the articles and to turn them into a summary that explains the things you need to know and then to also cite them so that you have the opportunity to check it,” Jayne said.
They also ask the FT model to infer from people’s questions when it should be searching from. “Maybe you’re really interested in what’s happened in the last year or so, and we also get the model to reread the answer, reread all of the segments and check that, as kind of a guard against hallucination. You can never get rid of hallucination totally, but you can do lots to mitigate it.”
The Financial Times is also asking for feedback from the subscribers using the tool. “We’re literally reading all of the feedback to help understand what kinds of questions work, where it falls down, where it doesn’t, and who’s using it, why and when.”
Leaning into media strengths and adding a superpower
Generative AI seems to have created unlimited opportunities and also considerable challenges, questions and concerns. However it is clear that an asset many media companies possess is a deep reservoir of quality content and it is good for business to extract the most value from the investment in its creation. Leveraging their own content to train and program generative AI tools that serve readers seems like a very promising application.
In fact, generative AI can give trustworthy sources a bit of a super power. Jayne from the FT offered the example of scientists using the technology to read through hundreds of thousands of research papers and find patterns in a process that would otherwise take years to read in an effort to make important connections.
While scraped-content LLMs pose risks to authenticity, accuracy and attribution, proprietary learning models offer a promising alternative.
As Jayne put it, “The media has “an opportunity to harness what AI could mean for the user experience, what it could mean for journalism, in a way that’s very thoughtful, very clear and in line with our values and principles.” At the same time, she cautions that we shouldn’t be “getting overly excited because it’s not the answer to everything – even though we can’t escape the buzz at the moment.”
We are seeing many efforts bump up against the limits of what generative AI is able to do right now. However, media companies can avoid some of generative AI’s current pitfalls by employing the technology’s powerful language prediction, data processing and summarization capabilities while leaning into their own strengths of authenticity and accuracy.
When aspiring journalists ask me whether the media is dead, I always say no.
I remind them that while the menu might change, the hunger for news and information never vanishes. To stick with the food analogy, news these days is like UberEats: far more options are available at your fingertips.
Here’s the thing: evolution in the media is constant and ongoing.
Historically, the delivery method has evolved in this industry, from horseback to telegraph and radio to television. Cable news, the internet and social media caused disruptive waves over time. These days, news is on a 24-hour cycle that is no longer limited to cable news. And, now, Artificial Intelligence has entered the chat. (And they are here whether we like it or not.)
Newsrooms ignore the emergence of AI at their peril, as history shows that transformative technologies don’t disappear simply because they’re ignored. Remember in 1995 when Newsweek predicted the Internet would fail? It was already decades into its inevitable march to dominate media consumption.
Technology usually gets better in time, and it has only improved in my 22 years in this industry. We have a greater reach than we could have imagined. I can instantly read what’s happening in any part of this country—or the world. All from a device that fits in my pocket.
Technology and journalism will always travel hand-in-hand. However right now, a lot about the relationship is toxic. It’s not serving us and we need to do some soul searching to fix what’s not working.
Change can be a painful experience
News and information is everywhere, and everyone can share their perception of news. It’s transforming in real time and the growing pains are unrelenting.
The year started with over 500 journalists losing their jobs, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. About 2,681 journalism jobs were eliminated in 2023 alone. That’s a 48% increase from 2022 and a staggering 77% increase from 2021.
Circulation, viewership and listeners have steadily declined for newspapers, broadcast TV news, and public radio. Major online news outlets are trying to stave off website traffic and engagement decreases. The shift to social media platforms for news consumption is particularly noticeable among younger generations. All this before we get to the fallout from tarnished community trust and news avoidance.
Everyone is looking for sustainability.
Same old traffic metrics
Meanwhile, social media referral traffic has plummeted globally over the past two years.
The big picture: News organizations invested heavily in social media for two decades, relying on platforms like Facebook and Twitter/X, but the algorithms were not in our favor. They never loved us half as much as we loved them. We infiltrated these platforms, but social media prioritized advertising over truth and accountability.
Now, logic tells us that AI search could be a death knell for search traffic. Search has served as a major entry point for metrics that have helped newsrooms drive advertising revenue. Audiences have grown accustomed to using Google searches to find links to information. AI, however, can directly answer most questions, and it’s getting smarter by the hour.
The WSJ has reported that publishers might lose 20-40% of their website traffic when Google’s AI products are fully implemented. The loss of traffic from social media and search will likely have devastating effects on this industry.
