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Perspectives

DCN’s media industry must reads: week of September 26, 2024

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Advertising | Perspectives | Press

A recap of week two of US v. Google II

Following a four-and-a-half-hour cross-examination of economist Robin S. Lee, the DOJ rested its case-in-chief Friday September 20. Friday, we also got to see what Google has in store for its defense, which continues in earnest this week.

If Google’s first witness serves as any indication, it’ll be a long week of the company’s textbook weaponized complexity, jazz-hands, and word games. So, some of us in the courtroom made our own word games to help pass the time: I’ve created more Buzzword Bingo cards for the week for those that are in EDVA. But why should we get all the fun?

Click here to download our US v. Google II crossword puzzle.

Now, as week three of this monumental trail begins, here’s a recap from inside the courtroom of week two along with predictions on what we can expect this week.

Revelations and receipts from week 2

More detail can be found in my daily updates, but here are some key moments from last week, with receipts (i.e. Trial Exhibits).

1. Google thought Yield Manager tech was “irrelevant.” Yet they paid $100M over valuation to “park it somewhere.”

While some have pointed out that Google integrated the Yield Management capabilities, the discussion at trial was focused on the RTB capabilities Google chose to deprecate to perpetuate AdX’s advantage via Dynamic Allocation. (See: PTX0085, PTX0112, PTX0060, PTX0058).

2. The IAB Tech Lab declined to take in Prebid.js because Google, its largest funder at the time, “vehemently objected.”

For more on this, have a listen to the Marketecture podcast featuring Brian O’Kelley, and check out AdExchanger’s coverage. It would have been nice to be able to point to a response here from IAB Tech Lab, but it doesn’t seem like that is going to happen.

3. The sell-side product team wanted to make Exchange Bidding much better than Header Bidding to legitimately serve the interests of publisher customers. Leadership told them to aim lower.

Jonathan Bellack’s testimony shed more light on internal dynamics, reminiscent of Eisar Lipkovitz’ comments that “the machine won.” Bellack wanted EB to be a superior product that wins over publishers, but leadership said “slightly better” is good enough.

What is the incentive to invest in innovation that serves the interests of customers when they have nowhere else to go? The market power is further illustrated by a 2014 experime which revealed that Google could profitably raise GDN prices by +7% for buyers to hit a higher margin target without a care in the world.

What to expect during week 3

Google’s first witness was sell-side sales VP, Scott Sheffer, who has been with the company for 18 years and counting. They began with a charade that came to be known as the adtech Spaghetti Football, where Sheffer walked through a clearly-rehearsed exercise of mapping out Google’s view of the adtech ecosystem. Naturally, Google is everywhere.

Those in the courtroom seriously questioned the strategy behind the use of this visual because it so clearly illustrates that Google’s control over the adtech ecosystem extends well beyond even the scope of this trial. Google has been known to weaponize complexity. The less people feel they understand, the more susceptible they become to Google’s narrative filling in the blanks. However, if their big plan is to confuse Judge Brinkema into siding with them, they may want to consider that strategy.

This approach further backfired when the DOJ untangled the graphic in order to leave only the products on-screen that allow publishers to indirectly sell display ad inventory on their websites, and enable advertisers to buy it.

Indeed, Google’s approach at this point appeared to be off to a very rocky start. As for where Google may be headed, the company faces some significant roadblocks:

  1. Before they started their case-in-chief, Judge Brinkema already made it clear that there’s no way Google wpi;d be allowed to call six witnesses related to government advertising. “One, maybe two,” she said. Three of the planned six were advertisers, and three were Google account managers on government business.
  2. If Google had been planning to call a lot of their long-time employees, they’re likely reconsidering that after Judge Brinkema suggested much of Sheffer’s testimony was “tainted” and “highly questionable” given Google had already been on notice about litigation during the events he attempted to recount. The DOJ has done a great job of ensuring the spoliation issues remain a constant rain cloud over the heads of their opponents and their witnesses. Nevertheless, I’m sure we’ll hear from at least one engineer about how daunting it would have been to enable unrestricted real-time bidding on third party exchanges, or to allow publishers to get AdX real-time pricing in ad servers other than DFP.
  3. Google’s full witness list also included a lot of “Grow with Google” businesses and small publishers, and Sheffer’s testimony leaned heavily into Google’s purported goal to foster the creator economy. If they’re planning on calling more than one or two of each, they are likely in for another rude awakening.
  4. We can expect that Google will over-index on expert witnesses. The core of their defense is to play games with market definition and to reframe tying and exclusionary conduct as legitimate refusals to deal. We already have a preview of we’ll hear (at length) from Mark Israel.
  5. We can expect that Google will rely significantly on deposition read-ins, where they don’t have to worry about unexpected cross-examination, and can cherry-pick what they feel they need to be part of the official record, with a keen eye on the inevitable appeal.

