The Generation Game

InPublishing reports:
New media is now old. This year, the internet celebrates its 45th birthday, while online news in the UK has reached adulthood. Any publishing strategy needs to understand that we are now in a ‘three generations in one’ news industry. There are still the legacy products like 'dead tree' newspapers and analogue broadcast but there is also the content re-versioned for online. Then there are the purely 'digital native' enterprises who sprang up fully formed by the internet. One new trend is that those three generations are increasingly combined in interesting ways.
Last year, I wrote in this magazine that newspapers had all accepted the idea of ‘digital first’. This is the idea that even if you make most revenue out of analogue, you must still re-structure your business according to the priorities of digital production and consumption. It is now the time (overdue in fact) to hire developers, publish on demand and design everything for mobile.
The implication of that strategic shift is that content is now King, Queen and Jack of Hearts. In a world where the consumer can easily access what they want directly or through networks, it is the product not the platform that matters if you want to create a sustainable business. The last twelve months have backed that up in spades.
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Thinking like natives
Some publishers have tried to create a digital startup culture within their own walls. European publishing giants Sanoma and Axel Springer have literally invited outsiders in on a competitive basis and picked the best for further investment. Even the dear old BBC has created a News Lab to act as a kind of internal innovation consultancy.
...So the dead tree press may still be sacking staff but it is also hiring new people. Digital revenues don’t match the golden days of the analogue advertising past but they are continuing to rise. The Guardian losses are being slashed, while groups like the Telegraph and Mail report profits. Even parts of the local press are getting their heads back above water. But there are two other massive structural trends that should concern UK papers: the new realities of global competition and the power of the platforms.