The Evolution of Media: Editorial, Commercial and Technical
I spent 10 years working across various enterprise software and digital media startups. My last startup experience showed me that news content companies in particular were having a very tough time making the transition. This concerned me.
It concerned me because journalists play an important role in holding power accountable in our society. My fear was that if the media industry doesn’t make a successful transition to our digital world, those with power will be free to operate without accountability to anyone.
I thought Google ought to do something about this — not because the challenges posed by a new digital economy were necessarily Google’s fault. But it seemed like an opportunity for Google to put quality news content on more firm financial footing.
With that in mind, I joined the company. Initially, I worked at YouTube, focused on news partnerships. After a couple years, I shifted to a strategy team at Google focused more broadly across all Google product areas. There I worked on global alliance and partnership strategy. In that role, I had the opportunity to dive more deeply into all aspects of Google’s business. I ended up developing a host of ideas about how Google could engage with the industry much more effectively.
From there I ended up doing something I thought I never would: I left. Guardian Media Group made an offer for me to shift to the other side of the table and come work for a news media company. With a remit to focus on global digital partnerships, the result was the formation of a coalition of European news media companies engaging with Google in fundamental platform initiatives. We called it the Digital News Initiative.
To Google’s credit, they embraced the engagement with the full force of Google and through 2015 we were able to establish a new mode of working together across publishers and Google’s platforms. We continue to work together to develop ways to improve economic opportunities for quality and original news content.
While the solutions we pursue revolve around a variety of revenue streams, fixing the advertising economy is foundational.
This means growing value for marketers — marketers who are working within a totally new information supply chain: Search and social platforms now serve the role of distributor, with traditional media companies largely relegated to the role of producer.
Obviously this shift is enormously frustrating to the traditional media company, as it forces them to develop ways of understanding the audience like never before. This is very hard and a completely new skill set for most.
That said, the severing of distribution from production also presents opportunities. Media organizations now have greater potential reach than they could have ever achieved on their own. The trick is to know how to convert that reach, increasingly on other companies’ platforms, into financial results.
This is where I see the most promising engagement in the industry.
Last year was the first time saw platforms like Facebook offer business terms to publishers that seemed to reflect an inherent understanding of the value of their content. Google also embraced the new engagement in launching Accelerated Mobile Pages. For the first time, we have the technology required to scale media businesses.
These are truly exciting times! Harrowing, for sure, but exciting nonetheless.
The imperative for both brands and media companies now is to know how to engage with audience in a distributed manner — that is, increasingly NOT on your own sites and apps. Marketers, like media companies, must tell their stories in platform-specific, context-specific ways. Otherwise, they have little hope of engaging anyone, anywhere.
For instance, YouTube offers astronomical reach. But if marketers look at YouTube like it’s just another video distribution platform, they are missing the point: YouTube is a place for conversations. The stories you tell there have to fit the medium of the platform in order to be effective.
New media companies know this and do an awesome job of tailoring their content in platform-specific ways. Traditional news organizations are learning. But while they do, they still have something the new media companies are hoping to achieve some day: trust.
Marketers have long recognized the inherent value of a publisher’s brand trust. Thus their efforts to align with those media brands, hoping the association between brand and publisher would reflect well on the brand.
Establishing this trust is hard and in many cases takes decades of commitment. It can be destroyed in an instant.
On their own, platforms do not bring that inherent trust. The content in the platform does that. Hence growing interest from platforms like Google and Facebook in working with publishers in a way that benefits all players.
I don’t believe the new digital opportunity requires the destruction of traditional brand marketing methods of consumer engagement. They can be complementary. But platforms, publishers, and brands need to continue the work started in 2015 and keep exploring the most effective ways of working together in this new digital world — together, with consumers as priority.
Dave Gehring has more than 20 years of experience in tech, startups, and media. From enterprise software to mobile and digital media startups, he went on to YouTube to manage news partnerships and, later, managed media strategy for Google’s Global Alliance Partnership Strategy team. Gehring then moved to the Guardian to create a coalition of European news media companies and engage with Google’ in what is now called the Digital News Initiative. He currently serves as an advisor to the Digital News Initiative, University of Missouri Reynolds Journalism Institute, and is founder of Relay Media focused on technology to enable publishers to work effectively on search and social platforms.
