1. The Future of News and the Seven Cs
Intro
I hate to disappoint you,especially right off the top, but I don’t know what the future of
news is. So, if that’s what you came for, you can skip this one. Go have a coffee or get
some fresh air before the next speaker.
But I know news has a future. Of course it does. It’s human nature to want to know
what’s going on and to share it with others – we like to “talk shit.” That’s how gossip
queenLainey Lui puts it.
I also know that people who work in the news industry are trying – we’re trying, and with
some desperation, to figure out our future. We’re testing a bunch of different
possibilities, hoping we’ll find a way to make enough money so we can keep working in
this amazing business.
Because news might want to be free, but news writers, editors, developers? No, thanks.
Speaking of free, let’s get the paywall out of the way, shall we? Last month, Postmedia,
the company that owns the Journal and several other large news organizations in
Canada, extended the paywall that was already in place at the Montreal Gazette and
the Vancouver Sun and Province to the rest of its papers. Now, you get 10 free articles
a monthon our website and apps before you’re asked to pay.
Reaction has been varied. And to those who have so far signed up, I want to thank you
from the bottom of my mortgage.
Do I think paywalls are the future of news? No. But they might be one of the
possibilities. And today, I’d like to talk to you about some other ones I think show real
promise. I call them the seven Cs. Mostly because I like wordplay, and especially
alliteration. But also because I read somewhere that putting a number in your headline
is a great way to get people to click on it.
The past
But before we get to the future, let’s take a quick trip back to the past, to the good old
days of newspapers.

2. And let’s use the
Edmonton Journal as
an example,
because, well, I know
it best. I’ve been
working there for
nearly 20 years.
Back in the day, the
Journal was the only
game in town. If you
wanted to know what
was going on in
Edmonton, you took
the Journal.
And if you were in business, that’s where you advertised. It was the best way to reach
the biggest audience. Until the Edmonton Sun came along in 1978, we had no real
competition.

3. That’s pretty much how it was when I came to the Journal in 1993 as a summer intern. I
joined a staff of almost 800 – 180 of them in the newsroom. Here’s what it looked like:
That’s me, in the
middle, the one
with the bowl cut.
Back then, we had
two reporters at
the courthouse,
three reporters
and a columnist at
City Hall, and
even more staff at
the Legislature.
Every desk in the
newsroom was
full.
The rise of the internet
I remember thinking the internet would be a boon for our business, and it has been in
many ways. It has made us better reporters, expanded our reach and given us amazing
storytelling tools like Twitter andStorify, not to mention all the cats.
Butthe internetalso destroyed our monopoly on distribution. Now, we can all be
publishers. Get a free Wordpress theme and you’re on your way. And when a service or
commodity isn’t scarce, it’s a lot harder to make money off of it.
This affected advertising, of course, our main source of revenue. With the rise of
Craigslist and similar services, the profitable classified business was completely eroded.
Print advertising dollars have become digital dimes and now, mobile pennies. What the
Journal makes on mobile advertising couldn’t keep a hipster in horn-rims.
I don’t have the Canadian figures, but the U.S. newspaper industry has lost more than
$40 billion in ad revenue in the past decade. And where did it go? Online, of
course.Google’s ad revenues are now more than twice what the industry pulls in.

4. I don’t know how much less the Journal makes now, compared to the good old days.
But here’s what I do know: Fewer than 300 people work there now. And when we shut
down our Eastgate plant this summer and shift printing to the St. Albert Gazette’s new
press, we’ll be under 200. And I expect that number will shrink even more. Employers,
please keep my name on file.
Not a business
But wait! I’mnot asking for sympathy. I’m just offering some context for the challenges
the news business is facing. Before, we didn’t have to operate like a business. We
journalists didn’t have to concern ourselves with advertising, that dirty, money-making
side. In fact, there was a strict separation of church and state: with very few exceptions,
the folks in advertising didn’t talk to the news staff and vice versa. To do so was viewed
almost as collusion. It was a threat to journalistic integrity.
Back then, we knew how many papers were sold every day but we had no way of
measuring which stories were actually read.So, we could convince ourselves that we
knew best what stories readers wanted. We went by our guts. And we thought they
served us pretty well.
In its heyday, the Journal newspaper was read by more than 400,000 people a week.
Now, even with a zillion other information sources to choose from, the Journalreaches
more than 600,000 people a week via the newspaper or on their computers, tablets and,