Some local shops still rely on the same old metrics – the volume of web traffic and the value of a click or pageview – because that’s what we’ve always done. But given how much the landscape has changed, that well is drying up and we need to find a new source.
Rather than wait and see and react to the technological changes coming at us, the industry must redefine its relationship with technology and take some control. Some news organizations have come to terms with this, and others see the value in creating new revenue streams. Diversifying revenue sources is key.
But beyond that, the industry has to be more entrepreneurial and less traditional. Doubling down on the old models is simply not enough.
When we think about rebuilding the infrastructure for news, we should ask ourselves: Could we build our own pipeline to traffic? Is there a way we can empower audiences to share content by building a trusted social media platform for distribution? That’s the thing: We – the news and media industry – have to take responsibility and build the infrastructure we need to create new habits for readers.
Provide audiences with utility
The reality is that news organizations have done a decent job building brand presence across platforms, but there’s no measurement for the value of that. Unfortunately, our success is housed under decaying pillars of success. The entire model must be flipped on its ear. We must reimagine everything. That mindset is why some startups have done more than survive and become a new breed of media success story. There’s a there there.
We spend a lot of time curating audiences we already have and need to spend more of our days figuring out how to capture the ones we don’t. Live events, office hours and panel discussions center the news and make it accessible to more people. It’s a way to expand your brand in a three-dimensional way. Lean into your personalities and their subject matter expertise to establish a more potent value proposition. And recognize that not all change is bad. The trick is harnessing it in ways that attract and satisfy audiences.
We must pay closer attention to evolving media consumption habits. Some people do have shorter attention spans and want brevity. However, that’s not absolute; there’s room for it all.
We use our phones to do everything and email is a new form of currency. Delivering news to a consumer’s inbox via newsletters just makes sense. We have to develop content creation and delivery strategies that fit today’s lifestyles. And then be ready to do it again as things inevitably change.
Newspapers are going the way of the tablet—not the ones Apple makes, but the ones Moses carried when he descended from Mount Sinai. Hieroglyphics, papyrus and wood had a place in history, as did quill pens. We can appreciate Johannes Gutenberg’s contribution and still embrace all the waves of technology that followed.
Diverse perspectives
The pandemic showed us that people need the expertise journalists wield. However, at the same time we see that people increasingly value the perspectives of social media influencers over journalists. We may not like it, but this needs to teach us something. Rather than ask our journalists to be invisible or unobtrusive, perhaps we need to re-examine ways to humanize them for audiences.
The plethora of free options suggests that every media outlet needs to focus on offering more distinctive coverage. No, it shouldn’t be harmful or polarizing. But it has to be inclusive, reflecting more communities that demand to be heard. That’s why so many niche and local publishers have cropped up; to fill a void that was created by arrogance, neglect and an unwillingness to change – a poisonous recipe.
Media has to marry new technology, develop a trustworthy infrastructure for news distribution and create a steady diet of distinctive coverage mixed with utility and expertise and get back into communities.
The media landscape will look different by the end of this year (and the next, and the one after that), but you can’t point to a time in history when information didn’t matter. And you cannot point to a time in civilization when news – no matter its platform – didn’t make a difference.
If we haven’t learned anything else, history tells us we should pay attention.
In the age of artificial intelligence, it could be argued that the calculus of content is changing.
Since the advent of publishing metrics, the goal has always been more: more page views, clicks, keywords and SEO. And while AI can automate various aspects of content creation and production to save digital media companies time and resources, the convenience of the technology has also allowed for a firehose of low quality content to proliferate.
But, amid the sharp increase of these junk content farms, is there a new opportunity for quality journalism to quietly reclaim its place at the fore? It’s certainly on the minds of the leadership at The Atlantic.
In April, The Atlantic announced it had reached 1 million subscribers and become profitable, by investing in areas where the company had “fairly high confidence of good returns,” according to CEO Nicholas Thompson. The 167-year-old publication currently boasts financial stability and is well-positioned to think about where it is headed as it approaches its 200th birthday.
The Atlantic’s one-million milestone is just the foundation for further growth. In a recent memo to staff, Thompson and Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
“The key to continued success is to be constructively dissatisfied with the present, and so both of us believe very strongly that our 1 million subscriptions represent merely the foundation of future excellence and growth.”
Goldberg says that he would like The Atlantic to double, then quadruple its current size, saying the company needs to figure out how to reach larger audiences around the world. “I want to set a course as The Atlantic heads towards its bicentennial in 33 years. Now is the time for us to decide this is where we want The Atlantic to go and this is how we’re going to get there,” he said.
