Jan Metzger
Greetings
Ladies and Gentlemen,
In my industry, it is now considered a truism - without everyone having drawn the necessary conclusions: The Internet is fundamentally changing all traditional media. The publishing business model is gradually disintegrating. Publishing, or in our case broadcasting in the electronic media, is increasingly becoming communication and dialogue thanks to the new possibilities of the Internet. This has far-reaching consequences. We should always be aware of one thing: We only know the beginning of this story, because the Internet is very young, just 20 years old. Its story has only just begun - albeit a furious one and accompanied by far-reaching changes in society and the economy from the outset. Nobody knows exactly where this story will take us. The big questions for us media makers are: What do these changes mean for traditional media? For traditional business models? For journalistic content?
First of all, the obvious: The Internet has given rise to new business models in the media that have found considerable success overnight. Here are just a few examples: The Huffington Post was among the top 15 news and media websites worldwide less than ten years after it was founded, ahead of CNN and the New York Times. And it was the number 1 of all online news websites in the USA. It is one of these new type of publications: A third of its traffic comes from social media (of which almost 90 per cent comes from Facebook). To increase its reach, it focuses primarily on tabloid topics. In 2012, however, it was the first online medium ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for a story about wounded US war veterans ("Beyond the Battlefield").
BuzzFeed is in the top 30 of all news and media websites worldwide, ahead of the renowned Guardian and the big Fox News. At BuzzFeed, social media is at the very beginning of the production process: writing and programming is done strictly to optimise click and share rates. Consequently, 50 per cent of traffic comes from social media. BuzzFeed relies on the proverbial cat content - derived from the cat pictures and videos that are extremely popular online and spread particularly well virally. The majority of articles on BuzzFeed are user-generated, i.e. created by users, but the proportion of original stories on major topics such as Ukraine, Syria, Ebola or IS is growing. The journalistic self-image of BuzzFeed, as attributed to Scott Lamb, Vice President International, is remarkable: Journalism works like a good pub conversation, he says. A lot of rubbish is talked and gossip is spread - but tips, news, political opinions and serious topics are also exchanged. That doesn't sound unattractive or unappealing at first.
Vice.com was once a city magazine in Montreal and is now a global media group: Vice is now represented on every continent except Africa and Antarctica. The company still publishes a glossy magazine (in 17 languages), operates websites, a YouTube channel with three million subscribers, produces films, runs a record label, a publishing house and, more recently, a television station. What makes Vice so special is its accuracy. The experts at Vice are experts in Generation Y (20 to 30-year-olds) and they know what millennials are looking for in the media: The most blatant story - in the thick of it instead of just being there! - often spiced up with topics such as war, sex and drugs. Vice cultivates and masters a subjective and emotionalised narrative style and differs from established media precisely in this respect. What makes a good story? "Simplicity, a hook and a punch in the face," says Vice Managing Director Shane Smith.
Vice.com, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post - three new journalistic business models on the Internet that have quickly made it to the top in the battle for the attention and scarce time of media users. What is the pattern of this success? New business models in the media have certain characteristics in common. They work.
mobile: The offerings are optimised for mobile use and are no longer tied to a stationary reception device.
on demand: They work on demand. It is no longer the provider who controls what is used and when, but the users themselves.
personalised: Services are tailored to individual user interests - one size fits all is a thing of the past.
social: These business models are based on distribution via social media. Distribution no longer works from point to point, but much more effectively because it is more targeted via networks.
viral: Providers no longer control distribution. The viral quality of content becomes the determining factor.
Dialogue: By involving users in production and distribution, these media create a dialogue - they are no longer monologues in just one direction like a traditional publication.
While the competition is struggling with declining circulation and falling advertising revenue, the number of users and thus the revenue opportunities of media such as BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and Co. are exploding. They are driven by social networks and viral distribution. This is changing the previous principle of media: journalists are increasingly less responsible for determining the publication of content. Instead, social media and their algorithms are becoming powerful co-distributors of content.
This trend can already be measured. Figures from the industry association Bitkom from November 2015 show that around one in five internet users (22 per cent) in Germany already use social networks to find out about current events. Among 14- to 29-year-olds, the figure is 32 per cent, and only two per cent of over 65-year-olds. Almost half use Facebook for this, followed by Xing and Twitter (just under a third) and YouTube. This shows that journalists are no longer the exclusive gatekeepers who decide on the publication of content. This in turn represents a significant change in role for us, the traditional media.