It’s slim pickings on what Judge Brinkema will allow, much less find compelling, so it makes sense that they expect to wrap up their case-in-chief by Thursday. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s sooner, now that they’ve been told that testimony by conflicted loyalists will not be persuasive.

Google’s games and tricks

One of my observations throughout Google’s defense is their affinity for jumping from side to side as it suits their argument. They bob-and-weave around the DOJ’s allegations by speaking to alleged advertiser benefits of conduct that harmed publishers, and publisher benefits of conduct that harmed rivals. The most frustrating manifestation of this is via their argument that the DOJ’s markets are overly-narrow and gerrymandered. Google loves to try to land the point that certain channels can be interchangeable to advertisers, and that they do face competition in the single two-sided market they insist adtech is. This completely evades the DOJ’s core point.

The DOJ has focused heavily on publishers as the key victims of Google’s conduct, with a specific focus on the majority of publishers that have both direct sold and indirectly sold display ad inventory on their websites, and thus need an ad server. No amount of alleged advertiser alternatives addresses the stronghold Google has publishers in. Only when pressed does Google point to a swath of (impractical and incomplete) alternatives available to publishers (e.g. running prebid.js without an ad server, or using two ad servers, where one of them is still GAM).

It often makes this trial feel like watching chickens and ducks try to have a conversation, and Google revels in this game of rhetorical fallacies. Ultimately, however, dancing around the core issues and harm to publishers only makes Google’s alleged stated ambition to fund the world’s information appear that much more disingenuous.

earlier coverage:

A recap of week one of US v. Google II

Featured Post | Innovation | Perspectives

Is the fediverse the future of news distribution on the social web?

Not that long ago, using the social web as a news distribution platform was a relatively straightforward process: all you had to do was grab the headline and maybe a photo and then post it to Twitter and Facebook — where most news publishers and journalists already had verified accounts with thousands or even tens of thousands of followers — and then watch the pageviews and clicks roll in. Over the past year or so, however, changes to both Twitter and Facebook have made the social-web approach less and less useful; in many ways, both services have gone from being either neutral or somewhat useful as a distribution mechanism to being actively hostile environments.

In the case of Twitter, now known as X, the acquisition by Elon Musk has changed the nature of the service in a number of ways. For one thing, the algorithm that determines who sees what has been altered, based on unknown criteria. So, many publishers and journalists now say they get less engagement from the platform than they were used to in the past. There also seems to be a lot more content that is racist, sexist, or is otherwise disturbing and/or uncomfortable — as a result of what Musk claims is a commitment to freedom of speech. All of this makes the platform seem like a much less hospitable environment for traditional news and journalistic content.

Facebook, meanwhile, has backtracked on some or all of the commitments it made in the past to journalism and the media, by canceling or downsizing funding it used to provide through a variety of programs under the former Facebook Journalism Project. Most of the staff associated with those programs have left or been reassigned, and the platform has made it clear that the newsfeed algorithm will not be promoting or recommending news content in general. Facebook and its parent Meta have removed news from the Canadian version of the service as a protest over a new law designed to force digital platforms to pay publishers for the news content they carry.

What is the fediverse?

Some see the emerging “fediverse” as a potential solution to these issues, or at the very least a workaround. As Rande Price recently wrote for DCN recently, the word fediverse is an umbrella term that covers dozens of different social platforms, from Mastodon (a Twitter alternative) to Lemmy, one of the fediverse’s would-be replacements for Reddit. 

Each of these services has different features and a different design, but they all have a few things in common: they are all open source, meaning the source code that powers them is freely available for anyone to download and modify. They are also all “federated,” meaning they can interoperate with each other — posts or content from one service can be easily cross-posted to another platform, or at the very least they can be exported and then imported. This is all powered by an open-source programming system called ActivityPub.

