#3 Inside Economist

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00:00:02: Our readers are essentially paying us

00:00:09: to tell them what's important.

00:00:11: So what we can't do is take their money

00:00:13: and then say, well, we don't actually know what's important,

00:00:15: but we'll just look at what you're clicking on

00:00:17: and do more of that.

00:00:18: Because that doesn't really help anyone.

00:00:20: You just get more articles about Elon Musk and electric cars,

00:00:23: right?

00:00:24: Because that's what everyone-- or Apple.

00:00:25: That's what everyone wants to click on.

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00:00:36: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

00:00:39: Hello and welcome.

00:00:58: My name is Bern Vasari.

00:00:59: I'm a editor at WZ.

00:01:01: In the media industry, it's all about corners and ends.

00:01:04: Paper, newspapers, and magazines are always less read.

00:01:08: In addition, people are hardly ready to pay for online content.

00:01:12: The economist knows these problems

00:01:14: contrary to the hearing.

00:01:16: The readership could increase in the past two years

00:01:19: by 100,000-page subscribers and subscribers.

00:01:23: How does this work?

00:01:24: What mistakes should media houses avoid

00:01:26: to ensure that we can achieve a good mix of young and old editors

00:01:29: and editors?

00:01:30: [SPEAKING GERMAN]

00:01:35: Hi, Tom.

00:01:47: Hello.

00:01:48: It's good to be here.

00:01:49: Thank you for having us.

00:01:50: So while many media outlets are struggling with declining readership,

00:01:55: the economist shows no sign of it.

00:01:57: Your readership is growing and growing.

00:01:59: Two years ago, you had 1,088,000 subscribers.

00:02:03: Today, you have 1,185,000 subscribers.

00:02:07: That's nearly 100,000 more in two years.

00:02:09: What is your secret of success?

00:02:12: Oh, that's a very good question.

00:02:14: I think the economist is quite an unusual publication.

00:02:17: So I should probably say that upfront,

00:02:21: because obviously we are a global publication.

00:02:24: So we're based in Britain, but we have people all over the world.

00:02:27: And what's even stranger is that most of our readers are in North America.

00:02:31: So they're outside the region where we're based.

00:02:34: And so we like to think of ourselves as not being based in a particular place.

00:02:40: We don't have a political allegiance to a particular place.

00:02:44: We have a particular philosophy that we follow,

00:02:48: which is sort of 19th century liberalism, you might say.

00:02:51: So I think part of our success has been that--

00:02:54: and this has been the story for the last 50 years or so--

00:02:57: we have attracted readers in North America

00:03:00: because we provide a global perspective

00:03:03: that is maybe a bit broader than they get from their local media.

00:03:07: Now, it has to be said that both the New York Times and The Washington Post

00:03:11: are also pursuing global media strategies.

00:03:14: I'm a subscriber to both, even though I live in the UK.

00:03:17: And that's something we've seen many other publications doing

00:03:20: in the English-speaking world.

00:03:22: The Guardian has done the same.

00:03:24: It has quite a big operation in Australia now and in the US as well.

00:03:28: So we sort of pioneered that model in retrospect.

00:03:32: So I think that's part of it that, you know, for some subscribers,

00:03:36: particularly, I think people who are interested in global affairs and global business,

00:03:40: that global perspective is something that they have seen more and more value for.

00:03:46: And I think we all feel now that-- and we saw this with the pandemic,

00:03:50: but we see it with globalization, we see it with the internet.

00:03:53: Increasingly, you can't just take a national perspective on things.

00:03:57: You have to understand how all the things in the world, you know, are interconnected

00:04:01: and how things on the other side of the world can affect you.

00:04:05: And so I think that has also meant that there has been a growing appetite

00:04:09: for the kind of global perspective that we provide.

00:04:13: So I think that has helped as well.

00:04:16: And then the other thing that we've noticed is that we tend to pick up readers

00:04:20: when times are uncertain and when they're difficult.

00:04:25: So we, you know, have a sort of counter-cyclical benefit that when there's a recession,

00:04:30: people go, "Oh, no, I don't know what's going to happen."

00:04:33: We saw this during the Trump presidency that also in many publications saw this,

00:04:38: the Trump bump, that the uncertainty that caused and the sort of global implications

00:04:44: of what was happening in America meant that there was a lot more interest in a global perspective.

00:04:50: And of course, what we've seen in the last few years, in retrospect,

00:04:54: the pandemic marked the end of a period of really quite unusual stability,

00:05:00: which sort of started to unravel in 2016.

00:05:03: But if you look at the first 15 years of this century, and certainly if you look at the last,

00:05:10: most of the 2010s, you had this period of relatively little great power conflict

00:05:15: because the Cold War had ended and you had low inflation, you had low interest rates.

00:05:21: And, you know, that has actually meant that we had this period of sort of calm and stability,

00:05:29: relatively speaking. And that's clearly come to an end.

00:05:32: We now have a lot more economic uncertainty.

