Five months after leaving his job as anchor of Global National, Kevin Newman—rested, recharged and focused—is ready to dive back into a news industry in the midst of an unprecedented revolution. Why now? ‘It’s a once-in-a-decade opportunity to bring some of the things I stood for in traditional media to the mobile platform,’ he says. And (hooray!) newspapers are a big part of his vision of the future… as long as they get serious about video, mobile, and developing one hell of a brand.
Do newspapers still do local best?
One of the trends from the last decade has been to try to commoditize both the sales side but also the editorial side. What’s ended up happening is we’ve lost our ability as journalists to have ears on the ground because everything is going through editing centres where stories are treated as things to be adjusted then shared across multiple [national] platforms. We’ve largely abandoned local news because of that. Big sales forces are always looking for big national accounts. Meanwhile, who’s knocking on the door of the local car dealership? There are no relationships left. To me that’s an enormous opportunity for anyone to establish those connections editorially to neighbourhoods but also financially to the momand- pop businesses that the big newspapers don’t seem to be interested in serving anymore.
So what business models work for local news?
[Locally focused] models are not being built by big newspapers right now but by startups like OpenFile. They are not a fully formed financial model yet, but they are attacking that deep local space thinking that major advertisers will want to target it, but also that there has to be a less expensive way for the local flower store to get advertising to people who want to see it in the neighbourhood. That’s the model I’ve seen that wants to invert the process of newsgathering to a bottom-up model. What will follow probably will be a similar advertising model.
What format works best for
newsgathering and news
consumption?
In terms of gathering, I think we’re seeing a move to a hybrid platform. We’ve been through five years of citizen journalism, paying people $100 per story and it’s not proving to be a [good] financial model for the people who are telling the story. Another option is still usergenerated, but there’s an overlaying of professional journalists on top of it, and those journalists are not getting the guidance from each other, or from their editors, but from open sources in every neighbourhood.
In terms of consumption, everything is migrating to mobile, so that’s going to be a significant limiting factor for any sort of journalism that is word-based. It’s just not comfortable to read words on a [small] screen. I would caution newspapers, as I have for a decade, to not solely imagine that their content is going to be consumed [as] photographs and the printed word. The next big thing is motion and [newspapers are] going to have to figure out a way to convey information using .
So newspapers have been wrong all along?
I think most newspapers have treated video as a poor second cousin. It’s a little click beside all the pictures and words and I think that paradigm is completely upside down. More than a hundred years have taught us that moving images—video and motion—are more compelling and grab way more eyeballs than any other media. I might suggest that the future of these things is overlaying the printed word with video and explanation that people can engage in, then answering the question: do I want to know more? Newspapers have thrown out the details on the front page, and put video in the back page. All that has to flip itself in a mobile information world.
Do papers have to behave more like
broadcasters to better sell ads?
One of the truths is that major advertisers, having taken a look at the Google model, are not always happy with where their brand is sitting beside content, because the algorithm is placing [their ad] and they don’t always have control over that. My bet is that now advertisers are looking for premium visual content that is in a contained space much like it was on TV or in print. They want predictability of where their brand is going to be and the type of content it’s going to be associated with. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity coming newspapers’ way.
Who’s doing this right?
I think The Globe and Mail is by having one sponsor advertise on most of their sites right at the beginning and it seems to be a model that is spreading. For the advertiser, it gives them an association with a trusted brand and for the newspapers in the sense it creates an ad that isn’t annoying.
What media property is closest to showing us
what the future will look like for newspaper?
I guess I’ll see what Rupert Murdoch comes up with, with The Daily [for iPads]. He has all of the assets at his fingertips to redesign something for tablet devices. What’s interesting to me is that initially television shows were people standing around microphones reading radio scripts. [Newspapers have] been doing that for the last five years. What’s about to happen [this year] is media will begin understanding the platform better and that it’s not enough to take your website and throw it mobile. You actually have to design things for how they are consumed on the new devices.
How should newspapers choose what they report?
If you have a local murder, the facts and details come from people who are closer to it, whether that’s online or whatever. But attaching perspective to it still has legs. The idea that a newspaper, like a department store, can give you everything is dead. What newspapers and TV stations should figure out is what they provide that’s unique to a conversation that’s already ongoing. The Globe and Mail didn’t perhaps go as far as they were going to go in that direction, but the amount of context and perspective in [their] redesign is significantly larger. Newspapers are finding their place as where you go for a deeper more meaningful understanding of things as opposed to what’s just happened. I think the media that is not doing that, ironically, is the most powerful one: television. It’s still very much “here’s what’s going on” because they think they are the centre of newsgathering, which they’re not.
Where should newspapers be next?
Geo-location has enormous potential. What it can do is send localized advertising to you and localized content, too.