That may not sound like a big deal, but when you think about the way that content is siloed in the current environment, it definitely sounds like an improvement. Twitter or X allows you to download all of your posts and other data in bulk — something that the previous management regime put in place — but it doesn’t make it easy to import it anywhere or do anything with it. Crossposting of tweets or posts can be automated with third-party tools such as Buffer or dlvr.it, but the process inevitably fails at certain points because Twitter and Facebook don’t really want you to crosspost things. Each of them wants your content to live on their platform and nowhere else.

One recent exception to this rule is Threads, the new-ish service from Meta. Launched in July of 2023 as a spin-off from Instagram, Threads grew rapidly — so rapidly that it was one of the fastest-growing social services in history, gaining 100 million users in a matter of days. In another first, Threads also said from the beginning that it wanted to join the fediverse by allowing Threads posts to be federated, so that people using a fediverse client could follow a user on Threads without having to set up their own Threads account. Others are also working on fediverse integration, including Tumblr, Flipboard, and Medium, and so are some individual publishers, including 404 Media and The Verge. While it’s difficult to say exactly how many people are part of the fediverse, one estimate puts the number at almost 12 million.

Meta has kept its Threads promise

It’s probably fair to say that there was a massive amount of skepticism about Meta’s pledge to join the fediverse, since the company is not exactly known for being open to other services. In fact, Facebook is notorious for down-ranking posts that contain external links, and Instagram won’t even let users post links with their content. Instead, they have to use a third-party service to add links to their bio, and then point users there, something that is so user-hostile it’s hard to believe that it still exists. Therefore, it seemed hard to believe that Meta’s hostility to external links would suddenly change.

As difficult as it might have been to believe, however, Meta actually followed through on its promise. In March, the Threads accounts belonging to Threads manager Adam Mosseri and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined the fediverse, when the company implemented a sharing or federation mechanism that allowed anyone with a Mastodon account to follow them from the Mastodon app without having to have a Threads account. Meta has said that it is now rolling out this feature across the service.

Why would Threads do this? One possible answer is that, since Threads is the underdog compared to Twitter, Meta is hoping to use integration with the fediverse as a lever to quickly expand its user base. One internet rule of thumb has been that platforms and services that see themselves as the underdog are alway much more interested in interoperability than incumbents or monopolies are. Whether smaller incumbents are willing to look favorably on this behavior is very much an open question. A number of servers have blocked Threads integration because they believe it is going to overwhelm their services, or because they view Facebook and its ilk as a negative element.

The upside of fediverse distribution

That’s one possible downside. However, for publishers and others interested in reaching the broadest cross-section of users, Threads joining the fediverse provides a potential positive solution. One of the problems with the fediverse from an institutional standpoint is that it consists of so many services — Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, and Friendica to name a few — with so many different terms of service and behavior rules and other criteria that it can be hard to navigate the landscape as a publisher or news outlet interested in distributing content in the most efficient way possible.

If Threads continues its push into the fediverse, that problem could be mitigated. In this case, all a publisher would have to do is post to Threads, and have that content distributed through all of the other services that Threads is federated to. While that may solve one problem, however, doing so could create two new potential problems. One is that posting content indiscriminately to multiple social networks can be seen by users as spam-like activity, and therefore might not be received well. A second problem is that doing this would mean ceding a lot of control over a publisher’s social strategy to Threads, and therefore to Meta, which some might see as a step backwards.

In some senses, it’s a Catch-22: publishers who try to make use of all of these different platforms individually could wind up stretching themselves too thin, producing little return from a social strategy. But those who outsource their distribution to Threads and the fediverse could also wind up getting hit by a backlash, which would blunt the effectiveness of the strategy. The only possible upside is that since the fediverse is still relatively new, it’s not totally clear how it is going to evolve. But those who spend a little time experimenting with it could find themselves ahead of the curve, and wind up learning a lot about social interaction along the way.

Perspectives

DCN’s media industry must reads: week of September 19, 2024

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Advertising | Perspectives | Policy

A recap of week one of US v. Google II

With week one of US v. Google II in the books, let’s take stock of where things stand, and what’s to come.

For most of us (particularly those of us in the courtroom), last week’s big moments are as much about revelation as validation.  We learned what we all have suspected about all of the times Google definitively knew the perception, effect, and harms of their conduct, and did what they wanted to anyway, because they could.