In terms of excellence, The Atlantic’s awards speak volumes to the quality of the journalism it produces. For the third year in a row, The Atlantic was awarded General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards. No one else has done that in this century, Goldberg remarks.
“So, we have the recognition of our industry that we’re doing something right, and I feel like this is the year when we need to really focus on: what are the next large steps we take?” Goldberg said. “Because we’re in a very good spot. But I don’t want to spend the next five years defending the hill that we’re on. I want to move to some other mountain entirely.”
And, that means not just defending their reputation for journalistic excellence, or growing iteratively. It means figuring out how to reach enormous audiences around the world – and getting a whole lot of them to subscribe.
Subscription strategy with an editorial focus
Prior to the pandemic, Atlantic Chair David Bradley and Laurene Powell Jobs decided they should move into the digital subscription space. They’d had a lot of success through scale – growing web traffic and advertising, Goldberg said. The company hired Alexandra Hardiman, (currently New York Times’ Chief Product Officer), as Chief Business & Product Officer in 2018-2019, to build The Atlantic’s digital subscription model.
“We launched basically six months before the pandemic started when advertising collapsed. And we did very well in those early months. There was a lot of demand,” Goldberg recalled.
The 2019 metered model offered three annual subscription plans for readers: digital, print and digital and a premium tier, which offered exclusive access to podcasts, product discounts and priority access to events among other perks. The Atlantic earned 300,000 new subscriptions in the 12 months that followed.
The following year, the pandemic impacted the publication’s in-person events and advertising, forcing layoffs of 17% of its staff, and losses in the millions.
Now, overall revenue is up more than 10% year over year. The company says advertising booked year-to-date is also up 33% year over year. And, subscriptions to The Atlantic have increased by double-digit percentages in each of the past four years. In fact, they’ve surged 14% in the past year alone.
By 2023, The Atlantic was back on the path to profitability. According to Axios, The Atlantic adjusted its paywall to be more flexible for subscribers and was working to add new revenue streams. Then, roughly 60% of its revenue came from subscriptions, which included print magazines and digital subscriptions through Apple News.
Flexible paywalls meet journalistic excellence
The strategy was to have the best, smartest, most dynamic, flexible subscription, acquisition and retention strategies, Goldberg said. “We’ve always believed that you can have the best systems in the world for acquiring people easily, but if you don’t have a quality product to sell them, they’re not going to come, they’re not going to stay.”
“We pivoted, I would say, to a total quality model on the web. We were doing good stuff on the web for years. We had a large team of young reporters doing news analysis and quick summaries and that sort of thing. But I’ve always believed that the aspect of The Atlantic that differentiated us from everyone else was a commitment to having the highest standards and producing the most complicated, interesting, aesthetically-pleasing, well-written journalism. I think that strategy has borne fruit,” Goldberg said.
The Atlantic focused on editorial excellence, publishing stories that exemplified depth and range and drove news cycles. It recruited high-profile writers including New York Times’ Jennifer Senior and Caitlin Dickerson, who won Pulitzers in 2022 for Feature Writing and Explanatory Journalism, respectively.
“My goal here is to build the greatest writers collective in the English language. We’re halfway there,” Goldberg said. “I don’t need the biggest one. I just need the best one. There are tremendous numbers of readers of English, who want access to our writers, and so as long as there’s an audience for quality journalism, quality non-fiction, we will be okay.”
Reaching new subscribers with newsletters
In addition to a flexible digital subscription strategy and editorial excellence, The Atlantic invested in new newsletters for subscribers in 2021, bringing nine newsletter writers into the fold. Newsletters help reach different audiences, build loyalty and repetition. And as Goldberg pointed out, The Atlantic is launching new ones all of the time. Thus far, the strategy appears to be a moderate success.
“One of the best things to happen out of that is we found more great staff writers, Yair Rosenberg, Xochitl Gonzalez and Charlie Warzel, just to name three and so, it ultimately brought their following,” Goldberg said. “They’re integrated into our writers collective in a way that’s great for our readers and great for our journalism.”
High-quality content reckons with AI
As digital media companies reckon with the changes artificial intelligence brings, deciding on how to adapt or adopt, it’s becoming clear that high-quality journalism retains immense value in the AI era. It offers authenticity, context, and deep analysis that AI-generated content lacks. It provides meaningful insights, informs people and counters misinformation.