5. increasingly, their phones. In fact, monthly traffic to our mobile site surpassed traffic to
our desktop site for the first time this year.
The move to mobile
And what surprised many of us is that mobile users aren’t just checking the weather or
traffic, the latest headlines or scores. They’re also reading the in-depth stuff:
investigative reporting and lengthy features.
Jana Pruden’s brilliant story for the Journal, Fear onthe Family Farm, about a man who
killed his abusive father after years of torment, was relatively popular on our standard or
desktop site. But on the mobile site, it was the most viewed content item across the
entire Postmedia network during that period, with 577,000pageviews. Visitors spent
more time on it – a collective 3.1 million seconds or 861 hours – than on any other story,
video or gallery on Postmedia mobile sites.
And why wouldn’t we
read long, sometimes
complicated news stories
on our phones – even
those of us who grew up
with newspapers?
They’re our go-to
devices, our favourites,
sometimes our only way
to access the Net. And
those little screens?Have
you noticed how they’re
the same width as a
newspaper column?
I think great journalism like Fear on the Family Farmis still a solid bet for the future of
news. It’s one of the seven Cs I’ll put my money on: Content.
Content
Content, as Bill Gates and others have famously said, is king. But I don’t think the best
answer for publishers is to serve up more content. We all have stacks of books and
magazines, downloaded ebooks and PVR’d TV series that we haven’t had time to read
or watch. We need kickass content, content worth paying for.

6. Have you seen the New York Times’ Snow Fallor the Guardian’s Firestorm? Both told
fascinating stories with words, video and audio in an immersive, almost cinematic way
online. They’re beautiful and I hope to see and make more like them. But let’s be
realistic: how many newsrooms have resources like the New York Times, which put
several staff and several months’ work into the making of Snow Fall?
And here’s a sobering fact: You know Nate Silver, the American statistician who
developed a system to forecast the performance of Major League Baseball players then
turned to politics, where he correctly predicted the winner of 49 out of 50 states in the
2008 U.S. election and all 50 in the last election? His blog, FiveThirtyEight, has brought
in more traffic in a single day to the NYT.com than Snow Fall has in the since it debuted
in December.
So while content may be king, characters can dethrone it. That’s the second C:
Characters.
Characters
Writers like Silver, or, if you’ll permit me,like the Journal’s Paula Simons – writers with
strong, unique voices, who produce staggering amounts of content, who never rest –
they’re gold. Journalism schools, instead of stripping their students’ writing of
personality and opinion, should be teaching them how to recognize and cultivate their
perspective, how to write with conviction AND accuracy.
Newsrooms, too, must support and encourage writers to build their personal brands. It
looks good on us. It’s their passion and their personal take on topics that attractreaders
and keep them coming back.
It really plays into the culture of recommendation that has grown up with social media: If
my friend likes it, it must be good. Or sometimes: If Paula Simons likes it, it must be
bad. Either way, readers are engaged, and that’s good for business.
That’s why I would argue that the traditional unsigned newspaper editorial has had its
day. Again, it’s impossible to say how many of them are read in the newspaper, but
online, they attract a tiny fraction of the audience who flock to opinion that has a name
attached, often engaging in lively debate via social media or commenting. We just can’t
afford them anymore. They’re a quaint vanity from our past.
But that’s just my opinion,like everything I’ll say today. Which is a useful segway into
another C…

7. Customization
Increasingly, news publishers are thinking about customization. They’re trying to figure
out how they can collect, curate and deliver news in a way that suits different devices
and their users.
Let me give you an example: Let’s say there’s a big snowstorm. In the morning, the
storymight play out moment-by-moment on social and mobile, as commuters cope with
slow traffic and slippery roads. They could check in through the day on the website and
read about the worst accidents. That evening, they might flip through the best photos of
the day on a tablet. And in the next day’s paper, they can dig into the city’s snowclearing policy.
Then there’s customization of content based on the user’s location or other factors such
as weather – and we’re only just beginning to explore these tools. If you’re near the
Alberta Gallery of Art, you may get an alert on your phone asking if you’d like to read
Fish Griwkowsky’s story about The Piano exhibit. If you’re in an LRT station, you could
be prompted to participate in a poll about the best route for the southeast leg. If it’s
sunny, you might see ads for sandals or a coupon for an iced coffee or milkshake.

8. We can also make it possible for users to customize their own news experience – using
apps like Zite or tools like the Globe & Mail’s Dashboard.
If there’s a dark side to user customization tools, it’s that they make it even easier to
close our eyes and ears to anything that challenges our opinions. And they diminish
serendipity, which has always been one of the great pleasures of news: those
unexpected stories that surprise, delight or provoke.
OK, let’s get to C number 4…
Curation
None of us have enough time, really, to find and filter the most relevant and reliable
news; to cut through the shit that litters the internet; to distill meaning from So.
Much.Noise.
That’s curation and it’s one of the jobs the news media can do – the best ones already
are. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” That’s the advice the media
commentator Jeff Jarvis first issued to publishers in 2007; link to the best sources of
information, professional or no; to the best commentary on blogs, social media and in
other publications.
There’s a great, recent example of curation on Gigaom. Just a few hours after Glenn
Greenwald’s story about NSA surveillance broke in the Guardian, the Canadian
journalist Mathew Ingram started systematically tracking the developments. Ingram isn’t
doing original reporting, but he’s adding value by pulling together the best of the
reporting and commentary that is being done. He’s like a one-man wiki. And by doing
this, he’s made himself and Gigaoma reliable authority.
At the Journal and many other mainstream media outlets, the software we use to write
and distribute content online makes linking out a lot more difficult than it should be. But I
think newsroom culture – protective and proud – is a bigger barrier.
More linking out will mean we don’t do as much original reporting, the journalist’s ideal.
And when we do, we need to make sure it adds value, by providing context or analysis,
or by creating a forum for conversation.
And the best conversations involve collaboration.

