Talking to Digital Media India today, Dow Jones' chief innovation officer Edward Roussel started and ended with a warning about big tech: "While it's easy to overestimate what companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Facebook can achieve short term, don't underestimate the longer term."

The common denominator for the Silicon Valley giants is news, each launching their own news products in recent months as part of "enormous" competition on each others' turf. "The reason is engagement - news is a way they can get people to keep coming back," he says.

With their involvement changing news, publishers need to respond with brevity, interaction, visual and audio content, and personalisation, the latter an idea "overpromised and underdelivered, but on which AI is increasing quality, and Microsoft pushing very hard".

Roussel also points to the need for brevity, as mobile users - who might use a phone 100 times a day - cut usage down to an average three minutes on each occasion. The question is how to compete for attention, and "give a great experience in a short time".

He says Snapchat estimates you have two seconds to get a user's attention, 80 seconds on the discovery platform, and just a minute for reading. "Heuristics - the up-down symbols and hashtags - are mental shortcuts to help a user make up your mind, and concision matters," he says. "It has to be a great news experience for a very short time."

Audio and visual forms are growing fast - and Roussel urges delegates to think how people listen - with other challenges including community, and a user's interaction with site contents. He names Clubhouse - where Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are reported to be callers - OnlyFans, Patreon, Cameo, and Substack as "growing exponentially".

"All these have three things in common, and one is disintermediation with the news industry as stars connect direct. "there's an element of the cult about these too - rising above the fray - and a distinct hierarchy, with stars connecting directly with fans."

Roussel says the economic value is in the interaction - people paying for interaction - and a reminder of the importance of how journalists interact.

On audio, he talks of a challenge driven by hardware, with smart speakers in 50 million US homes, plus speakers in cars, and the growth of airpods, of which Apple sold 100 million in 2020. "Ubiquitious audio, and you need to know, what does it mean to listen to your publication, if you took away all the words?"

A "ripple effect" on the content side has seen intense competition over streaming of sport, and between companies such as Apple, Google and Amazon, and Clubhouse - created last April - now a unicorn. "What are you doing to lean in to the audio revolution," he asks.

It's the "golden age" of visuals, and with an explosion in data-driven graphics - "kudos to the New York Times, whose top six stories are all based on data-driven graphics" - and of video shot on mobile phones. "So many of these stories began with mobile video footage," he says.

Meanwhile, YouTube "has more viewers under the age of 50 than all the US TV channels" and is spawning start-ups such as the House of Highlights channel. Not to mention photo galleries, Google and Instagram stories. "You need to ask how you can make your journalism more appealing, with data galleries, UGC and more," he says.

Personalisation is being driven by AI, with Microsoft - having "got rid of all its human editors" - directing all its efforts on "curating efforts such as yours and directing them".

There's also an explosion in hyperlocal news apps such as Citizen, Nextdoor, and News Break, "serving you news in your neighbourhood, and absolutely brilliant," he says. "I'll bet this'll be big next year or year after, and geolocation, topic-based, or based on previous reading."

He comes back to Bill Gates' prediction that influences such as Google, Facebook and Apple are the ones to watch, over five-to-ten years.

"How do you compete in that environment, and ensure they're not crushing you."

He suggests local newspapers will struggle - the Gannett model "very troubled - finding it hard to compete. "I don't see a way for local newspapers to do that," and only publishers such as the Washington Post and New York Times "which have journalism which is differentiated and distinct" will be able to persuade users to pay.

"The subscription model is winning, is very scalable, but only if you have distinctive journalism," he says.

It's just what WAN-Ifra's Digital Media India delegates wanted to hear.

Peter Coleman