Despite the one million subscriber milestone, Goldberg isn’t ready to relax. “It’s not like a breath out. We’re not breathing easy because you’ve got to run scared in this business,” he said. “But those three things, the subscription health, financial health, journalism health and recognition, give us a great place to have meetings where we can actually think through, alright, what are we going to do with The Atlantic on its approach to its 200th birthday.”
“Because it is a very unstable industry, obviously, and I worry about small mistakes or small missed opportunities snowballing over the years. I worry about missing the opportunity to do something newer and bigger.”
Few of The Atlantic’s contemporaries are left. As Goldberg points out, many venerable magazines that came after The Atlantic – like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post – have disappeared.
“So it’s kind of a miracle that The Atlantic has made it through the beginning of the internet age successfully. It survived the Great Depression and the Civil War and World War II. And, so we really have to focus on what is it that made it survive? And what do we do to increase its chances of surviving and flourishing into the next phase?”
Something is shifting with Gen Z. Data from Gallup shows that in the US, women aged 18 to 30 are now thirty percentage points more liberal than men. That gap opened after decades of a roughly equal spread of worldviews. As media organizations seek to attract, engage and retain younger audiences, understanding what drives them and accurately representing them will be essential. However, as the news media struggles with increased polarization on many fronts, it appears that gender equity is rising on the list of contentious topics.
This divide is a result, and signal of, something more than young women simply becoming increasingly liberal. Research from King’s College London in February showed that, specifically when it comes to attitudes to masculinity and women’s equality, there is a growing division. In some cases, young men today are no more supportive of action on gender equality than older men, despite generally being more socially liberal.
A growing number of people – one in three in the UK– think that gender equality has been “solved.” Yet when it comes to the news, women’s perspectives remain “firmly niche,” according to The Missing Perspectives of Women in News report. “The proportion of people who believe that feminism has gone too far, that equality has been achieved, that’s growing across all groups,” the report’s author and researcher, Luba Kassova told us. “Gen Z young men are leading though: A higher proportion of them seem to think that.”
Women’s expert voices remain significantly muted in high-profile news genres such as politics, where men’s share of voice is up to seven times higher, and the economy, where men’s share of voices is up to 31 times higher. It’s not just female expertise that’s lacking: In 2019, the coverage of gender equality issues constituted less than half a percent of all news coverage in the U.S.
But do news organizations have a role to play in building understanding around gender issues, and closing the gap in attitudes between young men and women? And if so, where do they start? Kassova shared some context around these issues and steps newsrooms can take.
Including missing perspectives
Kassova’s first piece of advice is that newsrooms need to build on the work many already have underway to make sure that those perspectives which are not usually heard, including young women, are part of their coverage. “The more male-dominated the coverage is, the more it becomes a fertile ground for the view that everything is fine, because the news agenda doesn’t reflect the perspectives of women, who tend to be marginalized,” she explained. She notes that her research has shown for every female voice, there are three male voices in online coverage.
There have been concerted efforts among many organizations to improve diversity across the board, with Kassova’s research showing that a third of women hold top-level leadership positions in newsrooms. However, this hasn’t provided the critical mass previously thought necessary to improve women’s visibility in the news. “The relationship between the number of women in organizational resources, in newsgathering and in news outputs is not linear,” despite previous hypotheses, her report states.
The biggest issue, which particularly impacts younger people, is the culture in newsrooms and news leadership. It continues to be dominated by men who are older, white, educated and richer (MOWERs). “A more homogenous group of people who set the tone, set the culture, set the rules of what constitutes a story, which stories should be prioritized,” said Kassova.
She says that this really inhibits progress when it comes to serving young people. “All these biases lead to substantive organizational challenges, including the under-representation of young editors and reporters, the intersectional invisibility of young female employees, and content of reduced relevance to young audiences,” she recently wrote in Press Gazette.
One starting point when it comes to what to cover is addressing the very strong misunderstanding among people of all ages about what feminism and gender equality is. “There’s a mis-perception that it’s a zero-sum game, where women are elevated at the expense of men,” Kassova pointed out. “There are plenty of publications fuelling that narrative by using condescending terms when they cover either young people, or young men,or men in general. And that doesn’t help.”
“What’s really important is for journalists to educate society as to what it actually means; that it’s not a zero-sum game. There’s so much research that has been done to show that where there is a higher level of gender equality, everyone – including men – tend to be happier, more prosperous, safer… So it’s really important for journalists to act as a conduit for truth and to raise awareness of what feminism means, and what equality means.”
Countering the damaging zero-sum perception involves talking to both feminists and anti-feminists. Kassova explained that journalists covering gender are much less likely to engage with the male perspective of what men find to be troublesome in the narrative around gender. But digging into that can actually unearth some different perspectives and build bridges with reluctant audiences.