00:05:34: We have a lot more geopolitical uncertainty, not just because of Ukraine,

00:05:37: but also because of growing tension between the US and China.

00:05:40: And we also have the unpredictable nature of climate change and the extreme weather events.

00:05:47: So there are all of these things where suddenly unpredictability is back.

00:05:52: And that I have to, you know, sadly confess means that more people then generally want to read the economists.

00:05:59: So all of those things added up probably explain why our circulation continues to grow.

00:06:06: There is a big challenge in media now.

00:06:09: The balance is shifting away from brand to online.

00:06:12: And this development can also be seen in the economists.

00:06:15: Two years ago, you had 35% of your subscribers.

00:06:19: They were digital. Today it's 52%.

00:06:22: But this is also interesting in contrast to other newspapers and magazines.

00:06:26: You have a paywall. So all your subscribers pay for your online stories.

00:06:31: What would you say? Which mistakes did you avoid?

00:06:34: I think that's a good way of putting it.

00:06:36: I'd like to say this was all part of a grand strategy.

00:06:39: To some extent it was, but I think it's also the case that we were lucky in some respects

00:06:44: in our approach to digital and our approach to the internet.

00:06:48: So yes, the first thing is that for as long as we've had a website,

00:06:52: I mean, we had a website quite early in, I think, '95,

00:06:56: because we had a couple of editors who were very aware of the internet.

00:07:01: And it was going to come and it was going to be a big deal.

00:07:04: We started reporting on that quite early on.

00:07:06: So they set up a website with a few articles each week, but it really was only four or five.

00:07:11: So when we started putting all of our content on the internet every week,

00:07:16: because at that point we were just a weekly print magazine,

00:07:19: and so we had a drop of articles every week.

00:07:21: And obviously things have changed a lot since then.

00:07:23: But that was when it really began.

00:07:25: And our website now, the archive goes back to that year, to 1997.

00:07:29: And when we started doing that, we did have a paywall.

00:07:32: We always had a paywall.

00:07:34: And we've moved the paywall around and we've changed the rules.

00:07:36: And we've sometimes had some bits free and some bits not free.

00:07:40: And the number of articles you can read free if you're not a subscriber

00:07:43: has gone up and down and all this sort of thing.

00:07:45: But to gain full access to the economist in digital form,

00:07:49: you've always had to pay for it.

00:07:51: And then when we launched our apps in 2010, that was the case as well.

00:07:56: So we've never had to sort of change our position and go back to our readers

00:08:01: and say, well, you know how this stuff you've been getting for free,

00:08:04: well, now I'm afraid you're going to have to start paying for it.

00:08:06: It's always been something that people have had to pay for.

00:08:08: So I think a lot of newspapers in the internet boom were chasing advertising revenue,

00:08:14: and they were chasing essentially clicks,

00:08:17: and that really changes the way you approach journalism.

00:08:19: And what that meant was, you know, the more clicks the better, the more people the better.

00:08:23: And then when the internet advertising started to become less valuable,

00:08:29: they had a problem and they started to have to put up paywalls,

00:08:33: which I think is the right strategy.

00:08:34: But that meant that they had been training their readers to expect something to be free

00:08:38: for years and years and years.

00:08:39: And then they said, actually, it's not free anymore.

00:08:41: And that's a difficult transition to go through.

00:08:43: And we never had to go through that.

00:08:44: We always had a paywall.

00:08:46: And also we've always had quite a high subscription price.

00:08:48: I mean, you know, essentially our readers are people who are prepared to pay our subscription price

00:08:54: because they feel they get enough value from the publication that it saves them time

00:08:58: and it gives them insights that they can't get elsewhere.

00:09:01: And so again, we saw some of our rivals weekly news publications in America in particular.

00:09:08: They pursued an advertising-based model.

00:09:11: They cut their subscription prices very low.

00:09:13: And I'm thinking of magazines like Time and Newsweek here.

00:09:17: And so they were chasing very high circulations and they got to, you know,

00:09:22: $3 million or something like that, I think.

00:09:25: And of course, they were making most of their money on advertising.

00:09:27: And then when print advertising dried up around 2008, 2009,

00:09:33: they had a big problem because to pivot to a subscriber-driven model,

00:09:39: they had to raise their subscription prices.

00:09:41: So it's a bit like the problem with the paywall and the internet.

00:09:43: You've trained your readers to expect the publication to be quite low-cost

00:09:47: and then raising your prices makes it difficult to hold on to those subscribers.

00:09:53: So we never made that mistake.

00:09:54: We always had a paywall and we've always had quite a high subscription price.

00:09:58: So that's part of it.

00:09:59: The other thing was that we never had a strategy of chasing an advertising-based model.

00:10:07: Our main supply of revenue has always been from our readers.

00:10:12: And obviously, there are times that I remember during the dot-com boom,

00:10:15: because I've been at the Economist for 25 years,

00:10:17: but I remember how thick the Economist was then

00:10:20: because there was so much advertising from internet companies and telecoms companies.

