The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) hosted the 8th edition of its Digital Media India (DMI) conference on 19 and 20 February in Mumbai. Over 140 news media executives from over 15 countries attended the event. Together with the Newsroom Summit, this year’s DMI is powered by the World Editors Forum India chapter. The digital event brought together ideas on digital trends, technology, innovations and revenue strategies.
Michael Cooke, the outgoing editor of Toronto Star, started off the conference with a keynote address on leading from the front, and said, “Future of digital is not clear, but future of print is clear and is not a very happy one.” He urged the audience to embrace digital. On digital journalistic challenge, he continued, “They say that anger and hate spread faster than any other emotion … and so that’s lighting speed on social media … as a leader you have to stand strong in front of this tsunami of poison and threats.”
The two-day conference covered a smorgasbord of issues affecting the digital news media business such as digital transformation, revenue strategies, advertising, fake news, audience engagement and artificial intelligence.
The opening session included a panel discussion on how digital media companies, compared to technology giants, can garner the larger share of the revenue pie. The panel comprised Rajiv C Lochan, managing director and CEO, The Hindu Group, who chaired the discussion; Bharat Gupta, CEO, Jagran New Media and Anant Goenka, executive director, The Express Group.
“For The Hindu, digital accounts for less than 5% of the total revenue, but we do it profitably. The Hindu e-paper has been behind a paywall ever since it was launched. The brand quietly introduced a soft, optional paywall last week,” said Lochan.
Jagran garners about 3% of their revenue from digital. Within digital ad pie, 60% come from display advertising and that pie is increasing.
“How well we know our audience is where the digital journey begins. Brands need to know how the audience is consuming content and what do they want to consume” said Gupta. He continued, “There is still more to garner from digital advertising. And, if time spent by the audience in our product is substantial, then we are ready for reader payment. At the moment, less than 10% of the audience fit in this”.
Similarly, “Indian Express’ digital revenue is shy of 10%, but it is a fast-growing number. We have to know the audience and own that audience. And then sell them things that they would like to buy,” said Goenka. Brand credibility is the strength of news media companies that advertisers will respect this. And reader revenue would come if we find our content niche, he added.
The Newsroom Summit India program covered classic journalism challenges such as tackling need vs. want dilemma, social media impact on journalism, combating fake news and mobile first news strategy. The highlights of the Newsroom Summit India discussion on the first day was a panel on ‘gender parity in newsroom’ discussing how gender-friendly the newsrooms are and how to improve the current situation.
