Thread by @rasmus_kleis

What’s next for the business of news? 

Journalists need to be part of developing future funding models to be independent and able to report (and “you’ll miss us when we are gone” is not a business model).

Background on my #IJF19 panel w/ @kapur_ritu @RosanSmits @tomstandage 1/8

Historically, the business of news was based on bundled products, low consumer choice and high publisher market power over advertisers.

But this model has been in long-term structural decline for decades, a decline accelerated by move to digital and dominance of platforms. 2/8

Today, we have unbundling, high consumer choice, and low publisher market power over advertisers-resulting in lower revenues, slimmer margins, and job cuts.

Basic challenge is similar for digital-born and legacy publishers: how to create+capture value in competitive market? 3/8

Online, news and information capture ~3% of time spent, and we shouldn’t expect its long-term share of online advertising to significantly outstrip this, especially when platforms capture more attention and offer cheap, targeted ads. (See @MattHindman press.princeton.edu/titles/13236.h…) 4/8

Sizable minority of people will pay, but in most cases for one subscription and only for what they consider to be truly outstanding journalism. (See e.g. @risj_oxford Digital News Report digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/ov…) This is encouraging-but much online news is not worth paying for 5/8

If we don’t address these challenges together it won’t simply result in more job cuts, but also greater risk of news media being captured by proprietors/others propping them up for political/PR purposes. (I've written about media capture for @anyaSIPA cima.ned.org/wp-content/upl…) 6/8

Business challenges are too important to be left to commercial side alone. 

Journalists need to be part of conversation or they will have to live w/consequences of decisions made by others who have other priorities. 

Again: “You’ll miss us when we are gone” is not a model. 7/8

So I am glad @kapur_ritu @RosanSmits @tomstandage and others are focused on building new business models for independent journalism, whether focused on advertising, membership, or subscriptions. 

More on changing economic context of journalism here rasmuskleisnielsen.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/nielse…

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