The DOJ wove together a compelling narrative around its allegations of the ways in which Google’s abuse of dominance across their trifecta of monopolies left publishers with little choice, and even less control. According to the DOJ:

  • Google used its existing search dominance to amass the demand of millions of search advertisers within their ad network.
  • Google acquired the dominant ad server and tied it to the ad exchange. Google Ads demand was made exclusive to the AdX exchange, which gave its ad server (f/k/a DFP) exclusive access to real-time pricing information from the exchange.
  • Sitting on both sides, Google made unilateral rules that disadvantaged its competitors, harmed its customers, and entrenched its dominance, all the while extracting monopoly rents.

Revelations and receipts

More detail can be found in my daily updates from the trial. But here are some key moments from last week, with receipts (aka Trial Exhibits).

  1. Google knew they were overcharging but why lower prices if you don’t have to? See: PTX0612 (below), PTX0624(below), PTX0864. Google knew that the 20% take rate was about double the market norm, but that they were insulated from price pressure by their AdWords unique demand.
  • When publishers found a way to take back control and reduce their dependency via Header Bidding, Google made it their mission to thwart it. See: PTX0444. Google employees openly discussed that Header Bidding was an existential threat.
  • Evidence suggests that Google knew Publishers wanted so badly to get out of the chokehold that they were even willing to lose some revenue in order to regain control.
    See, e.g. PTX1854 – transcript of Google / Publisher partner meeting about bundle of changes: moving to 1st Price Auction, Removing First Look, UPR (April 2019)

Layser’s testimony earlier in the week, as I wrote, contained the most poignant moment in the trial thus far, outlining Google’s unfair, unilateral decisions. Her testimony, and the below excerpts illuminate the two central themes of the trial: Google’s control and the company’s conflicts of interest.

More on conflicts from Eisar Lipkovitz’s 2023 deposition:

What’s coming next

The DOJ expects to wrap up their side sometime this coming week. This is about half of the three-week timeframe they originally anticipated for this trial. It also reflects the tight ship Judge Brinkema is running.

This week, we’ll be hearing from a couple of expert witnesses, a few more industry participants, and at least four Google employees/Xooglers.

  1. Monday: Neal Mohan, current YouTube CEO, previously on Ads business, coming over from DoubleClick
  2. Tuesday: Nirmal Jayaram, Sr. Director, Engineering
  3. Wednesday: Scott Spencer, Xoogler and ex-DoubleClick, former VP of Product Management
  4. Thursday: Jonathan Bellack, Xoogler, Director of Project Management

Bellack is key to the case

It is quite possible that Bellack will be the DOJ’s closing act. That’s because Bellack is a long-time employee that had been at DoubleClick since 2004, coming over to Google with the acquisition. He served in many product management-focused roles on the sell-side, including leading the unification of DFP and AdX under GAM. His name has appeared just about daily in emails and documents entered into evidence during the examinations of Xooglers like Eisar Lipkovitz, Brad Bender, and Rahul Srinivasan. (For more on each of these folks, check out our Witness Database.)

  1. At the end of 2022, Bellack reportedly told Google that he was looking to leave the company, after nearly 15 years. About two months later, on January 20th, 2023, he was exited. Interestingly, the DOJ’s complaint against Google was also filed in January of 2023.
  2. He was vocal about leaving, and about the abrupt nature of his departure. As he says in his interview about his exit, he was “aggressively” compensated, and isn’t worried about money.
  3. Bellack is involved in projects to support local journalism in his home town, and he joined the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard after leaving Google, where he “is building a team of technologists to invent new social media approaches that center the public interest.” In the latter part of his career, he wants to be a “great helper.”

He appears unfettered by golden handcuffs, and isn’t gagged by contract. But undoubtedly, there are personal loyalties that Bellack still holds. He thanks Neal Mohan (who testifies tomorrow), saying he “never stopped fighting” for him in his blog. Nevertheless, for the above reasons, and given that he seems to be the last Xoogler the DOJ plans to call, this is one I’m awaiting eagerly.

Courtroom vibes

One of the interesting dynamics in the courtroom is how Google appears to be using one of their (many, many) defense team associates to run post-its back and forth to its comms team/spin-factory throughout the day. I’ve talked before about how control is Google’s strategy. Controlling the narrative is a big part of this.

As I watch this play out each day, I am reminded of the critical importance of journalism and public access to information to a healthy market and functioning democracy — exactly what is at stake in this very trial. It is a reminder of why we and our partners created usvgoogleads.com and created resources there to help others do their own analysis and form their own opinions. The public silence the IAB and the ANA about this trial alone speaks volumes about the power Google wields.