“Young people live in different worlds because the social media that we construct for ourselves presents different worlds,” she said. “The only way to bridge that is to reflect people’s different perspectives. And there isn’t enough of that happening. The ideology that we carry too often dictates the sources that we speak to. I think we need to be very mindful to counteract them, to present different perspectives so that everyone feels heard.”
As a practical example, this can be exploring how the millennia-old patriarchy has impacted both men and women. Although women are by far the biggest victims of the system, men suffer from it too. By not engaging with that, we end up with a situation where social issues like the #MeToo movement are presented as a men vs. women conflict.
“We have to stop that,” Kassova highlighted. “You can only achieve gender equality if dominant genders and all genders surrounding work and move in the same direction. What’s happened until now in many feminist narratives is men and women are pitted against each other, very often seeing men purely as perpetrators, and women as victims. And there isn’t a more sophisticated narrative.”
“The way to deal with it is really to be equitable, and to cover issues with compassion rather than judgment. There is not enough solution-based journalism and there is not enough understanding.”
Involve younger audiences in news coverage
With some parts of the news industry contracting significantly, age is something that news leaders have prioritized. But although there is an acute understanding that change needs to happen, this hasn’t always been approached tactically.
“One of the perennial questions strategically is how do we bring younger audiences in?” said Kassova. “But there the conversation tends to be around, how do we make the output that we’ve already thought about, the stories that we’ve already crafted, more attractive to audiences? There isn’t enough self-reflection to look at, what are the organizational barriers that lead us to produce content that is disengaging?”
This links back to the MOWER leadership issue highlighted earlier. The average age of a journalist is 47 in the US, and 43 in the UK, so there is already a generational mismatch between those who produce the news, and those who they want to consume it. But the answer is not necessarily to flock to TikTok.
“What’s really important is for news organizations not to think just about what platforms they go to, but what are the perspectives that haven’t been heard?” explained Kassova. If the structural and cultural issues within newsrooms are addressed, and marginalized perspectives prioritized, the rest will fall into place.
For those who aren’t persuaded by the need to cover underserved audiences, there’s a strong economic incentive too. “Covering more diverse perspectives, and having more equitable coverage leads to increased revenue, because it brings in new audiences,” Kassova pointed out. “There is about $11 billion waiting to be won by the news industry given the consumption gap that exists at the moment: around 11 to 12 percent. If the industry closes this gap by one percentage point a year, then in the next five years, there’s an additional $11 billion to be made.”
We need news coverage that is compassionate and equitable
Polarization in society can be driven by and inflamed by the media. Newsrooms have an important role to play in highlighting women’s perspectives and stories, as well as counteracting some of the misunderstandings and zero-sum arguments around feminism. If these voices aren’t heard, divisions in society, and among younger people, are only going to grow.
“I am a big proponent of equitable coverage and compassionate coverage,” Kassova concluded. “It’s really important because that’s the only way we can actually break the polarization that happens on so many levels; intergenerational, intragenerational societal polarization, global polarization. I think compassion is the glue that will bring us back together.”
One point Kassova was firm on is that more research needs to be done around Gen Z and their attitudes. There may well be growing diverging views within the genders as well, and as an industry, we need to work to understand the drivers of these changes, particularly as we work to build our audiences – and news leaders – of the future.
I recently found myself reflecting on a transformative time in my life. Spurred by an intense desire to remodel my grandmother’s basement, I worked through a difficult period in my youth. But though I was helped by taking action, not to mention my grandmother’s wisdom, I now see how (and why) the superficial changes I made to her home were not enough to keep it upright. It needed the kind of comprehensive overhaul that required expertise I did not then possess.
The experience also helped me understand how important it is to break the cycle of complacency that stands in the way of radical transformation. This mindset – and need for change – applies to the media industry too.
As I recently wrote, I believe that restoring our confidence, our faith in the power and promise of the media industry is the first step towards transformation. Confidence in the news media industry means embracing change, listening to our audience, and delivering information that serves the greater good. It’s a challenge, but one we must confront to remain a relevant and trusted sources of information.
To rebuild trust, we must immerse ourselves in understanding our audience’s needs and concerns. But, while surveys and feedback loops offer insights, they’re only effective if we act upon them. We can’t rely on old slogans or assume we know what’s best for our audience. Instead, for true transformation, the media industry must evolve, adapt, and truly engage with those we serve.
