What is the future of news and journalism? The industry is on the brink of imminent change, maybe 5 years after the music industry and a couple of years before the TV industry. There is about to be major disruption. The opportunities are great for those that embrace the disruption and those who can most accurately call what the industry will look like five year’s out. Here’s my take on the key trends and what the world will look like five years out.

There are three key trends that will drive change, and fast. These are:

1. The industry needs to find a way to make money, and it will. Papers are losing money and going bust. If the industry is to continue it needs to find a way to first cover its costs and then turn a profit. The industry needs to get people to pay for the value that it creates. In simple terms, it needs a viable and sustainable revenue stream. I’ve had some fascinating conversations with newspapers recently. One of them was thinking of pulling its website because it saw it as a cost centre with some small marketing benefits and a source of cannibalisation. This is obviously very short-sighted. Rather than pulling the site, they need to find a way to make meaningful and sustainable revenue from it.

2. The industry also needs to become far more efficient. Currently papers/magazines are inefficient in two ways. First, you only ever read a % of any paper or magazine you buy.  The current aggregation of content is simply inefficient as it is not tailored to the individual. Secondly, the replication of content across all of the different newspapers is unnecessary. You can have several thousand journalists writing about any given news article across the world. Whilst we need diversity of opinion and style (and language), the level of replication is too great for a global economy.

3. Online is going portable. The Amazon Kindle will be the start of a trend that sees consumers willing to consume news and editorial on the move and online more and more. Amazon will start this, smartphones will augment it, but my money is on Apple coming up with the killer device that sees this mode of consumption gain game-changing penetration. (They’ve seen the prize available with iTunes and the iPhone app platform and I can’t see them letting this one go. I also can’t see any other tech company who could create a device that could beat them). This will be the start of the end for printing on paper. And whilst it’ll probably take 50 years or more to kill paper, the initial swing will shock the industry significantly.

So, what does this mean. Are the newspaper and magazine brands going to die? No, but their source of value will change considerably. In five years, I think you could see up to 20-50% of people in developed countries consuming their written news and editorial content via a portable device. This will also mean that they will be more likely to use a site/platform that aggregates the news than go to the existing online channels. The value of the brands will be in acting as a quality filter and as a way for journalists to build their own brands. I might read the headlines on the BBC, the in depth articles on global politics in the Economist, the tech news on TechCrunch, the rugby reports from the Times, the football from the Mirror and then search for Matthew Paris on British Politics and Jeremy Clarkson for outlandish social commentary. All of this will come into my aggregator because I have selected it by brand and/or by journalist. I’ll read the headlines and sports scores for free and I’ll pay 2p for Mirror articles and 20p for Economist articles (and I won’t even think about it because the payment mechanism will be close to frictionless, as it is with iTunes and the app store). Newspaper/Magazine brands will be rewarded not because they have built a channel through which they can push content but for putting quality content into an aggregated channel. And they will be more profitable because of it. The aggregators that will win will be able to give me the content that I want and also to put content that I find interesting in front of me that I wouldn’t have otherwise found. They need to help me enjoy browsing as I do in a paper today.

What about for journalists? The top journalists will do better as they command more power. Since I’ll be able to read Simon Barnes’ column without buying the Telegraph they have far greater influence over the articles I select. They’ll still need the newspaper and magazine brands in order to build their own brands. Chris Andersen paints a different picture in which you get a proliferation of journalists, many of whom work for free as amateurs. I don’t see this happening. Blogs show that you can have a long tail of amateur journalists but the vast majority aren’t read. Those that are become quasi-journalists. I suspect the pool of journalists that can make money will be smaller but the quality of content will be higher. Those that make it (either climbing through the papers or their own blogs) will do better than they do today.

So, the future of news, generally looks positive. There will be consolidation along the way. Some big brands may be lost forever but in the long term, we should end up with a more efficient, more profitable, more personalised and more convenient source of news and editorial.

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Other relevant articles:

Here’s another interesting take on the future of news from Umair Haque in Harvard Business Review called the Nichepaper Manifesto.

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