Attention - The Most Important Currency for News Publishers

In our ongoing series about the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2023, we present to you some of the top ideas that news and media publishers can adopt to ensure their businesses continue to evolve in a fast-paced digital world. In our opening blog in this series titled "Digital media overwhelmingly the way forward for news publishers", we listed out some of the top trends which will decide the way forward for most of us. 

Looking at these trends and having gone through the report in detail, we have compiled the following tips to factor in your business strategy as you plan ahead for 2024 and beyond. At Quintype, we’re listing these out in an order of importance that respects our news publishers greatest concerns.

Go Digital X 3 

News and media publishers are seeing the importance of growth via digital platforms as the significance of traditional channels and platforms continues to dwindle. This is particularly so for younger and newer audiences. Future growth of your business depends on finding and nurturing newer audiences and they all exist on digital platforms. Going digital is a no-brainer.

Get your newsroom up to date with new-age media setups, adopt a Newsroom CMS, train your people in using technology, especially AI-driven technology, and invest in nurturing audiences by combining content and analytics.

Create Unique Offers

Less and less news consumers are willing to pay for online news today, especially given the tough macroeconomic climate we are facing today (across 20 of the most advanced countries, the number of users paying for any kind of online news is a low 17%).

Juxtapose this with another trend of a sharp decline in people’s trust (down 2 percentage points overall during the past year, reversing the gains made at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic) as well as interest in the news and news sources (the number of people saying they were very or extremely interested in news is down to <48% in 2023 from 63% in 2017), news publishers are constantly voicing off concerns over protecting their revenues and profitability. 

This means that news publishers will be driven to collaborate with distribution platforms and channels to create unique offers for various users to serve up relevant news content. We may be entering an era where we witness new revenue and business models in which news media brands collaborate with tech platforms and journalists as well as editors to provide personalised, well-researched, exclusive and high-quality content to diverse audiences. 

Brands can steal a march by investing advanced capabilities in building dedicated and loyal digital audiences through content collabs driven by analytical tools, supported by innovative approaches to monetisation. 

Go Deep. And Go Wide.

Digital technology is lowering entry barriers to the business of acing news and media reach and audience building. As a result, well-established brands are vying to grow alongside competition from new entrants who have a strong understanding of their audiences as well as technology that helps boost the presence and relevance of their content. Therefore, In times to come, both must prepare to go deep and go wide with their content, if they want to keep their audiences interested. 

It means enhancing their content quality with well-researched information and data as well as fielding their content as far and wide as possible. Be it through presence on social and digital media across formats as well as through traditional channels.

Brands will have to calibrate the depth and scope of their content according to the platform they are using for audience outreach. For example, brands use X(formerlyTwitter) to touch upon hot topics while podcasts are known to be highly effective for fleshing out a particular topic or argument in detail. In this scenario, the adoption of a robust News CMS can make it easy for brands to manage multichannel presence, by allowing automation of content creation and distribution process.

Get their Attention First

In a world where interest and trust levels are ebbing low, news and media publishers are facing an uphill battle trying to make their content attractive for their users. All of the key points up till here are ultimately about ways to grab and hold their attention. 

It is interesting to note that various social media are used in diverse ways to access different kinds of news. The proportion of users paying attention to different types of news varies wildly. This means that different news topics resonate with audiences in different networks. This is why it is crucial for news publishers going forward to refine their content strategies by using analytics and data.

Getting your audiences’ attention is the single most powerful metric in an increasingly digital world, where it will help your brand wield the negotiating power needed to arrive at effective monetisation strategies.

Know more about Quintype's Newsroom Growth Platform.