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Data and tablets: the future of media


As the advent of Facebook, Twitter and "citizen journalism" is forcing a sea of change in traditional journalism, the popular image is of a moribund business, being pushed to the wall by declining ad revenues.

The reality, however, is more nuanced, according to the speakers at Thursday's Future Media Forum at RIA Novosti, and it is up to media organizations to learn how to evolve in order to survive in a new, more mobile digital environment - especially with the increasingly dominant tablet.

"The web was fantastic as a distribution mechanism, but it lost the packaging of great media," said Chris Anderson, a businessman and the former editor of Wired magazine. "The tablet is an opportunity to keep the curated [professional] design experience of great media, and match that with the distribution efficiencies of digital."

The rise of data

New forms of media consumption are simply the backdrop to a greater shift: the growing presence of data in presenting news.

"Today it is perfectly evident to me that it is the number, the skill of working data, of taking a data stream and releasing it in a publication, undertaking one stream and releasing others," said Svetlana Mironyuk, editor-in-chief of RIA Novosti, in her introductory comments. "It is probably an integral requirement of modern journalism."

Aron Pilhofer, interactive news editor at The New York Times, and Bella Hurrell, assistant editor of visual journalism at BBC News, presented widely different examples of data visualization online.

Pilhofer demonstrated part of "Snow Fall," a Pulitzer Prize-winning multimedia feature about a 2012 avalanche in Washington state that used video, photo slide shows and 3D moving infographics to enhance the material in the text.

"Storytelling takes many forms," he said. "Some of them, many of them - in our case, all of them - are visual, not a traditional narrative."

Hurrell said that editors should consider the relevance of information to their audiences when considering multimedia features - such as interactive calculators of the cost of fuel or changes in tax rates.

"We've found that users tend to care most about stories when [the stories] tell them something about themselves," she said.

Data on readership

Media companies also need to understand data in order to improve audience figures and revenues in an uneasy environment - and they already have the data in place, if they track what individual users are reading.

"Media companies have better data and are in a better position than many of the social networks," Lutz Finger, co-founder and director of data analysis firm Fisheye Analytics, told the forum.

The change in the position, he said, was when media stopped being "gatekeepers" of audience information for advertisers, and social networks started assuming that role. The error of the business model for social networks is relying on users clicking on ads their friends have clicked on - which works in few categories other than retail.

The error in media companies is a failure to adjust their advertising business model, from a focus on reach - the traditional model of the gatekeepers - to a focus on click-through rates, through targeted advertising.

"If you read a lot of articles on automotive, there's a high likelihood that I could get you to click on an automotive ad," Finger said. "Personal behavior is more important than the behavior of your friends."

Redefinition

Media materials are likely to be increasingly identified and integrated with the devices people use to read or view them - a feature that is probably not a novelty, considering the 20th-century icon of the broadsheet.

Andrei Dubovskov, president of mobile service provider MTS, highlighted the complementarity of media and telecoms in the era of mobile technology.

"We have lived apart for a very long time," he said. "We have not seen each other and did not notice each other, and now probably correctly say that a time of synergy has begun."

The relationship of media outlets to readers will also change. Describing a "freemium" model, whereby video games and websites offer free content as a way to entice readers to become subscribers, Wired's former editor Anderson cited it as an ideal structure for the tablet not just mechanically, but also ideologically.

"Media don't have to depend on advertising, and it rights a century-long wrong, which is that the advertising dependency of media meant that the customer wasn't the reader, it was the advertiser," he said. "The great thing about the ‘freemium' model is that the person who pays for the content is the person who consumes it."

A broader reach

Both Anderson and Finger tried to relieve concerns about the future of the journalistic profession, perceived to be under threat from the emergence of citizen journalism that social networks have abetted.

Anderson, now the CEO of 3D Robotics and the founder of a civilian drone manufacturer, told the forum that the boundaries between media and non-media companies have become blurred, since all companies produce content, and journalistic skills are needed to draw attention to a company's products.

"There's this vast demand for editorial qualities, skills, techniques, outside of media," he said.

Finger took an inverted view, using the concept of "mindspace" - that its invasion by a greater variety of parties, from companies to governments to journalists themselves, makes it harder to ascertain the truth of events and trends, which carves out a space for traditional media in their redefined form.

"The future model of media is also to guard the truth," he said.

Read other articles of the print issue "The Moscow News #25"