But what are the causes of this change in the media? In any case, we ourselves, the media, are not the cause of these changes. Rather, the media were one of the first sectors to be affected by a much broader and much deeper process of change at a very early stage. If you approach the matter from above in a helicopter flight, you can choose three different fields of view of one and the same phenomenon: Firstly, the large section: technological change, secondly, the somewhat smaller one: economic change and finally, thirdly, the section: media change. The latter is a subset of much larger processes of change. Countless scientific research papers and even more books have been written about these processes. Here is just a rough, brief sketch to illustrate the argument:
Firstly - technological change: the net is on its way to becoming a global, ubiquitous economic platform. Three billion people around the world now use the Internet - that's 41 per cent of the world's population. Even more people already have a mobile phone connection: there are currently around 3.6 billion mobile phone users worldwide, which is already half of the world's population. They can and will increasingly use the network.
Secondly - economic change, because technological change is bringing about far-reaching economic changes. The web has begun to reshape economic relationships: It started with Amazon and continued with Uber and AirBnB. In the meantime, countless internet-based trading platforms have changed the way business is done. They are shaking up entire industries. In addition, the Internet of Things is rapidly driving automation and creating new production processes and business models by networking machines and other objects. Who can say how much of industrial production will be carried out by 3D printers in the coming years? Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would have said: "It's the productive forces, stupid!" The Internet is indeed having a profound impact on the further development of the productive forces and thus on the production of almost everything and everyone. Or as one of today's entrepreneurs, Oliver Samwer, one of the founders of Jamba and Zalando, casually put it: "Shops are the Middle Ages. They were only built because there was no internet back then."
Thirdly, media change: technological and economic change are the causes of changes in the production and distribution of media. Or to put it another way: what we see in the media are the consequences of major technological and economic changes.
With the introduction of digital production methods and the internet, the barriers to media production - production technology, distribution infrastructure and the money required for this - have practically disappeared. "You can reach more people than ever before and need fewer production and capital resources than ever before," says Gabor Steingart, Managing Director of the Handelsblatt publishing group. In the electronic media, for example, until a few years ago it was impossible to bring live images to the screens without major and expensive technical endeavours such as the use of TV OB vans or a complex broadcasting infrastructure. Today, a mobile phone app is basically all you need. This principle is changing the media industry - as can be seen from the way Internet-based publishing models are creating new empires practically overnight and overtaking traditional media companies.
There's no shortage of bold theories about where these changes are leading the media industry:
"Mass media is a temporary anomaly," says John Standage, for example, writing for the British Economist: The media industry only exists because since the
19th century, the media could only reach a broad audience by means of expensive machines. In return, companies were able to charge advertisers money for access to the audience and the audience money for their products. Today, thanks to the internet, anyone can reach a large audience very cheaply, at least in theory. The media industry is therefore increasingly getting into difficulties because it is based on the control of something that is now much more freely available. In its day, it had its function, but no longer under the new conditions - so a "temporary anomaly" is coming to an end. And we can watch it happen.
Or Jeff Jarvis, author of the industry bestseller "What would Google do?": "There is no longer any mass media today". Printed news is dissolving on the Internet: The actual news first runs via Twitter. The background to a story can now be found on Wikipedia or on Vox Media. So why wait for a newspaper?
What's more, (media) consumers today are no longer a mass, but individually addressable beings. Google, says Jarvis, has understood this: "Google knows where I work and where I live. My daily newspaper doesn't know that. That's why it still treats me like part of a crowd." At the same time, individual addressability is also forcing the media to engage in dialogue with their users: "We can no longer put something in front of people - we have to listen to them," says Jarvis. Media must become platforms on which people can engage in dialogue. At any rate, this is no longer what the old mass media used to be.
Whether this is already the case or whether it will become so is, of course, debatable. In any case, some clear patterns can be recognised in the whole chaotic and spontaneous process of media change: Everything that can become digital will become digital. And everything that becomes digital becomes mobile.
New laws apply in this new eco-system: production is different - the business models of the press and broadcasting are losing their validity. Only traditional media that are open to the new laws will survive. And distribution will be different - because communication between media and users will change fundamentally. 180-degree communication in broadcast mode ("We send - you receive") will increasingly become 360-degree communication in the sense of dialogue and conversation. Traditional media that are open to this change will improve and get closer to their customers - and they will survive in a different way. The others, who bury their heads in the sand, will sooner or later be out of business.
As the media, we have no control over how technology and the economy change. How we ourselves behave under these rapidly changing conditions is up to us. I am convinced that we have to change if we want to remain true to ourselves: If we want to save quality journalism, that probably unique media landscape that we have in Germany. If we don't change, we won't survive, but will end up in a museum - like so many other industries before us.