Thinking through the challenges we face in rebuilding confidence as the news media – and trust in the news media – it’s clear that aligning traditional journalistic values with evolving consumer expectations is no easy task. Nowadays, people are inundated with information from various sources, making them more discerning (or even polarized) about what they believe. They’re not just looking for facts; they want information that validates their worldview. This presents a daunting hurdle for journalists. However, it’s crucial that we remain steadfast in our commitment to truth and integrity. While we must evolve to meet the needs of our audience, we must also stay true to our core principles.
Action is essential for media transformation
A crucial step in rebuilding trust and confidence in news media involves identifying community issues and presenting potential solutions. While journalism informs us about various issues, there’s an opportunity to go beyond sensationalism and focus on actionable steps towards resolution. This approach not only empowers our audience, but also fosters advocacy and drives real change within society.
Throughout history, news media has played a pivotal role in catalyzing social change. For example, the Montgomery Advertiser, a local Alabama paper that documented and supported the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott. Their coverage empowered the Black community, brought national attention to the issue of segregation, and ultimately played a part in desegregating public buses. This is the legacy we must strive to uphold.
It’s essential to recognize this power we hold as media and leverage our platform to continue advocating for truth and altruism. By rebranding ourselves as agents of positive change, dedicated to objective reporting and proactive problem-solving, we reaffirm our commitment to serving the public good and recapture our confidence. However, to achieve this vision, we must embrace a dual mindset. We need to evaluate our existing practices critically while fostering a culture of innovation and adaptation.
As someone who values the importance of taking risks, I believe that stepping out of our comfort zones and embracing innovation is essential. By doing so, we can develop products and processes that resonate with today’s audiences, delivering value in impactful ways. It’s time to redefine our approach, embrace change, and chart a course towards a vibrant and sustainable future for news media. Though the challenges may be significant, the potential rewards of a thriving, trusted news industry are immeasurable.
Trust and transformation
Just as a willingness to tackle a basement project unlocked surprising potential, fostering a culture of innovation within news organizations will help us find the way forward. Media transformation starts with leadership—creating an environment where fresh ideas can flourish, not wither under the weight of tradition. This culture of innovation isn’t just beneficial; it’s essential for our long-term sustainability and profitability.
I’ve witnessed firsthand how a lack of openness to new ideas stifles growth and innovation within organizations. Despite overflowing with potential revenue streams, some organizations remain stagnant due to a resistance to change. However, by creating committees dedicated to exploring new possibilities, encouraging brainstorming sessions that welcome even the most “out-there” ideas, and fostering an atmosphere of trust and respect, organizations can unlock their full potential.
Without this culture of innovation, organizations risk stagnation and irrelevance. They risk losing valuable assets—both in terms of talent and revenue opportunities—to competitors who embrace bold strategies and innovative thinking.
Explore new frontiers
Here’s where innovation gets exciting. Imagine news content that isn’t just informative but truly engaging because it leverages new storytelling techniques. Consider multimedia formats such as data visuals, video, podcasts, and other interactive audience components. These approaches don’t just make for an engaging experience; they can make complex issues accessible to a wider audience.
Furthermore, fostering a culture of innovation allows us to humanize the journalists behind the stories. By featuring stories or even more personal or longer bios about the dedication and passion of those who strive to deliver accurate information, we can rebuild trust and connect with our audience on a deeper level. People want to know the faces and stories behind the news. Showcasing the human element of journalism can go a long way in fostering trust.
We must also find ways to showcase the true impact of journalism. By highlighting investigative reports that led to positive change, we can demonstrate the power of journalism to make a difference in society. When audiences see real-world examples of how journalism has improved lives or held powerful institutions accountable, it strengthens their understanding of the vital role the news media plays in a healthy democracy.
Proactively communicate media transformation
To thrive in the ever-evolving landscape of news media, we must flood the market with our message. Message saturation will define our success in the coming decades. If we don’t take ownership of our narrative, others will shape it for us, potentially in ways that don’t reflect our values or contributions.
It’s crucial to convey that news media is not the enemy; we play a vital role in society’s development, understanding, information and speaking truth to power. By articulating our role, we position ourselves for growth and progress on our terms. This foundation is essential for restoring confidence, as it shapes public perception of who we are and what we stand for. While we may already know our identity and purpose, the sheer volume of information available today requires us to actively engage with our audience. We must strike a balance between confidence and visibility to maintain our relevance and influence in the marketplace. Otherwise, we risk being overshadowed by the constant influx of information.