It is a reminder each day of why I am incredibly proud to be here on the ground, and to have the opportunity to help keep you all informed. Let’s keep all eyes on Google. The future of journalism depends on it.

Perspectives

DCN’s media industry must reads: week of September 12, 2024

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

Perspectives

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Perspectives

DCN’s media industry must reads: week of August 15, 2024

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Perspectives

DCN’s media industry must reads: week of August 8, 2024

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Featured Post | Industry-Research | Perspectives

Engaging young audiences: top trends and tactics

In today’s media landscape, engaging younger audiences is both a challenge and an opportunity for newsrooms. Understanding the media habits and preferences of Gen Z is crucial for the sustainability and long-term relevance of players across the media industry. 

Two recent papers, the latest Digital News Report and FT Strategies Next Gen News Study, offer valuable insights into younger audiences and strategies for effectively reaching and engaging them.

Here are the key trends media executives need to be aware of, followed by suggestions about how to act on them to improve engagement among young audiences. 

Trend 1: A preference for digital 

Not surprisingly, we need to start with (or truly accept) the shift away from traditional media habits. Having grown up with media on-demand and the ability to consume on mobile devices, younger audiences tend to access content very differently from their parents.

In terms of news media, as Nic Newman – the lead author of the Digital News Report – notes, younger audiences are “much less likely to use traditional sources such as TV and radio news and much more likely to access via social media, aggregators, and search.”

Instead, preference is usually given to both short-form and long-form video content on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. “The youngest group (Gen Z) are most likely to say that social media is their main source of news,” Newman adds. 

Trend 2: Authenticity over traditional credentials

Another critical shift can be seen in concepts of credibility. Traditional benchmarks such as awards and brand recognition, hold less sway with younger consumers, observes FT Strategies’ Liat Fainman-Adelman. 

Instead, perceptions of authenticity are key to this group’s definition of trustworthiness.

“Someone who identifies with a certain community / group or has lived through that event is seen as more credible in covering a related news event,” Fainman-Adelman explains. “Someone documenting their daily life in Ukraine on TikTok may be more popular and trusted than a trained journalist sent to cover the war.”

This trend helps explain the gravitation towards individuals over institutions seen in both reports. 

“Young people want to feel connected to those who are delivering them news and information,” Fainman-Adelman contends. “It’s important for them to see who they really are and understand their underlying motivations.”

Trend 3: A level of news skepticism

Gen Z audiences want to understand the motivations and identities of the people behind the news. However, the formats used by many traditional media outlets often fail to speak to this need. In turn, this has led to a heightened skepticism towards the traditional news media. 

“Individual contributors are seen as more personable and relatable than a faceless byline,” Fainman-Adelman says. 

Subsequently, Newman explains, “because they are exposed to so many different sources, and see so many different perspectives, young people tend to [be] highly skeptical of most information and often question the ‘agenda’ of all news sources including mainstream news providers.”

This tendency is also heightened by the more “lean back” approach seen among many younger users, whereby they consume media in a more passive – and less intentional – manner. Their media experiences are often mediated through algorithms, rather than by going direct to specific sources. 

That means this group is “much less likely to have a connection with traditional news brands preferring the news to come to them,” Newman says, observing how relationships are “driven more by relevance of the content itself rather than where it comes from.” 

Trend 4: Broader definitions of “the news”

Younger audiences also have a looser, more fluid, interpretation of what is news and the trusted sources that are sharing it (e.g. alternative/independent sources, personalities and influencers). 

As Newman outlined in an email interview, “young people make a distinction between ‘the news’ as the narrow, traditional agenda of politics and current affairs and ‘news’ as a much wider umbrella encompassing topics like sports, entertainment, celebrity gossip, culture, and science.

“Often they see narrow(ly-defined) news as a chore to spend as little time with as possible. But are prepared to spend more time with passions and diversions.” 

Trend 5: Navigating information overload 

Participants in FT Strategies’ study were born after the year 2000. “That’s had a pretty significant impact on how they interact with media and technology,” Fainman-Adelman told me via email.

Growing up in the digital age, young audiences are adept at filtering the large volume of content we are exposed to every day to find the material that interests them. That’s one reason why short-form media is particularly appealing to them. 

And despite concerns about shorter attention spans, FT Strategies found that younger audiences do engage in long-form content (e.g. podcasts, online videos etc.) if it is of interest to them.

