<\/p>\n
News publishers in India are asking the same questions and facing the same issues as those in the US and Europe was the conclusion after two days of discussions and presentations at WAN-IFRA\u2019s Digital Media India conference in Chennai this week.<\/p>\n
They may be only just starting to face falling print circulations \u2013 another victim of Covid \u2013 but otherwise they are still looking at how best to monetise their digital content and utilise artificial intelligence. There were questions about scale and subscriptions, AI and audiences.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you really need 200-300m users to build sustainability? Can you do it with a more engaged audience?\u201d asked Pradeep Gairola, business head, digital at The Hindu. He went on to say that he felt publishers were obsessed with replacing print revenues with digital income when actually smaller online revenues can lead to sustainability because you don\u2019t have the printing and distribution costs of newsprint.<\/p>\n
He added that he regularly talks with the paper\u2019s editors about the volume of content they produce, a familiar theme in western newsrooms. \u201cI ask the editors, \u2018What will you stop doing?\u2019 But they always want to do more. They see newspapers as a family affair, always adding things for new members.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mariam Mammen Mathew (pictured above), ceo, Manorama Online, also believes that attitudes toward traffic are changing in India: \u201cWe have run after the numbers in terms of traffic. But digital can\u2019t work with only ads. We need subs.\u201d She said that required a knowledge about what will bring in individual readers on a daily basis. \u201cWe had a one-to-many approach to customers \u2013 it needs to become one-to-one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shelly Walia, executive editor of The Quint, suggested that the lesson that subscriptions is a long-term game had been quickly absorbed in India. \u201cIt\u2019s a long struggle to get people to pay for news,\u201d she said. \u201cEach click and each sub requires work \u2013 and for the whole organisation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, the theme of internal alignment was a common one. Pundi Sriram, chief product officer, at The Hindu, talked about how the product chief in newsrooms should be seen as the equivalent of a restaurateur to the editor\u2019s chef, or a producer to his or her film director.<\/p>\n
But more than that he had a telling challenge to the journalists present: \u201cWhat would it mean if your newsroom thought like a product team?\u201d In other words, thinking of the value their output gives readers and of the overall offering as \u201cnews as a service\u201d.<\/p>\n
That service isn\u2019t there at the moment, according to many speakers. Siddarth Varadarajan, founder and editor of The Wire and a former editor of The Hindu, lamented \u201ca sameness of content\u201d with the same news and ideas being endlessly resurfaced. \u201cThere has been a failure of big media to provide analysis and information to what is clearly a very large audience. In fact, audiences have never been bigger,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Of course, there was much discussion of AI and its effect on newsrooms. Nishant Sinha, product head at Times Internet, spoke about his AI-first CMS. His team works to the principle that \u201cyou can\u2019t dig a well when you\u2019re thirsty\u201d and so have built AI tools into the CMS. The AI tools need to be there when required; journalists won\u2019t take the time to search them out in busy moments.<\/p>\n
Among the areas the AI-first CMS covers are content generation and summarisation (offering article drafts, summaries, headline suggestions); content creation and personalisation (tagging, personalised feeds); multimedia generation and optimisation (translation, image generation); research and verification (data analysis); automated publication and distribution (content scheduling).<\/p>\n
He said the Times wants to use AI \u201cas an assistant, augmenting human creativity and critical thinking, not replacing it\u201d. But of course it anticipates that reporters\u2019 roles will change. \u201cThey are becoming more like editors, strategists and specialised investigators.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally it was left to Suresh Sambandan, a software entrepreneur and investor, to challenge the audience with the last presentation on the second day. He said that we are moving from the information economy to the entertainment economy, driven by AI which should give consumers \u201ca lot more time to indulge ourselves\u201d. This was a great opportunity for news publishers, he said, as \u201ccontent will continue to be big\u201d.<\/p>\n
However, the trap was to assume that today\u2019s publishers will still exist as of right. \u201cLess than 5% of old brands will make it to the new era,\u201d he said, pointing out that in the 1800s there were ice cutters, in the 1900s there were ice factories, but that neither now exist because we get our ice from our refrigerators. \u201cEmbrace change or complain? Your choice.\u201d<\/p>\n