How to Foster Innovation in an Increasingly Digital Media Market
A 2021 survey conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 76 percent of editors and CEOs ranked subscription models as a high priority and that the COVID-19 pandemic had advanced plans for switching to digital models.
Jim Brady, Vice President of Journalism for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, has worked in journalism for 34 years, with 27 years of experience in digital journalism. He has served as the Executive Editor for washingtonpost.com, CEO of Spirited Media, Editor in Chief of Digital First Media, and ESPN’s public editor from 2015 to 2018. Brady’s work has taken him from print to broadcast and beyond, earning a national Emmy award, Peabody award, and four Edward R. Murrow awards for Best Non-Broadcast Affiliated Web Site.
With a decades-long career in all facets of media and storytelling, Brady offers nuanced perspectives on the industry’s past, present, and future, informed by other’s and his own successes and failures. In this program, Brady discusses sustainability, the disintegration of advertising-reliant news business models, media survival tactics, and the success behind using methods such as connection, experimentation, innovation, and adaptation.
How to Keep Innovation Alive in Digital Media
“When you’re dealing with the digital world where everything’s changing so quickly, there is no thing that is definitely going to work.”
Brady describes the early days of digital journalism and the culture of “fast following,” watching what other publishers did first and replicating whatever plan of action worked. “The problem with that was that there weren’t that many people willing to go out and do it first. There was this caution, everybody was terrified that they were going to screw up – I think the key to digital for me was I was always like ‘I’m happy to fail first’.”
Writing With a Voice That People Care About
Comparing larger news organizations to local outlets, Brady explains that readers are more likely to subscribe to smaller newspapers when coverage is more curated toward the audience. As outlets move away from the advertisement-reliant model and toward subscription-based models, Brady advised that newspapers and journalists build better relationships with and connect to their audiences better.
“We wrote with a voice that read like people would talk – we covered things they really cared about…the newspapers have to get back to this idea that you’ve got to get the consumers to care about what you do and we can’t talk past them,” said Brady.
Brady’s advice for journalists in digital media: know how to communicate online and have a large amount of patience. Have an online presence and personality but know when and how it’s appropriate to chime in.
What Could Shape the Future of Televised and Digital Journalism?
Trust in the media has declined to an all-time low. But audiences feel more positively about their news sources when they feel represented by them. What lessons can writers, editors, and media organizations learn to adapt and increase their audience?
Returning to the basics. Brady advises news outlets to rely on the fundamentals of journalism: answering important questions. Brady finds that listening to an audience can reveal deeper and more interesting stories to report on, building trust and leading to higher readership.
Brady is hopeful that cable news networks will learn from their on-the-ground coverage of the war in Ukraine and return to more genuine reporting as opposed to the average divisive political discourse and commentary.
Business models that don’t rely on advertisements for profit benefit writers and newsrooms in general. Successful subscription-based models can bring a healthy symbiotic relationship between reader and writer. That relationship is key.
