Reluctance to innovate is biggest threat to newsroom
“In today’s times, are factchecking and news treated as two separate concepts?” This was the question that digital and social media consultant Lara Ayoub opened her session with at the WAN-IFRA conference on Tuesday. Her session was titled ‘Content creation and distribution’.
She briefly spoke up about her journey of quitting the newsroom in 2012 when it wasn’t adapting itself to the digital medium. Explaining the much-needed synergy between the print and online medium, she said: “The print and digital medium need to work closer to create content for the readers. The readers today are increasingly fragmented as they consume content through different mediums like websites, apps, Facebook, Twitter etc.”
The point was further drawn home by Dmitry Shishkin, BBC World Service Digital Development Editor, BBC, UK. He shared that the only way to succeed in the digital space is to keep coming up with innovative content as you need to try different formats like YouTube videos, animations, cartoons and any other medium that adds value to your readers and differentiates you from others. “There is no future in digital in being beige,” was his statement that stood out.
“The biggest threat to a newsroom,” according to him, “is the reluctance to innovate.” And true enough, we often hear statements like “I am not technical” or “the newsroom will never allow that” in a newspaper organisation that is undergoing a transition to digital space.
He listed three reasons why digital content fails – a) No USP in the content for the readers to keep coming to your platform, b) No data-based decisions in the newsroom and c) Not giving journalists enough chance to fail. He explained this last aspect bt saying: “If your editors don’t analyse data as part of your work flow, you are going to fail. Also, instead of just looking at the most popular stories, you need to look at the least popular items and analyse the reasons.” There is no point spending 50 per cent of your time creating content that only gets 10 per cent readership.
He stressed on the thought that mobile first journalism doesn’t necessarily mean writing short pieces. “Readers are willing to read long pieces and that means you need to write real journalism content for the digital platform.” For a newsroom to be truly digital, it needs to be driven by a strong leadership with three skills – product, editorial and organisation.
Also, most importantly there is a need for diversification in the newsroom — a need to add more women. “The news media is dominated by guys trying to cater and engage to a different gender and we are not serving them well.”
anita@khaleejtimes.com