Five strategic recommendations for media companies to engage younger audiences

Given these insights, media players need to adopt a multifaceted approach to engage younger audiences. Of course, this demographic is not an homogeneous group. Nevertheless, we can identify a number of broad characteristics that publishers should be looking to adopt.

Here are five key approaches media executives need to implement (if you have not already):

Tactic 1: Embrace visually-oriented social networks 

Prioritize platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, where younger people spend much of their time. As Newman notes, the last few Digital News reports have shown that younger audiences are increasingly turning to these networks for news and other content. 

Although media outlets tend to prioritize connections that they can monetize, Fainman-Adelman suggests “developing socially native content to build brand awareness on platforms (and eventually transitioning to more direct relationships).” 

“Engaging the next generation will be crucial for legacy media’s sustainability and reducing the gap now will undoubtedly pay off in the long run,” Fainman-Adelman believes.

Tactic 2: Understand platform dynamics 

YouTube, Instagram and TikTok have some shared qualities, but audiences use them differently. Creators need to tailor content based on the features and audience expectations of each network. 

Fainman-Adelman advises, “Ensuring that news media is highly accessible (e.g., in terms of language, tone, humor) and engaging (e.g., multimedia, interactive, participatory). This “will be critical for building and retaining loyal audiences in the long run.”

Tactic 3: Emphasize authenticity

Shifts in tone are also key to providing a sense of intimacy and authenticity younger audiences crave. The Next Gen News report identifies “how social media personalities’ lived experiences boosted their authenticity and relatability when it came to certain topics.” 

This can be hard for mainstream outlets to replicate. But, the Digital News Report highlights younger players – such as Dylan Page (aka News Daddy) in the UK, Vitus Spehar (best known for Under the Desk News on TikTok) in the USA and Hugo Travers (Hugo Décrypte) in France – which others can learn from. 

Stressing transparency in reporting processes and clearly distinguishing between news, analysis, and opinion can also help build credibility among skeptical younger viewers.

Tactic 4: Embrace diversity

This can take many forms, including using formats such as short videos, podcasts, and interactive articles that are engaging and accessible. Broadening the range of topics covered and adopting a more conversational tone can also make news more appealing to Gen Z audiences.

Meanwhile, FT Strategies make the case for “partnering with creators, empowering editorial talent to share their [personal] stories, and … [hiring] younger and more diverse journalists who are permitted to express themselves in an authentic way, particularly on social media.” 

Sophia Smith Galer (ex-BBC and Vice News) and Taylor Lorenz (The Washington Post) were identified by the report’s Advisory Board as exemplars with large social media followings who enable “their authentic personalities to shine through their work.”

Tactic 5: Change the narrative

“One of the most profound shifts we’ve seen among younger audiences is who and what they see as trustworthy” Fainman-Adelman says.

Media players need to learn from this and avoid doing things the way that they always have done. Afterall, for many younger audiences, these tried and trusted techniques don’t resonate with them. 

Changing the paradigm means being clearer about editorial processes, funding sources, and potential biases. A genuine openness to feedback and audience engagement also matters. 

Incorporating solutions journalism and more positive narratives may also help. Offering content that provides hope and inspires action can resonate with younger demographics (and others), moving away from the “doom and gloom” narrative many consumers associate with the media. 

Bringing it all together

Engaging more effectively with younger audiences requires a deep understanding of their media habits and preferences. There are also potential long-term benefits to this too. As Fainman-Adelman reminds us, “several studies show that young people are often accurate predictors for broader shifts in society.”

Existing trends like widespread multimedia consumption, passively accessing content via social and other indirect ways (instead of doing direct), as well as a desire for shifts in the tone and breadth of content being provided, are here to stay. And they are only going to become more mainstream.

As a result, media players must be willing to experiment with new formats and approaches. These should prioritize authenticity, relevance, diverse content and more diverse voices. Through this, news organizations and publishers will be better placed to build trust and loyalty among younger audiences.

In doing this, Newman reminds us that “mainstream news brands cannot please all young people all the time due to the fragmented ways in which they consume media.” But, he says, “they can give themselves a better chance of being chosen more often.”

As the media landscape continues to evolve, those who adapt will not only survive but thrive. In an increasingly fragmented environment, adopting these strategies to connect with younger audiences can transform media organizations into trusted and preferred content sources for both the next generation and everyone else.

Perspectives

DCN’s media industry must reads: week of August 1, 2024

Here are some of the best media stories our team has read so far this week:

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