The Wan-Ifra India Digital Summit , which is taking place virtually over three afternoons, began on 18 July 2023. After the welcome, the first session was quite interesting. Fredric Karèn, the senior vice-president for editorial transformation at Schibsted, presented the group’s digital journey, especially since 2012 when the group took stock of its prospects and strategically decided to invest in digital content and operations, including subscription, while de-escalating its print investments.
Karèn says that the group which has eight platforms or brands including two which are only digital, straddling the Swedish and Norwegian markets has been successful to the extent that it is “digitally sustainable.” He added that if the group were to divest its loss-making print activities and was only digital, it would have a profitability of 10%.
This achievement over the past ten years has come from believing in the New York Times dictum – ‘Make your journalism worth paying for.’ Karèn said that a digital-first and foremost strategy was developed and followed without compromise for a decade. Taking the company’s strength in political news and opinion, he said the strategy was to “Define our core journalism; spend less time on print; invest in technology; and finally, in data.”
This has now brought the group to its next stage and a new strategy to be executed from 2021 to 2024. Karèn suggested that this entails keeping on investing in journalism; challenging new positions which might mean even newer types of reach and geographies; growing subscriptions using digital tools and personalization with smarter offerings; and, reinforcing premium ad positions in a new way with a ‘Partner Studio.”
“Advertising is not dead,” he said, implying that premiumization and relationship selling will have to explore and create new types of advertising. Investment in people is essential and what’s the harm in having an editorial person sitting next to a tech resource? Karèn added that in the next phase, there is also the potential to improve the group’s data position.
Rarely does one attend a conference session that contains implementable practical advice – that is, if one is first willing to adopt the radical emphasis that print media will either evolve or wither away as a companion channel to digital channels, eventually, if not immediately. (A subsequent session later that afternoon indicated that this is unlikely amongst the larger Indian print news media organizations.) However, without clarifying how many tech resources Schibsted has added in the past decade, Karèn revealed that in print production the group has reduced resources from 150 to 3 people!
His practical advice was to keep tech tools and data as simple as possible. A simple CMS is best – super simple and much easier for digital journalism. “Mix journalists with tech,” he said. “This is equal to magic.” As far as data, less is more, he said pointing to only three easy-to-understand data points to look at. The mission to 2024 is also simple – conversion of free readers into subscribers; to keep engaging readers; and to create a steady path of new readers – a funnel and a strategy for reach.
All of the above sounds prescriptive and simple, but it is unlikely to be followed by major Indian print media news organizations that are addicted to the high-calorie diet of print advertising. However, in the current situation of print circulations still far below 2019 levels and very lean pagination for most of the dailies, some organizations may still be capable of a creative rethink and rejig. Otherwise, the opportunity to learn from Schibsted is squarely in favor of the Indian digital news media, which is already asset-light and increasingly has that golden and outspoken flavored product – journalism worth paying for.
