WHILE social media takes centerstage since the unconventional campaign and victory of President Rodrigo R. Duterte, which harnessed social media's strength through sheer volunteerism, it is but the tip of the iceberg of how people all over the world are consuming their news.
And as in any changing of the tides and crosscurrents, things can get nasty and blurry.
That things are changing was apparent in all the discussions and presentations during the Wan-Ifra Digital Media 2017 held in Singapore last October 31-November 3, 2017.
The conference featured a powerhouse cast of resource persons discussing paid content, improving video platforms and mobile journalism for the master classes on Day 1 to 13 sessions with 39 resource speakers including the CEO Gary Liu of the South China Morning Post (SCMP), which had its share of the headlines when the Alibaba Group acquired it in April 2016. Alibaba Group is a Chinese e-commerce company that provides consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) sales services via web portals more known to us as online shopping and its founder Jack Ma.
That an e-commerce company that has made billions in the 18 years that it came to be was interested in a newspaper also gives a hint on the future of the print media.
Future not clear
But Liu, himself, is honest to admit that where the change in the print media industry is leading to is not yet clear.
"We have not figured it out. I don’t think anyone has figured it out. That’s why we all have to communicate with each other," he said in his presentation entitled: The real business for Asian media companies: a successful print-2-digital transformation, to win back the hearts of readers, subscribers, and ad clients.
To complicate matters, even as the world is still trying to figure out the millennials and the millennials are basking in their notoriety of being hard to understand, the Generation Z, the real digital natives are already in school, majority of them not likely to have held a newspaper.
Marc Lourdes, director of CNN Digital Asia in Hong Kong said that in creating content for millennials and the GenZ, they publish content in these generations' chosen platforms -- mobile, and multi-platform.
Being everywhere
"It's not pulling in our audience but pushing our content to where the audience is," he said, adding that the millennials and GenZ regard interactive content as normal and thus are more responsive to a platform that offers this.
As such, CNN is everywhere.
It has news apps, social media and walled gardens, messaging apps, it's in watches and devices (Samsung gear watch, Applewatch, GoogleHome, Amazon Echo, and Samsung-1), Video on demand (VOD) and over the top (OTT) where OTT can be related to a product or a service that is provided over the internet whereas VOD is only related to videos and presentation, and virtual reality. This is aside from the CNN TV and CNN Digital.
The picture being drawn is that, it's no longer enough to just have a website and an epaper, as Sun.Star already has. A visit to the Google Headquarters in Singapore gave a glimpse of an even more complex web of applications, services, and programs that intends to push post-modern communication to wherever it is headed, which include artificial intelligence and the return of the audio.
Irene Jay Liu of Google Asia-Pacific introduced the Google News Lab, which collaborates with journalists and entrepreneurs "to build the future of media with Google".
Its focus areas are "building trust in journalism and fighting misinformation online, supporting and furthering practice of data-driven reporting, empowering new immersive forms of storytelling, and surfacing underreported voices and perspectives."
Google sees an opportunity to ride the tide and be vital component of the industry, wherever this is going as the news landscape is rapidly changing.
Aside from the consensus that no one is really sure how the changing print medium will evolve in time at this moment, there is also the agreement that the success stories of media companies that have explored the digital world and churned out profit show that quality journalism .
As the managing editor of Helsingin Sanomat, Kimmo Pietinen, said in his breakfast presentation, "There is a demand and market for quality journalism."
Mindset change
But this required major changes both in the physical newsroom and in the mindset of the newsroom.
First is the emphasis on the digital, where everybody has to think digital, and most articles go digital first. The print, he said, is largely curated to fit its audience.
They placed emphasis on planning where the news editor is now dedicated to planning what articles they will be making in the next weeks and months, instead of just days. They also enabled an audience engagement team to perform better.
Helsingin Sanomat is the leading newspaper in Finland with 260 journalists, which produces a daily national newspaper and is the No. 4 website in Finland. While the newspaper is HS's main business, it also publishes magazines, weekly newspaper, Metro freesheet, books, and has a digital ebook library service and shop.
Trust, credibility
What is becoming apparent as newspapers engage digital media and go into social is that credibility will be what will make the audience bring in profit.
"Trust is the new currency," said Shailesh Prakash, chief information officer and vice president of Digital Product Development of The Washington Post. "It is a privileged position that we cannot squander."
Especially with the digital natives, this generation is aware that apps and content like music and video has to be paid, and they are willing to pay.
Fake news may abound and be passed around, given the relatively free nature of the Internet, but the media company that will be able to turn in a profit will be those whose audience are willing to pay to access their content.
The business models that are succeeding early in this game after the ad market failed to live up to the promise of the Internet to newsrooms are cashing in on metered subscription, freemium, bundling with print, hard wall subscription, and single purchase.
Bottomline, print is not dead, it is but evolving into something that is far different and more interactive, the full concept of which no one at this present moment, can yet get a good grasp of.
"We as humans tend to focus on what's not working, we forgot to focus on what's working," Prakash said, and this is how it was in recent years when many in the print media industry were amplifying the death knell failing to see beyond the printed word.
But as in any industry, the greatest risk to a company's future success is the reluctance to innovate.
"Never stop testing, never stop experimenting, and never stop learning," said Winston Utomo, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of IDN Media Indonesia, in his talk on Creating Shareable, viral content for millennials.