00:10:23: And we were very, very happy to sell them advertising pages.

00:10:26: And while it lasted, you know, we happily took their money

00:10:28: and we were even more profitable than we are without that.

00:10:32: But it meant that when that advertising dried up,

00:10:35: we still had our revenue from subscribers to sustain us.

00:10:39: We didn't have a model that depended on predominantly on advertising.

00:10:44: So in that respect, we were lucky.

00:10:47: And then if you look inside, this is a bit more sort of inside baseball

00:10:50: for the publishing industry,

00:10:51: but what a lot of publications did in the 2000s

00:10:54: was they hired a lot of journalists to write articles,

00:10:58: to write great content for digital platforms, for the web,

00:11:01: and then subsequently for, you know, for video on Facebook and all this sort of stuff.

00:11:06: And that was very often a sort of separate operation

00:11:09: from the generally older and more experienced journalists

00:11:12: that they had writing for their print editions.

00:11:14: And in many news organizations, that created a sort of cultural divide

00:11:18: that the young writers were like, come on, this is the future.

00:11:22: We're changing the world.

00:11:23: Who are all these dinosaurs over here?

00:11:25: And by the way, why are they paid so much more than we are?

00:11:28: And then the older journalists saying, who are these whippersnappers

00:11:31: and what is this internet?

00:11:32: And it's just getting in the way of my job.

00:11:34: And I wish it would just go away.

00:11:36: It's just a fad.

00:11:37: And, you know, I'll leave the internet to those people,

00:11:40: those young people in the corner.

00:11:41: They can do the internet.

00:11:43: And of course, you know, neither of those positions is right.

00:11:47: The internet was the future and it is part of your job.

00:11:50: But it was also not sustainable in the way that those companies very often were approaching it,

00:11:56: which was, you know, they were trying to pay the salaries of all of their digital journalists

00:12:00: from advertising revenue that then turned out not to be there anymore.

00:12:03: So many news organizations then went through this very painful process

00:12:07: of having to crunch together two really quite different groups of people.

00:12:12: And, you know, that, that again is something that the economists managed to avoid.

00:12:17: Our approach during the dot com boom was not to hire lots more journalists.

00:12:22: In fact, the editor at the time, Bill Emmett said that the right strategy,

00:12:26: because we weren't really sure what was going to happen with internet business models and so on,

00:12:30: he said the right strategy is to do the least we can get away with.

00:12:33: So we did start publishing some pieces during the week between the,

00:12:37: the Thursdays when our weekly edition comes out,

00:12:40: but they were written by the same people who write the weekly.

00:12:43: So the idea was that anyone who covers a particular topic,

00:12:48: whether it's France or cars or China or, you know, I don't know, the Brazilian economy,

00:12:54: they would, it would be the same person writing for our digital platforms as for our print edition.

00:12:59: And that has meant that, you know, because we've increased our output,

00:13:03: we've had, we have had to hire more people and the number of journalists has gone steadily up

00:13:07: and the number of foreign bureaus has gone steadily up.

00:13:10: But we did that in a very sort of gradual way and we basically added to our existing newsroom

00:13:15: and our existing roster of journalists.

00:13:17: We never had a separate team of digital journalists.

00:13:19: So again, that was a mistake that I think a lot of publications in retrospect did make

00:13:25: and came to regret and we managed to avoid that one too.

00:13:28: And that has also been a good thing.

00:13:30: Of course, this is very unhelpful when people come and visit and say,

00:13:33: how can we learn from the economists?

00:13:35: What can we do?

00:13:36: Well, unless you've got a time machine, you can't avoid that one.

00:13:39: And then the, the kind of being a publication that's based in Britain,

00:13:44: but has most of its readers in another part of the world,

00:13:47: that's quite difficult for people to copy as well.

00:13:49: So it's not like these were great sort of strategic plans that we, that we did.

00:13:54: We basically avoided mistakes in some areas and we were quite lucky in others.

00:13:58: And I think the main thing that we did that was a deliberate choice was to never make all of our content free.

00:14:05: This is very interesting because many newspapers and magazines fetch young employees for only for the online sections.

00:14:11: The older employees only take care of print.

00:14:14: So there's a culture clash then.

00:14:17: But how do you do it?

00:14:18: In which areas do you deploy young employees?

00:14:21: How does it work if a young employee comes to the economist?

00:14:24: So it's always been the case that, I mean, I started on the science desk,

00:14:28: which is one of the places where, where people start.

00:14:31: And the great thing about science is you have to write about all sorts of different subjects.

00:14:35: And you end up not just writing for the science pages,

00:14:37: but when there's sort of a science, you know, policy debate or there's a some sort of,

00:14:42: I mean, something like the pandemic that became a science story that touched everything else.

00:14:46: So it means that you naturally sort of end up working with other departments

00:14:50: and then when it's time to move on, you move on into one of those departments.

00:14:54: So I specialized in science, but also the sort of hard end of science, physics and microchips and that sort of thing.

