Adapting to digital quicker and leapfrogging into the future

This year’s WAN-IFRA Conference – the 28th – scored a first. No prizes for guessing. For the first time, it was a virtual conference thanks to Zoom in the background and the OnAir platform in the forefront. So, what might have been an event at the ITC Grand Chola turned out to be a virtual event – the Indian Media Leaders eSummit and the Printing eSummit.

At the inaugural, K.N. Shanth Kumar, director on the WAN-IFRA South Asia Board, said that the media industry had taken “a severe beating to put it mildly” and only now were some signs of revival visible. The eSummit, he hoped, would discuss “complex issues that have descended upon us so suddenly as a result of the pandemic”.

Advertising, he said, had been so severely impacted with 50 per cent of the revenues that news publishing houses were forced to restructure businesses by recasting or reemploying resources, cutting costs drastically, finding new ways to do good journalism within limitations, and looking for revenue opportunities.

Shanth Kumar stressed that “we need to adapt to the digital environment at a much faster pace since in a sense we have leapfrogged into the future”. He mentioned the need to find ways to monetise digital offerings quickly. “While we can be sure print is nowhere near dead, we need to make concerted efforts to increase the efficiency and extend the longevity of the printed newspaper. With working from home hardly an option, printing and distributing the newspaper poses new challenges in the post-COVID environment.”

Production costs, he pointed out, had become a big component of the newspaper business and news organisations were under severe pressure to bring costs down due to reduced revenues. He suggested looking at ways to use emerging technologies and also learn from practice in other industries to make the news publishing business more viable.

Michael Stevens, director, Print Mastheads, Nine Publishing, Australia who started his career in journalism in 1979 spoke about adapting to a very changed world and the need “to ensure we continue to operate profitably in the face of challenges”. He recalled how the first big change in the newspaper business was desktop computers in the first two decades, followed by on-screen pagination, a revolution as many at the time had thought.

All positive changes, although the past thirty years had seen what he referred to as a “constant revolution” – the print industry contending with issues that disrupted the business and challenged its profitability and indeed its very survival.

Gary Liu, CEO of South China Morning Post, setting the tone and tenor, narrated the story of SCMP's transformation from a print giant to a digital-first enterprise even as it weathered the COVID-19 pandemic. The newsroom had metamorphosed into a digital one by default, he said, with a dedicated team to package news for print – turning the conventional structure and process on its head. Liu, too, stressed that technology was fundamental to progress. It helps us be faster, more accurate, more productive, he emphasised.

Jayanth Mammen Mathew, executive editor and director, Malayala Manorama, said while available technology was needed to be used to allow remote working up to a point, journalists still needed to go into the field to cover stories and, as such, the newsroom couldn’t be said to be completely closed.

It is also pertinent to note what Brett McKeehan, director – Asia, CNN Digital Worldwide, Hong Kong, said at the Digital Media India Conference 2020 held some time ago in New Delhi. Newsrooms that don’t embrace change are going to be left behind, he had said. “Audience equals opportunity. With the right digital tools and by treating them as people with real interests, one can target readers effectively to the benefit of one’s business.”