Rarely has a Society of Editors conference over the years hosted a session in which so many of the contributions were so stimulating and so genuinely informative. The speakers offered both practical guidance based on their own experiences along with some pointers to where we should be going. And, to ground us in reality, there was also a thoughtful challenge to our smugness about our news organisations' abilities to attract an audience among a generation that has grown up using a digital technology that we are still trying to tame.
The session, entitled "The future is already here", began with Robert Freeman multi-media editor at the Press Association arguing that "the public" are already taking a multi-platform world for granted and presented a vox pop video clip showing that people are now getting their daily news from a range of choices - internet, TV, radio, magazines, free and paid-for newspapers. But his concern was that we may face a "content vacuum very soon" unless we take the opportunity to fill it. His further major point was that content and delivery platform cannot be divorced from each other. They are intertwined. We cannot hope to be successful in providing content if we are not interested in technology that allows us to deliver it.
Gordon Mack digital media editor of The Herald in Glasgow, gave an upbeat assessment of his 225-year-old paper's transformation into a multi-platform news provider, pointing to the fact that its website now attracts 500,000 unique visitors a month, up 45% on a year ago. Though his paper has yet to engage with mobile phone alerts, it has moved successsfully into video and audio material, and it has also launched a facsimile edition, discovering a tiny niche market (of just 66 copies a day). Mack's belief is that papers must get much better at aggregation. His concern is that content is too "stubbornly wedded to print".
But what was enlightening was his argument that print journalists cannot expect to transform themselves into web broadcasters without a great deal of training. They are also hopeless at scripting podcasts, he said. And the burden of his message was that greater investment is therefore required. In other words, more editorial staff must be dedicated to digital journalism. While Yahoo and Time Warner have thousands of employees to produce their sites, The Herald has an online production team of just two!
He was followed by an absorbing talk from Simon Reynolds, editor of the Lancashire Evening Post, about his "quiet revolution in Preston in the last eight months." His paper has pioneered an integrated, fully converged news organisation. Along the way, he thought the paper had learned three key lessons: the crucial importance of interaction; the limitless public appetite for news; and the continuing enjoyment of bizarre editorial content. He illustrated the first point by showing a vodcast of Preston's mayor reading the news, an amusing diversion with a serious point: readers can do it too! A further video clip was more sombre, showing the arrival by plane of the body of a local soldier who had been killed in Iraq. Readers of the splash story in the printed paper were able to go online and see the poignant film of the event.
And the bizarre? A website audio clip of a cow mooing with a Lancashire accent! But, from serious to light, from news to comment, Reynolds gave some startling statistics. His staff are producing some 500 stories a week online, along with 550 pictures and up to 20 video and audio clips. The Post's monthly page impressions have quadrupled in a year to 1.5m and the number of unique users has trebled.
Bertrand Pecquerie, the director of the World Editors' Forum, argued that newspapers have to become what he called "super-aggregators" and that they may benefit from either running several websites rather than one. He pointed to the success of some regional papers in devoting attention to "hyper-local content" to target small communities. He also urged media companies to think about adopting an idea already pioneered in Germany of different kinds of paper - national, regional, local and, perhaps, specialist - working from within the same newsroom. But he was scathing about the Telegraph group's hub-style newsroom. He believed that there was a danger of such newsrooms becoming "control rooms", 21st century examples of Charlie Chaplin's inhumane Modern Times factory. "It's horrible", he said (though it gained an extra resonance from his accent: "it's 'orrible").
Then, finally, came a counter-intuitive contribution from The Observer's columnist, John Naughton. He reminded us that 21-year-olds are genuine "digital natives". "These kids have been socially conditioned in a universe that runs parallel to the one most folks in the media business inhabit", he said. "They were born multi-tasking. They're resourceful, knowledgeable and natural users of computer and communicatioons technology... They're here and they're living among us. They're not very interested in us... The best we can hope for is that one day they may keep us as pets".
That may appear like a down-beat end to the debate, but it is a reminder that we in the media cannot hope to attract this generation unless we embrace them. They must show us the way. But do we want to listen? And, even if we do, will we understand what they're talking about?