00:15:01: So I ended up writing about tech on the business section next.

00:15:04: That's where I went. I went into business, but other people go in, in other directions.

00:15:07: We also quite often start people on the Britain section and in the finance pages.

00:15:12: And then we have a whole load of digital roles like the social media department, the films department,

00:15:19: and they are producing digital content.

00:15:21: But very often what happens is that the people working on those departments,

00:15:27: they're not part of the core journalism team in the sense that they're writing for the weekly,

00:15:32: but very often or indeed for the website.

00:15:34: But very often the smart ones do start pitching articles.

00:15:38: They do start, you know, they start writing explainers and they start writing daily charts

00:15:42: and then they start writing the longer pieces for other sections.

00:15:45: And that's how they then move on.

00:15:48: So there are those particular departments where people tend to start.

00:15:53: We also have quite a long tradition of internships and furthermore, they're paid internships

00:15:58: and they're paid quite well because living in London where many of these internships happen,

00:16:02: also in New York and Washington, is expensive.

00:16:05: And so we don't want it to be the case that only people who already have somewhere to live

00:16:09: can apply for these internships.

00:16:11: And that is also a very common source of new talent for us

00:16:17: that people who are interns, they may not be hired immediately,

00:16:21: but they are very often subsequently hired.

00:16:24: And so that means that we have lots of, you know, plenty of young people coming in

00:16:29: and going straight into the sort of core journalistic operation,

00:16:36: rather than saying you have to do 10 years writing for the website

00:16:39: and then if you're lucky, we'll give you a job on the printed edition,

00:16:42: which might have been a thing that newspapers would have said a few years ago,

00:16:46: but I think, you know, that wouldn't be a terribly appealing prospect these days

00:16:49: because print editions are going away.

00:16:51: And I think the sort of prestige of print, which has been there for a long time,

00:16:55: I think people are paying less attention to that.

00:16:58: We certainly are paying less attention to that.

00:17:00: You know, obviously we want our print edition to be what it's always been,

00:17:04: the sort of desert island read if there's only one publication that's dropped from an airplane.

00:17:08: You can read it and you can understand what's happening in the world.

00:17:11: That's always been the aspiration.

00:17:13: But we are spreading out the publication of what we put in the weekly edition.

00:17:18: We're spreading that out throughout the week.

00:17:20: So again, you can consume the weekly as a digital product once a week.

00:17:24: You know, it comes out on Thursday and it's got a cover and you can do all that.

00:17:27: But you can also read, if you go to the home tab of our app,

00:17:32: you can, or the homepage of our website, you can read some of those pieces a few days earlier.

00:17:38: And we have a constant stream of other material coming out on our digital platforms.

00:17:42: And what we're seeing is that more and more of our subscriber base are reading us on a sort of more of a daily basis than a weekly basis.

00:17:50: And, you know, the style of our journalism is still not to switch to being a daily newspaper.

00:17:56: We are still not, you know, specialists in jumping on daily news stories.

00:18:00: There are lots and lots of other newspapers and news organizations that do that.

00:18:04: It's really the analysis. It's the global perspective.

00:18:08: It's, you know, it's a slightly step back from what's happening and telling you what it means approach.

00:18:14: And that's something we can deliver more than once a week.

00:18:18: I mean, we can deliver that on a daily basis.

00:18:20: But I think that's what people really value from us, not what's happened.

00:18:24: But this thing has happened. What does it mean?

00:18:27: And that's really where we differentiate ourselves.

00:18:30: And that's not really, you know, all of that stuff I've just said,

00:18:33: that is independent of the medium where you deliver the journalism.

00:18:38: You can do that in print. You can do that in digital platforms.

00:18:41: Ultimately, what our readers are doing is they're paying us to help them understand the world.

00:18:46: And we used to do that through a print publication and we can now do that through, you know,

00:18:50: a range of digital platforms and print as well.

00:18:53: So I think our business model still works if print goes away.

00:18:56: That said, I think a lot of our readers do still do still like print.

00:19:00: So I think we do have quite a high cover price.

00:19:03: So I think we're likely to be one of the last digital publications,

00:19:06: sorry, one of the last print publications still standing, you know,

00:19:10: along with the glossy fashion magazines and architectural magazines.

00:19:14: Those things that look really, really nice on your coffee table.

00:19:17: But I think we'll be one of the last ones standing because our model is essentially not dependent

00:19:22: on the way in which you read us or consumers.

00:19:25: So if I understood correctly, of course, you had a weekly cycle.

00:19:29: You had a weekly cycle with the print magazine.

00:19:31: And now with online, you have a daily cycle.

00:19:34: What do you do with breaking news? How important are...

00:19:37: So we sort of have both.

00:19:38: So, yes, rather than thinking about it as printed digital, we think about it as weekly and daily.

00:19:44: So there are a bunch of things that happen on a weekly cycle, like designing the cover.

00:19:50: And then those weekly cycle things happen to be the things that go into the print edition,

00:19:55: but they also go into the digital version of the weekly edition.