Navigating the complexities of rebuilding trust and relevance in the news media industry, one thing remains clear: confidence is key. It’s not just about embracing change or asserting our importance; it’s about believing in our ability to make a difference.
By fostering a culture of innovation, embracing new storytelling techniques, and actively engaging with our audience, we can reaffirm our commitment to truth, integrity, and the greater good of democracy. With confidence as our cornerstone, we can chart a bold course toward a vibrant and sustainable future for news media. Though the challenges may be daunting, our belief in the power of journalism to inform, inspire, and empower will propel us forward.
Young streamers are more likely to gravitate to user-generated platforms like TikTok and YouTube for their entertainment needs over subscription-based products like Netflix and Max. Streaming services need to update their user experiences, particularly around findability and discoverability, to offer more-personalized content recommendations over generalized suggestions, according to the findings of a new report.
Deloitte’s “2024 Digital Media Trends” study found that 60% of Generation Z video consumers are more likely to watch user-generated content because they “don’t have time to spend searching for what they want to watch.” Half of all respondents say they “abandon an entertainment experience because they can’t find what they’re looking for.”
The findings are problematic for entertainment giants, which are committing large budgets toward the production of original content that aren’t attracting significant audiences. Deloitte says the top six subscription streaming platforms are likely to spend $100 billion on original content production and marketing in 2024 alone. Jeff Loucks, the Executive Director of the Deloitte Center for Technology, Media, and Telecommunications who co-authored the Digital Media Trends report, said that investment is likely to be wasted effort if streamers can’t easily connect to those shows and movies.
The discoverability dilemma
According to Loucks, one big reason why shows and movies aren’t being watched is because streaming platforms make it difficult for that content to be readily discovered, likening the experience of sifting through shows and movies on a streaming service to “the old days of Blockbuster.”
“You’re searching through a bunch of titles, and you can’t agree on what to watch. It’s going to take an hour and a half of your time,” Loucks said. “The content discovery has got to get better.”
Industry experts who spoke with Digital Content Next said they were largely unsurprised by Deloitte’s findings that streamers — particularly younger audiences — were increasingly turning to user-generated content platforms like TikTok and YouTube for their entertainment needs. One often overlooked reason is that platforms like YouTube and TikTok have made heavy investments in their search and discovery algorithms that identify what a person is watching on the regular, and then serve up more content that caters to their interests.
“YouTube and TikTok are scarily accurate and predictive and elemental, whether the content is large-scale or bite-sized,” said Tim Hanlon, the founder and CEO of the media consultancy firm Vertere Group. “Those are all independently describable and ascribable elements, data-rich elements that can be mixed and matched together.”
Loucks agrees that younger viewers are increasingly attracted to short-form content, which can be easily skipped for something new if it isn’t appealing. “Sometimes, people are telling us that they’ve got a lower attention span, and smaller, snackable content is something they’re willing to watch — it’s easier to consume,” Loucks said.
Addressing fragmentation
Embracing short form and the push-based UI of user-generated content platforms won’t serve as a silver bullet that will solve the complex challenges of streaming search and discoverability, however. There are still plenty of consumers who prefer to be entertained by watching feature-length films and episodic TV series — and they’re having the same challenges finding interesting things to watch across apps and platforms, too.
According to a report from Accenture, about 36% of people say they’re exhausted from having to constantly look across platforms and services to find something they want to watch. And 60% of consumers say they’ve churned out of a service because a movie or TV series was dropped, or they thought they’d watched everything there was to watch.
Fragmentation is accelerating these trends, because content that is relatable to a person is spread across different services. “The net impact of fragmentation is the fact that consumers can’t simply find content in consistent places where they want to spend their time,” pointed out Dallas Lawrence, a former communications executive for Roku’s platform.
Lawrence spent a lot of time thinking about this problem at Roku. He noticed that companies spend a lot of time and marketing money drawing customers into their streaming services only to “fail at the five-yard line.”
“They’ve failed to actually consumers with a piece of content they want to watch, and that’s probably one of the biggest challenges today, both from a streamer perspective — to keep people from cycling out — but also from a consumer perspective.”
Lawrence is now the chief strategy and communications officer for Telly, a startup that grabbed headlines last year after promising to offer a free, dual-screen smart TV. Telly packs a lot of features that are meant to entice consumer interest — from a premium screen to an integrated high-fidelity sound bar. They also promise to play nice with any streaming platform that a customer wants to use.
Telly is rooted in the idea that the TV will pay for itself over time through advertisements shown on a secondary screen that sits beneath the main display. Lawrence said Telly is uniquely positioned to help ease the challenges of streaming discovery for consumers and services alike because the device is able to evaluate what someone is watching across any service.
