'Digital dementia', innovation and the crazy people

Oct 12, 2016 at 01:37 am by Staff


The secret to long life in the news media industry is innovation, and it is the crazy people who come up with the best ideas.

So the audience in the two conference streams at WAN-Ifra's World Publishing Expo in Vienna heard, as both dedicated many speakers to telling just how their organisations are dealing with the demands of news media life and longevity.

The three-day show features an ongoing programme of conferences, alternating printing and - the more popular - digital media. Some speakers were common to both, and included innovations attributed to the "crazy people" in their organisations.

Transforming media companies and what form this transformation should take was a recurring theme, with representatives from major groups such as Austria's Styria Media Group - where Klaus Schweighofer described how the way the second biggest newspaper group in Austria, Croatia and Slovenia has its feet firmly in both print and digital.

The figures are impressive: 1.6 million readers daily, 196 million visits monthly and 357,000 listeners daily, along with 22 million video views monthly. At the same time, Styria has also recently invested in a new press but accepts that "we are in a totally new game.

"Nothing is as it used to be," says Schweighhofer.

"The current myth is that the new gadget (the smartphone) makes your life and that you do not need anything else - this is just digital dementia," he says. "We push hard in all areas of the business and push for excellence in all areas, you have to be the best to attract the best, and to compete with the algorithms of players such as Facebook and Google.

"In a battle between humans and machines, it is the local warmness of your local audience that matters compared to global coolness."

Among the strategies Styria has tried and dropped is e-commerce - "we had to offer too wide a range of brands and products" - and they have banned the term paywall. However a newspaper in Montenegro, in the Balkans, is having some success with a payment for content system.

"We are trying the freemium strategy now", Schweighofer says.

Kurt Sabathil, managing director of Schwabisch Media in Ravensburg, Germany, reminded the audience just how much the world has changed since he purchased his first PC in 1985: "In common with most other newspapers, Schwabische Zeitung has lost circulation and in the last decade, 60 per cent of advertising pages to Google, so as a regional publisher we fight to survive, to be strong in every market with our brand."

The group has 22 dailies and 14 weeklies with a 500,000 plus circulation, plus magazines and "online magazines", television, radio and services,m and sees itself as a content company.

"Data is the oil," he says. "We have many employees under the age of 30 - they think differently, do things differently and something new will happen."

Gerold Reidmann also believes in innovation. As managing director of Russmedia and editor-in-chief of Austria's Vorarlberger Nachrichten, he sees his group's ten media brands across all channels as the constant companion of his audience members and the frequency of their visits as evidence of a vital loyalty.

Abeer Abdalla attributes many of the successes of Al-Jazirah Corporation's printing innovation suite to ideas from crazy people too: Based in Ridyadh, Saudi Arabia, the PR and business development executive "gets very excited about what we can do and how we got there.

"We believe the future of print depends on technology and print is as active as digital in our part of the world."

She showed off double gatefolds, metallic and fluoro inks, micro-encapsulated signature scents, diecutting, perforations and "adverstickers" as evidence that exciting developments were continually happening in print.

Maggie Coleman

Pictured: Al-Jazirah's Abeer Abdalla

Sections: Newsmedia industry

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