00:19:58: And then we have a bunch of daily cycle things that happen.

00:20:01: So we have, you know, a set of daily newspaper, newsletters.

00:20:05: We have a daily news service called Espresso, which is a daily app.

00:20:11: And then we also, for some of the material that's going into the weekly, you know,

00:20:17: if it's an article about, I don't know, there's a summit on a Tuesday,

00:20:21: it makes much more sense to publish that on the Tuesday or indeed on the Monday

00:20:25: and tell you what we think is going to happen, rather than, you know,

00:20:29: saying what actually happened afterwards on the Thursday.

00:20:32: So very often we'll have a, you know, we'll have a story that responds to news or anticipates news,

00:20:38: and then a version of that story, suitably updated, will appear in the weekly.

00:20:45: So what it means is that the sort of what we used to have, you know,

00:20:48: the number of new items published on digital platforms used to have this big lump on Thursdays.

00:20:54: And that lump has been gradually smoothed out now.

00:20:57: There's still a little bit of a lump, but it's much smaller than it was.

00:21:00: I think it's about a third of items appear for the first time on the Thursday that are in the weekly.

00:21:10: So in other words, two-thirds of the stuff in the weekly has already been published by then.

00:21:14: It's something like that now.

00:21:16: It's been changing quite rapidly in the last couple of years.

00:21:20: But what that means is that it is more likely that we're telling you about stuff that's

00:21:26: relevant today.

00:21:27: It still all works as a weekly publication if you'd like to consume it that way.

00:21:32: And we are essentially meeting our readers where they want to be.

00:21:35: If they want to consume it weekly, they can.

00:21:37: And if they want it sort of spread out throughout the week, because there's quite a lot to read,

00:21:42: then they can do it that way too.

00:21:44: So you don't do breaking news?

00:21:46: Not really, no.

00:21:47: We only do it if we think we can add something.

00:21:50: So I'm reminded of something like the Bataclan attack in Paris a few years ago.

00:21:55: And that took place on a Friday.

00:21:57: So the weekly edition had gone to bed, but obviously it was a big deal.

00:22:02: And we did put up a story that evening saying there's been this attack and all the rest of

00:22:07: it.

00:22:08: But of course, everyone else did too.

00:22:09: And what we found that it was a quite eye-opening moment, I think, for many of our journalists

00:22:17: was, it was one of the first times we had coordinated coverage on Slack.

00:22:21: So we'd recently started using Slack.

00:22:24: And that day, the editor who was in charge of the coverage said, we're not going to use

00:22:32: email for this because there's just too many email threads.

00:22:34: If you're not on Slack, get on Slack now.

00:22:36: So everybody got on Slack.

00:22:38: So that was an eye-opening thing.

00:22:40: But the other thing was that one of our correspondents then wrote an analysis piece about what

00:22:47: this terrorist attack in Paris meant for French foreign policy, for the French government's

00:22:54: approach to migrants and to Islam and all this sort of thing.

00:23:01: And that piece did much, much better than our news piece.

00:23:05: The number of people who came and read that on our website on the Saturday was much, much

00:23:09: higher.

00:23:10: Sorry, it was one or two days after.

00:23:12: It was the Saturday.

00:23:13: So the attack was on a Friday night.

00:23:15: We published that piece just before lunch, as I recall, on Saturday at the top of the

00:23:22: website.

00:23:23: And that was the piece that got a lot more interest and a lot more people read it.

00:23:28: And that was because everybody had done the basic story of, this is what happened and this

00:23:32: is how many people died and this is what went wrong and this is how the police responded

00:23:36: and all the rest of it.

00:23:38: But what this meant for France in the coming months and years was that's exactly the kind

00:23:45: of thing that we specialize in.

00:23:47: We can do it.

00:23:48: We don't need a whole week to think about that.

00:23:50: So we can respond to that.

00:23:52: You could say that's a breaking news story.

00:23:54: I mean, it was the next day.

00:23:55: But what we weren't doing, we weren't updating.

00:23:58: We didn't have a live blog with this many ambulances have arrived and all this sort of

00:24:02: thing because there are lots of other news organizations that do that and do it very

00:24:06: well.

00:24:07: Sorry, Andrew.

00:24:08: You have only one article about the event and that's it.

00:24:10: Yeah, probably.

00:24:11: Yes.

00:24:12: I mean, in that case, we had one.

00:24:13: It happened and then we had a, what does this mean, peace?

00:24:18: In other cases, obviously you do need to have multiple pieces with something like the pandemic

00:24:24: or the war in Ukraine.

00:24:25: It's a rolling story.

00:24:26: And so you have to approach that differently.

00:24:29: But I mean, something like the war, that's been a good example of how being able to provide

00:24:34: analysis but being able to provide it in response to the news quickly.

00:24:38: So what does the destruction of that dam in Ukraine mean and all this sort of thing?

00:24:42: That is the exactly the sort of thing that we do.