9. Collaboration
Collaboration can be internal,between reporters or across large news organizations.A
good example is the PANDA project, developed by some journalist developers in the
U.S. It’s a Google Drive-like database where you can store, search and clean up
datasets, without having to be a data wizard like my friend Lucas Timmons, who
introduced PANDA to the Journal last year, with the support of Editor-in-chief Lucinda
Chodan. Lucas put all the data on donations to provincial political parties in our Panda,
which made it possible to quickly search for individuals or corporations to see whether
they donated to more than one party, and how much. Imagine if all our reporters, or all
Postmedia reporters, stored the data they collect in one Panda, so an archive would
build up over time. We could search across multiple datasets and see patterns and
connections that might not otherwise ever be revealed.
Collaboration can also be external, such as when news organizations publish content
from contributors who are not on staff. Sometimes, this is a way to compensate for staff
cuts that have reduced coverage of some topics or geographic areas. Or it can be a
way to serve up expertise that doesn’t exist on staff, such as the Guardian’s remarkable
stable of science blogs.Or look at Capital Ideas, a network based at the Journal for
Edmonton business owners and entrepreneurs to share advice.
External collaboration has been harder for major news organizations, who have been
known to think that indie news sites or writers or developers aren’tquite good enough.
They worry that an association with non-professional journalists might dilute their brand.
Or they want to avoid sending readers off their own sites.
I don’t like to say it, but it’s often ourjournalistic hubris that has kept us from embracing
the audience and revenue opportunities that collaboration could provide.
Hubris has also been a roadblock tocommerce.
Commerce
For the past five years or so, a new competitor to the traditional advertising model of the
news business has been gaining ground. Many media types dismiss it with the same
irritated, disdainful air as they did online classified ads a decade ago – and we know
where that got us.
Sponsored content, sometimes called native advertising, is content that is created by or
in concert with an advertiser. Often, it’s presented in a way that makes it look almost like
regular editorial. The theory is that users are more likely to click on something if it
doesn’t look like an ad.

10. Sponsored content tends to command rates two to four times greater than banner ads,
so everybody’s trying it – New York Times, BuzzFeed, Forbes, the Globe & Mail, you
name it.
There’s no question that sponsored content is a threat to the news business. The best
of it will draw even more eyes away from traditional news. And if we trick readers into
clicking or blur the line between editorial and advertising too much, we won’t be able to
maintain their trust.
But it also presentsan opportunity. Brands have a problem that publishers can help
solve: They need content but they aren’t experts at creating it.We are.
Why not repurpose or repackage the content we’ve already created for use by
advertisers on their websites? Or why not work more closely with advertising clients to
create appealing, engaging content that also serves their ends – not in hard news, but
in topic areas that have traditionally been given feature treatment, rather than critical or
investigative.
The Journal did this with Taste Alberta, when we partnered with the Alberta Livestock
and Meat Agency to produce a series about food that is grown, produced and
processed in the province. Over the past three years, we’ve written dozens of stories
about great Alberta farmers, chefs, restaurants and businesses, and contributed to the
vibrant conversation around local food.More recently, we worked with the Alberta
Emerald Foundation to bring readers stories about the province’s leading environmental
stewards.
We could even take commerce a step further – and this would be a big stretch for big
media. We could do what Lucy Yeomans recommends and make it possible for readers
to instantly buy the products we write about.
Yeomans is thelongtime magazine editor who left Harper’s Bazaar to work for the
fashion e-tailerNet-a-Porter. There’s a place for great stories and entertainment in
publishing, she says, but if you’re also presenting the user with products, they ought to
be “shoppable.”
And why not? When a story initiates a sale, publishers can and should profit. It’s a way
that we can be useful to our readers and clients and support our own and other local
businesses.

11. I think the key to success with sponsored content and other adventures in commerce is
clear labelling and disclosure of the commercial relationships behind some content. We
can’t afford to damage our credibility with consumers.
You heard that, didn’t you? It’s another C, my last:
Credibility
The news media’s credibility rests on our providing fair, accurate and relevant content
and on admitting and correcting our mistakes. But I think it also rests on our reflection of
and our participation in our community.
Legacy media survive on the relationships we have built with our audiences. For the
Journal, that goes back more than 100 years.Together, we have cried in sympathy…

12. …and laughed in joy.
We have shared silliness…

13. …and shame;
…failures…

14. …and triumphs.
We’re part of your past, your present and, I hope, your future.
We will fail if, after all we’ve shared, we’re too proud to change, to adapt to this tough,
new business reality. We will fail if we make you feel like nothing more than a paying
customer.
Our success is in continuing and extendingour commitment to Edmonton. It’s in
presenting local news, but more than that, it’s in engaging people to participate in that
news.
We’re not just a megaphone; we’re a microphone. And we need to listen.
-30-