Consolidated Report of the Discussion
Future of Editorial Work – New Training Courses Required?
In times when expenditures are cut back, net activities start to resemble more and more classical business. So print journalists are asked to provide content for the internet more or less as a sideline. The resulting question is whether publishing houses will be able to provide content which is worth its money or whether they produce nothing more than “print in Internet gown”.
Among publishers there is a strong believe that already existing content is not going to be sold further online. A main challenge is in fact how the organisational structure can reflect the provision of paid content. Is a print journalist able to also write digital content with equal quality, with equal depth and with equal quantity? This is one of the crucial questions which publishing houses currently worry about.
In fact the portfolio of journalists will change, probably drastically. Some even argue that in the foreseeable future the print journalist for daily newspaper will cease to exist. The new generation of journalists and editors will be trained in multimedia. There are very specific demands on writing for the internet, the newspaper, the radio or mobile platforms which asks for new training programs for doing editorial work in the future.
Positioning Users – User-Demand or Technology Push?
Positioning users in the debate about paid content means to address the question whether users need to be forced to buy into the paid content model or whether they have a say and in fact shape the content market by consuming in their own ways. These two positions have come through in the discussion, too.
On the one hand the point was pressed in the discussion that what users want should drive the business. For regional news platforms for example, the only chance to generate money is to be prepared to report back from the local or even sub-local level since local topics are important to the user. For this line of thinking it is starting from what the user wants which is the way ahead. Whereas much is argued with technology, we instead need to address two questions: what does the user want and how do we get the user to where we want him? These are the questions which usually come too short in discussions about the content market. On the other hand it is argued that if you do not force users they are not going to pay. However, when forcing people it is acknowledged that content providers need to give them something worthwhile in return.
Whatever the argumentation is, it is important to notice that as much as content differs (from regional news to erotic) as much do their target group differ and with this the users and their likely behaviour.
Pricing Models – How To Tag Content?
Apart from the very rich set of issues covered in the study conducted by the VDZ/Sapient the only real big issue left over for further research is the question of how to tag content. As Mr. von Reibnitz, one of the man being responsible for the study, pointed out; “An interesting and important issue is surely sales, potential of sales and sales problems. What is the right price to charge for an article, a download? Here I see the need for further research.” A clear suggestion for future research. However, as crucial as these questions are as problematic to investigate they are at the same time. An independent funding body would be most suitable to tackle the development of pricing models though.
What Counts As Content – Will The Classic Media Business Survive?
There is a commonly-shared understanding that a clear-cut definition of „e-content“ is not easy to give. However, dating or sending SMS are a particular hard case. In statistics and studies they are often listed as e-content. However, they are strictly speaking user-generated content. Companies have little to do with it but rather provide the service with which the content is generated. So, including such content distorts the studies.
However, current discussions demonstrate that ordinary content has not been successful in a paid content sense of the word. Across studies, in the list of types of content on offer there are less than 40% which can be classically described as content. This highlights the problem of the observation from above: contents in the way which one likes to define is not the crowd puller. Perhaps this also hints at something else: parts of the classical media business model as we have known it might have outlived. Perhaps this is what the number “less than 40% of paid content can be classically described as content” is pointing at. In fact, such an observation would question the entire classic media business and ask for a long-term investigation of content on a meta-level.