00:24:46: And that seems to be exactly what people value because you could spend hours reading through

00:24:50: all of the live blogging of this, this has happened and that's happened.

00:24:54: And here's a video from Twitter of something blowing up and all that.

00:24:57: But if you actually just want to know what's happened today and what does it mean and you

00:25:02: want to do that once a day, then we can help you with that.

00:25:06: Come to our website or look on our app once a day and we can tell you.

00:25:11: And so we've heard this from many people that with something like the war, following that

00:25:17: without spending your whole time refreshing Twitter or reloading newspaper live blogs,

00:25:24: if you just want to stay up to date but not spend too long doing it, then that's the sort

00:25:28: of thing that we can help you with.

00:25:31: What would you say?

00:25:33: How much time do you have for a story or how slow is possible?

00:25:38: What do you mean by how slow?

00:25:39: Well, first we went like in Butterclown on Friday and then the next piece of the piece

00:25:45: from the Economist was on Saturday.

00:25:46: So this is one day.

00:25:47: Yes.

00:25:48: So yes, we got a piece up within a couple of hours, I think, which is not very fast by

00:25:53: the standards of Reuters or whatever.

00:25:56: But yes, we got a basic piece up and I think we probably updated it a couple of times.

00:26:00: But we quickly realized that just constantly adding updates to it and it was a really good

00:26:05: example of that.

00:26:06: That was just, there was no point in doing that.

00:26:09: People were not coming to us for the latest updates on the death toll or whatever.

00:26:16: And so I think we added an editor's note at the top, update, the death toll has now risen

00:26:21: to this now that the building has been stormed or whatever.

00:26:25: So we sort of press pause or press stop on continuing to update the story because that's

00:26:32: not where we can add the most value.

00:26:35: So yeah, generally, if there's big news and we haven't got something prepared, then we

00:26:41: will think that getting something up in three or four hours is acceptable, usually because

00:26:46: there will be, it won't just be a straight news piece, there will be some analysis in

00:26:51: there as well.

00:26:53: And then very often the amount of analysis will go up in the piece that finally ends up

00:26:59: in the weekly or we may publish subsequent analysis pieces.

00:27:02: So yes, we're really not trying to compete with the newswires.

00:27:08: And I know that other news organizations, how quickly you get your news alert out, your

00:27:14: push alert and how many clicks you can get people.

00:27:16: So we're not really playing that game.

00:27:18: How long is the life cycle of an article or how long does it stay on the homepage?

00:27:25: That's a very good question.

00:27:26: There isn't a fixed answer.

00:27:27: If something, I mean, most pieces that run in the weekly and there are something like

00:27:32: probably 60 or 70 pieces in the weekly, maybe a bit more than that, but certainly less than

00:27:38: 100.

00:27:40: Most pieces will get some sort of appearance on the homepage.

00:27:43: But what, so they may only be there for half a day.

00:27:47: But what we find is that pieces that are particularly popular or do particularly well can stay there

00:27:52: for a lot longer.

00:27:54: And so occasionally we will have pieces, we've had many pieces like this with the war in

00:27:59: Ukraine where people are particularly interested in reading about the state of the Russian

00:28:05: army or whatever.

00:28:07: And so those pieces, if people are still interested in them, we'll leave them up.

00:28:13: So in that respect, we are paying attention to what our audience is doing.

00:28:17: We're not taking our audience's behavior as a signal about what we should write more

00:28:23: about because one of the things that's happening is that our readers are essentially paying

00:28:29: us to tell them what's important.

00:28:32: So what we can't do is take their money and then say, well, we don't actually know what's

00:28:36: important, but we'll just look at what you're clicking on to do more of that because that

00:28:40: doesn't really help anyone.

00:28:41: You just get more articles about Elon Musk and electric cars, right?

00:28:44: Because that's what everyone or Apple, that's what everyone wants to click on.

00:28:48: And if we say, well, actually, we need to be paying attention to what's happening in

00:28:52: Venezuela or whatever, that's a useful service we provide to our readers, which is to alert

00:28:58: them to things that they didn't know they needed to know about or they didn't know they

00:29:02: would find interesting.

00:29:04: So we don't use analytics to decide what to write about, but we do use analytics to decide

00:29:10: what to feature and what to promote.

00:29:12: So what do we put in our newsletters?

00:29:15: What do we put on social media or we promote on social media?

00:29:18: What do we put on the homepage or keep on the homepage for longer?

00:29:21: And that is interesting to see, oh, this seems to be working well, people seem to be interested

00:29:24: in that.

00:29:25: But we don't then say, right, let's go and do loads more pieces like that so that we

00:29:30: gather more clicks because ultimately, that's not our model.

00:29:34: Our model is a subscription-based model.

00:29:37: And so we need to be aware of what our readers are finding interesting and it can help other

00:29:44: readers find those pieces, but it doesn't change what we actually write about.

00:29:48: Our listeners have the opportunity to ask questions to our podcast followers.

