Recently, the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) met in Krakow, Poland.
It was enlightening and encouraging.
While the economics of the industry is challenged everywhere, there is some reason for optimism. Here’s why, based on my observations and conversations at the conference.
Reining in monopolists: For many publishers, print remains the key source of revenue as Google’s monopoly allows it to take far too much out of each advertising dollar. There is hope that the case brought forward by the U.S. Department of Justice, where U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema found Google liable for “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power,” will lead to divestitures and restore competition in the ad-exchange and publisher ad-server markets. In Canada, the Competition Bureau alleges, “Google has maintained its dominance over time through a systematic campaign of interrelated anti-competitive actions, designed to entrench its substantial market power and harm the competitive process.”
Bulwark of freedom and democracy: In accepting WAN-IFRA’s Golden Pen of Freedom Award, Oksana Brovko, CEO of the Association of Independent Press Publishers of Ukraine, said, “In a world where disinformation spreads faster than truth — where machines can mimic human voices and faces — real journalism is our last line of defense. Today the war is in Ukraine. Tomorrow it could be in your country. And journalists will once again be the first to speak. And the first to be targeted. That’s why journalism must be prepared — everywhere. And protected — everywhere.”
News bargaining codes: There was great interest in Canada’s Online News Act now that $100 million (Canadian) is flowing annually from Google to news businesses. There is anticipation that the Australian government will strengthen its News Media Bargaining Code by adding a “news bargaining incentive” to the code that would “encourage” new commercial deals but charge platforms if they did not. Just like in Canada, Google has stepped up with cash for Australian news businesses, but Meta has been intransigent and walked away. If the Australians force Meta to carry news and pay publishers, that will be a model for other jurisdictions. International eyes are also on Oregon Senate Bill 686, which would see platforms compensate publishers.
Generative artificial intelligence presents both risks and opportunities: There was a growing consensus that the theft by generative AI companies must stop. With Google’s AI Overview, a reader can receive summarized information from news stories without ever clicking through to the sources who employed journalist to create it. Despite blocking the chatbot’s crawlers, The New York Times received more than 240,000 “visits” from ChatGPT alone in January of this year. While OpenAI and Perplexity have licensing deals with several large premium publishers, the value of many of those deals is woefully inadequate when it comes to cold hard cash. The New York Times has opted for a sue, rather than woo, approach. At the same time, AI can benefit readers with greater personalization and reporters with everything from transcription to translation, information gathering, and fact-checking — allowing more time to go deeper into a story with less grind and more reporting.
Facts over followers: For too long, publishers have relied heavily on social media as a distribution channel to grow — and sometimes chase — audience. With the publisher making heavy expenditures to produce content and the platform reaping most of the advertising revenue, the model was not sustainable. Publishers are starting to reclaim the direct relationship with their readers — and advertisers — rather than being reliant on social media behemoths for cheap clicks.
Finally, for news media to survive in a crowded digital world, publishers must invest in high quality public interest journalistic content that is informed and newsworthy — and that they can monetize — rather than amplifying noise and manipulation to satiate Big Tech’s algorithms.