“If I’m watching Bridgerton on the top screen of my Telly, the device is recognizing that, and we’re going to say, hey, maybe you’d like to watch Gilded Age on Max as well,” Lawrence said. “We can throw that ad on the second screen, and when you’re done watching Bridgerton, you just pick up your remote and click into Gilded Age. The ability for us to recognize what someone is watching now, and then pull them into new content with a single click before they’ve turned off the TV or cycled out, that will have huge benefits.”
Streaming discoverability beyond the EPG
For now, Telly is the only dual-screen device on the market that can seamlessly pull off this experience. However, the idea of using viewing habits to deliver personalized results and improve streaming discoverability is not unique and can be franchised by other services.
Instead, streaming services seem to be defaulting to antiquated ways of browsing across content, complains former CBS executive Adam Wiener, who now operates his own media consulting firm Continuous Media.
Wiener says that subscription-based platforms have adopted the “endless scroll,” which allows consumers to quickly flip through movies and TV shows. Often, however, this approach fails offer personalized content recommendations the way user-generated platforms like TikTok and YouTube do. Free, ad-supported platforms and some premium pay TV services that deliver linear content are even worse, Wiener notes. That’s because they’ve embraced the grid-style electronic program guide (EPG) that was used by cable and satellite platforms for decades, but hasn’t kept up with the times.
“The problem with the EPG is that it’s the clunky thing of yesteryear, and it also doesn’t include all the things that you may be interested in,” Wiener opined. “An EPG should know that I never, ever watch reality shows, and it should never show those things to me.”
Endless scrolling and EPGs also reveal another problem: There is a lot of stuff to watch. According to Nielsen’s State of Play report, there are now more than 2.7 million unique titles across hundreds of streaming services, and the sheer volume of content libraries can leave consumers feeling extremely overwhelmed and make finding something to watch seem impossible.
“It’s the paradox of choice,” Wiener says. “The age-old discussion that it becomes tiring to scroll through a screen, the thought that maybe if I continue scrolling right, I might find something more interesting…and then it feels like you can’t choose, like you have to settle for something, and you just hope that it’s good.”
Hanlon agrees: “When everything is a choice, there’s a paralysis that occurs when you either revert to something you know from the past, or you’re looking for signals to grasp,” Hanlon said. “What services wind up having to do is dumb things down and simplify it to the point where it becomes pages and pages of tiles or, worse, a search box.”
AI leads the way for streaming discoverability
Wiener and Hanlon both point to generative artificial intelligence (AI) as a solution that can help ease a lot of the pain points associated with streaming search and discovery. At least one company is already embracing the idea: Earlier this month, Cineverse said it was working on a new AI-powered content recommendation engine called cineSearch.
Using metadata provided by Nielsen’s Gracenote and an AI platform powered by Google’s Gemini language model, cineSearch will power a forthcoming consumer chatbot called Ava that aims to offer personalized TV shows and movies across apps and services — even if the content isn’t offered by Cineverse itself.
“Our partnership with Gracenote increases the number of films and TV shows that are discoverable by users and allows us to offer cineSearch users the highest-quality title information with intensity rankings – when paired with a user’s viewing history, streaming service filters and content preferences – will help solve a major consumer issue and the leading cause of viewer frustration,” Tony Huidor, the Chief Technical Officer at Cineverse, said in a statement.
Deloitte’s Media Trends report suggests companies like Cineverse are on the right track. According to the report “streaming services should look to the engagement models of social media services to improve their own content delivery strategies, making a more concerted effort to leverage user data and AI technologies to target content toward individual viewers.” Loucks affirms that video platforms should want to embrace generative AI solutions to improve their content recommendation engines.
“Each service is going to have to work on having a user interface that is good and that works better, and I think generative AI is going to be a big part of that,” Loucks said.
Discoverability delivers streaming audiences
Audiences expect personalized experiences. According to a November 2023 report by Google Cloud, 81% of streaming video viewers “expect streaming services to provide highly personalized experiences,” and 31% will switch out of a service if they can’t find something they want to watch. Worse, nearly half of respondents say they’ve canceled a service in the past “if they couldn’t find something to watch,” Google Cloud revealed. Clearly improving streaming content discoverability is critical for success.
The experts and the data reveal common themes: Streamers don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to find something to watch. And if a video platform makes an investment in personalized search and discovery, that is where audiences — especially younger viewers — will spend their time.