00:29:54: This has sent us the 22-year-old Katharina from Graz.

00:29:58: I think it's very important to be able to say my opinion because in economics there are

00:30:04: no commentaries under these articles.

00:30:06: Why is that actually so?

00:30:08: And how do you keep contact with your readers?

00:30:11: Why does it so? Because when it comes to readers, that you don't have a commentary section.

00:30:18: What do you mean by commentary?

00:30:19: Oh, we don't have comments at the bottom.

00:30:20: Yeah.

00:30:21: Yes.

00:30:22: You don't have?

00:30:23: No.

00:30:24: Well, I mean, we did for a while, for quite a long while, and many publications have switched

00:30:29: off their comment sections.

00:30:32: And it's for a variety of reasons.

00:30:33: In our case, it was partly technical.

00:30:36: We were having a great deal of difficulty preventing spam comments, basically, and it

00:30:42: was just becoming more and more technically difficult to stop them because the system

00:30:46: that we were using under the hood is quite antiquated.

00:30:50: And we have that still in the process of turning it off.

00:30:53: But it meant that investing to prevent spam comments meant investing in an old platform

00:31:00: that we want to turn off.

00:31:01: So I have to confess that was part of the reason.

00:31:03: But the other reason, I think generally, was that there's been a broader shift away from

00:31:09: allowing commenting just because it can be so toxic, it can expose you to legal risk.

00:31:16: And I think the approach that many publications take now, which I have a lot of respect for

00:31:21: and I would be very happy to see us adopt in future once it's technically possible,

00:31:26: is to allow comments on some articles.

00:31:29: And so you see this with the New York Times.

00:31:31: They switch on comments on certain articles.

00:31:33: And then that way, you can really concentrate your moderating resources on those pieces

00:31:39: and make sure you get a really high level discussion.

00:31:42: And some of the other things that New York Times does as well, where they invite comments

00:31:46: by email and then they publish a selection.

00:31:48: So I think there are good ways of doing this.

00:31:50: The other thing that happened, of course, is that a lot of that discussion moved onto

00:31:54: social media platforms.

00:31:57: And so expecting people to discuss the article on your website, when in fact they were going

00:32:03: to be talking about it on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, started to look a bit behind

00:32:08: the time.

00:32:09: So I think the heyday of the comment section from 2008 to 2013 or '14 or something is probably,

00:32:16: yes, I can't remember when we switched ours off.

00:32:19: But I think that was a period in internet history where things worked in a particular

00:32:24: way and things have moved on.

00:32:26: So I think, yeah, there are good ways to do comments and to have discussions, but you

00:32:31: really do have to moderate them carefully.

00:32:36: And also, if a discussion starts off with a good polite tone and high degree of sort

00:32:47: of, well, in particular, if you get journalists themselves to weigh in early in a discussion,

00:32:54: that many people have found that really improves the quality of the subsequent discussion.

00:33:00: So there are these ways to ensure that you can get a useful and informative discussion.

00:33:08: The problem is they don't scale.

00:33:09: You can't do them on every single article.

00:33:12: So I think deciding where to do them is a way to do it.

00:33:15: And we have other ways of having discussions with our subscribers now as well.

00:33:20: We do a weekly subscriber webinar, which is only for subscribers, where a group of editors

00:33:25: talks about something in the news that week and we take questions from the subscribers

00:33:29: as well.

00:33:30: And that's proving very popular.

00:33:32: So I think being able to discuss things with your audience is useful, but how you do that

00:33:37: is constantly evolving.

00:33:40: We talked about that media is changing from a print to online.

00:33:44: How does that change your workflow?

00:33:47: Which factors decide if a story is a video text podcast or will be published in print?

00:33:51: Well, there isn't a single answer to that.

00:33:55: So we do have an audio, we make several podcasts.

00:33:59: So we have a daily podcast called The Intelligence, and then we have several weekly podcasts as

00:34:03: well.

00:34:04: And we also do podcast series on the side.

00:34:06: And so in those cases, the producers of those podcasts are working closely with the newsroom

00:34:12: to not just do discussions about articles we published, but very often to preempt those

00:34:20: articles.

00:34:21: If there's news on a particular day, yes, we'll cover it, but we'll also discuss it

00:34:24: in a podcast.

00:34:26: Films is, you know, videos a bit harder because the turnaround time is, for the sorts of video

00:34:30: we make is not quite as quick as it is for audio.

00:34:34: And then we have the audio edition, which is the audio versions of all of our articles

00:34:40: in the weekly, and they're read out by still by actual humans, by retired newsreaders for

00:34:48: the most part.

00:34:49: And that's a very popular feature for us.

00:34:51: But yes, I mean, there is this broader question of how do all of those different media types

00:34:56: fit together?

00:34:57: And like everybody else, we're continuing to experiment.

00:34:59: I think we've got, you know, we figured out what our voice sounds like in podcasts, and

00:35:04: we figured out what it sounds like in video.

