NEWS SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2014 3 The next BIG WAVE Newspapers already successfully faced “new modes of circulating intelligence” in the past. They overcame the gloomy prediction of James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the New York Herald who predicted in 1845 that the telegraph - the disruptive tech of the time – would put many newspapers out of business. While newspapers are constantly predicted to die, they are actually enjoying the largest audiences ever, continue to play a critical role in our communities, remain a good invest-ment and can still address the many challenges of hyper-connected societies by pooling intelligence from its network of peers. Research and innovation is key to the future of the news media value chain. For decades, almost centuries, this innovation has been mostly pushed by the publishers’ industrial partners. With so many big tech providers im-pacted by the weak market conditions in print, this vital innovative input from traditional industry providers is about to dry. This bears major risks. We will not see anymore progress into ways professional news is produced, delivered and consumed, except if News media companies reclaim their capacity to innovate for themselves, coop-erating with a renewed set of partners coming from the emerging technologies ecosystem. Collaboration is key to innovation Why is it vital to embrace collective thinking on how to better connect media businesses with start-ups and re-search centres ? Tom Negrete, Director of Innovation & News Operations at Sacramento Bee, California, provided me with the best arguments. Like many of his colleagues he understands the «need for traditional news publish-ers to evolve from a culture that is insular, guarded and top-down in its decision making to one that is collabora-tive, intellectually curious and data-driven in its decision making.» Innovation produces value only if it is part of an ecosystem. You do not innovate if you are isolated and every media company needs suppliers and partners to ac-celerate the technology transfer from innovation to business. Sacramento Bee with Stanford University and the University of Southern California, Trinity Mirror and News Corp in the UK, The Irish Times, Alma Media in Finland, RBS with the University of Porto Alegre in Brazil, The New York Times, Schibsted, and Springer are just a few outstanding and visionary examples of ambitious and smart in-dividual programmes. Collective programmes like NextMedia in Finland, NxtMedia in Norway, Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek in the Netherlands, and iMinds in Belgium are accelerating the process on an industry-wide scale. Seizing power over technology Publishers and journalists must seize power over technology. It’s a challenge of long-term survival. Similar to the environmental challenge, you can live without taking it into account but cannot build the future without ad-dressing the challenge. WAN-IFRA’s mission is to help news media businesses, their technology officers, reporters and marketers to tap into this potential. We launched the Media Innovation Hub (miHub) to serve that goal, help publishers to connect and engage with Research centres from around the world, and the new generation of tech providers. Media companies must now work intensively on the incoming disruption generated by the Internet of Things, wearables and hyper connected personal devices, mobile small data, to name just few incoming revolutions that will accelerate the consumer technology disruption already experienced in the past decade. If mobile has been the major disruptive factor during the past ten years, the hyper connected world will be the next big wave. Answers will come from a closer collaboration with research and experts who focus on these issues and deliver solutions business and tech solutions. Exponential growth and adoption of consumer technologies drives new levels of service demands, including news. To really address this challenge, media companies must increase their experimenting curve, move fast; fol-low and anticipate. The more they cooperate as a community to support start-ups, and work upstream with re-search centres, the more they will have a chance to bridge the needs of their readers and engage them with pow-erful technologies. WAN-IFRA launches alliance for media innovation The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) recently launched the Inter-national Alliance for Media Research and Innova-tion, a global partnership among media, universi-ties, researchers, innovation centres and emerging technology providers to ensure that a wide variety of stakeholders work together for the future of evolving news media. The initiative will be conducted under the umbrella of WAN-IFRA’s Media Innovation Hub, which fosters long-term growth in the news media business by tapping into the innovation provided by the growing network of emerging technology providers and innovators world-wide. Towards a new leadership in innovation “News and Newspaper Industry: Towards a New Leadership in Innovation,” a manifesto and a draft action plan, was released at the 2014 World Newspaper Con-gress, calling for cooperation and partnerships to ensure that innovations that can benefit news media around the world are identified, developed, analysed, shared and publicized. “We see the future of news media being invented right now, all around the globe, by hundreds of different companies, universities, and entrepreneurs,” the docu-ment says. “However, their separate efforts, research, proto-types, and roll-outs receive inconsistent attention and analysis. Many good ideas fail only because of a lack of development support. Others get hyped beyond their real value. Vital lessons and examples are not being widely enough or rapidly enough disseminated. Considering these challenges, the global Alliance in-tends to serve four key missions: – To SHARE a strategic vision and a clear understand-ing of research and development programs in the works with potential value to the news media in-dustry. – To CONNECT those various efforts to partners and resources so that they might reach their potential. – To FACILITATE stronger and more effective coopera-tion between news publishers and the academic and research environment. – TO TRAIN media professionals and encourage multi-disciplinary approaches enhanced by closer collaboration with academic centres associated to the project. The document “News and Newspaper Industry: Towards a New Leadership in Innovation,”can be found at http://www.wan-ifra.org/node/104703 (bottom of the page), Vincent Peyrègne CEO WAN-IFRA
Asian Newspaper Focus 09/10_2014
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