Upendra Shardanand

When I visit a news company I occasionally ask, “If you completely eliminated your offline operations – the revenues, yes, but also the costs of paper, printing presses, delivery, etc. – could you support the same level of journalism purely as an online brand?” The answers range from “no” with zero hesitation to “no” after some deliberation. But so far, always “no.” (If you’re the exception, do let me know!).

The reality is that some of the news organizations we love are going to go away. Others will shrink. Still others will flourish, and new ones will be born. And some online services that you would never expect to be a news outlet will add to their offering news from other content creators. On the demand side, news consumption is, if anything, increasing – it remains one of the top three activities on the web, depending on who you ask. What’s changing is that the web is casting off much of the inefficiency and sub-par products that were masked when publishers were near-monopolies who controlled distribution (in the form of printing presses, delivery, broadcast spectrum, cable lines, and so on.)

We’re in the thickest, murkiest part of the haze, and we can’t yet see what’ll be there when we emerge on the other side. And news organizations are just now turning from self-preservation to re-invention. (Or starting from scratch, like your Huffington Posts and Breitbarts.)

The ones finding success are the ones that understand the following:  

1. Navigation and convenience are the new pipes (to quote my friend Chris Willis).

As mentioned above, controlling offline distribution meant controlling the physical delivery of the content. Online, it’s all about offering superior navigation to the content (which the publisher may or may not create or host), as Google (the best place to navigate the web) and YouTube (the best place to navigate videos) have shown.

2. You can’t offer better navigation by offering only your own original content.

When we first started Daylife, we were unsure whether traditional news companies would be receptive to the notion of linking to their competitors and the wider web. After all, this was an industry which not too long ago was worried about deep linking. But news companies are rapidly realizing that to best serve their readers’ news needs, publishers can’t rely just on their own original content. They have to show their readers what’s out there on the web. Or, as Jeff Jarvis says, do what you do best and link to the rest. 

3. Your own original content still matters. And needs to be better than ever.

More than ever, publishers need something unique – in voice, brand, content – around which to build. If people sometimes feel that the traditional news organizations all feel a bit same-same, a bit whitewashed and stale, well… maybe they sometimes are. Increased competition means even more need for differentiation.

And that competition will only increase. Norm Pearlstine recently said he believes the news business is going “back to the end of the 19th century, when a city like Chicago had 28 local papers, all small and privately owned.”  If that’s the case, your original content will be the hook that builds your brand.

To paraphrase Umair Haque (ppt), the value of average content online may be dropping, but unique, differentiated content & products can see increasing returns. 

And slapping on the stock AP or Reuters feed to your site won’t cut it. Note that I’m not critiquing those wire services, but the “slapping on.” The AP, Reuters, and Getty Images, more than ever, make huge sense – there is no point in every last publication having a reporter in the same place at the same time. But as a publication, you need a way to make that common content your own, and make it part of your service in a way that’s different than everyone else’s.

A new architecture for news is emerging, which is oft-discussed and debated at Buzzmachine, Publishing2, PaidContent and elsewhere. One of its key components will be an intelligent, malleable technology platform for organizing news from thousands of content-creators and delivering it to publishers as web experiences that:

1. Allow publishers to efficiently add content in a scalable automated way, making the most of their existing editorial and engineering staffs. 

2. Support real advertising, with real money for the publisher, and real engagement for the advertiser. There has to be some meat on the bones of the experience.

3. Publishers can customize  and make their own, matching their voice, brand, and feel. So even if you’re using the same platform as the next guy, you can do something different and special.

4. Let publishers innovate. For too long, innovation around user experiences in news has lagged behind the UX for online commerce, communications, and other categories.  Given the right platform that does the heavy and un-sexy lifting, publishers, editors, and engineers can be creative and experiment with novel ways to explore news.

These are the problems that Daylife is working on, and we’re not all the way there. If Pearlstine is right, you could – today – start a small paper in Chicago with a few good writers, focusing on unique content with a unique angle (local sports, politics, food, say), and use a platform like Daylife for everything else, adding depth and covering more niches.  

You see this model pursued by our good friends at the Huffington Post, who have a core of original writing around which they wrap navigation of news elsewhere on the web. 

News will do more than survive. It will flourish. The players will change, the craft of storytelling will change, and the products will change. We’ll see, when we emerge from that murky haze.