00:35:06: But at the end of the day, I think written journalism is still central to what we do

00:35:13: because going back, I keep saying this, you know, the deal we have with our readers is

00:35:18: roughly they pay us money to save them time to figure out what's important this week and

00:35:24: what they should make of it.

00:35:26: And the quickest way to absorb a lot of information about a complex subject is still to read words

00:35:33: on a page or on a screen.

00:35:35: And you know, in theory, video gives you much higher bandwidth, but in practice, actually

00:35:40: absorbing information quickly is it's best done just by reading.

00:35:44: Now that could change and we could have brain implants in the future or I don't know what,

00:35:48: in which case we would have to, you know, adapt the way we deliver our journalism.

00:35:53: And we already deliver it in lots of different ways on lots of different platforms.

00:35:55: So, you know, we think that what we provide, which is the expertise of our journalists,

00:36:01: we'll still work on other platforms that emerge.

00:36:05: But at the moment, the best way to deliver on our promise, which is we have busy readers,

00:36:10: busy subscribers who want to know what's going on, they want to understand the world, they

00:36:13: don't have much time.

00:36:15: We think that reading is still the main way to do that.

00:36:18: And yes, you can supplement that with audio and video and other things and interactive

00:36:22: graphics and so on as well.

00:36:23: But at the end of the day, that's still the centerpiece of our output.

00:36:29: How do we do it?

00:36:30: Is all online articles going print or all print artists go online?

00:36:35: All print articles go online and then there are additional online only things like a daily

00:36:40: chart like explainers, like additional news updates in between.

00:36:44: Sometimes you'll get an early version of a story or a news version of story that runs

00:36:48: on digital platforms and then an updated version of it appears in print or other times a print

00:36:53: story will run online and then we'll update that.

00:36:57: But we tend to, we don't, we don't know to update stories because, you know, where do

00:37:02: you stop doing it?

00:37:03: And then obviously all of our audio and video output is digital only.

00:37:07: So, so yes, everything you see in print runs online, but not everything you see online will

00:37:13: necessarily have appeared or will appear in print.

00:37:15: What did we find in our archive on the subject of media?

00:37:25: In Austria, 1867 with the state constitution the press freedom was introduced.

00:37:31: The Vienna newspaper printed the law on December 22, 1867 on its title page.

00:37:37: Under article 13 it says, "Every man has the right to express his opinion within the

00:37:45: legislative framework freely through word, written, print or by image.

00:37:47: The press is not allowed to be restricted under censorship, but through the concession system."

00:37:53: What do you think when you, when you look in the future in the next five years?

00:37:56: So what has asked what we're talking about in the beginning that many media outlets are

00:38:01: struggling now?

00:38:03: Will people continue to read newspapers or what will be the future of media?

00:38:08: Well, I've been saying for quite a long time that I thought that the, the business model

00:38:14: of news, digital only news organizations that were sustained entirely by advertising was

00:38:20: very precarious and I didn't, I didn't think there was a good long-term future there.

00:38:25: And just in the past few months we've seen, you know, Vice has gone bankrupt, Buzzfeed

00:38:30: has shut down its news organizations.

00:38:32: I should say, you know, this isn't, this is, I've been making this prediction for a long

00:38:35: time.

00:38:36: I wish this wasn't true.

00:38:37: Both Vice and Buzzfeed News did really excellent journalism.

00:38:42: And you know, but the problem is that just relying on digital ads is not enough to fund

00:38:49: a newsroom.

00:38:50: And, and that is, that's difficult.

00:38:53: And the other thing is that they tried various other models like video and so on.

00:38:57: Ultimately, when you've got big technology platforms that sit between you and the readers,

00:39:04: whether that's Google search engine or Facebook or Twitter's algorithm, then you are in a

00:39:08: precarious position because changes to those algorithms can really affect your business

00:39:13: model.

00:39:14: And so, so what we've been saying for a long time, and this has been our model, and we're

00:39:17: facing more and more news organizations move to this model is that when you have a subscription

00:39:23: based model and, and people pay you directly for the journalism, and you deliver it directly

00:39:29: to them through your website and through your app, and there is nobody else in the middle,

00:39:33: we think that is a much more sustainable model.

00:39:35: Now, the problem with that is, is that not everybody can afford to subscribe to all of

00:39:41: these publications.

00:39:42: And so what do you do about that?

00:39:44: And so I think there's a place for public service broadcasting, that's part of it.

00:39:49: And I think there's also, you know, there are some other interesting models.

00:39:52: If you look at what the Guardian has done, for example, I subscribe to the Guardian,

00:39:55: so I pay to read the Guardian.

00:39:57: I used to work at the Guardian.

00:39:58: It's a, you know, it's a great British journalist institution that I want to survive.

00:40:03: But its business model for many years has been that everything on its website is free.

00:40:09: And you know, therefore, they were dependent on advertising.

00:40:13: They found this middle way where they basically make subscribing optional.

00:40:17: So you can choose to pay them if you want, and you get some, you know, you get improved

00:40:21: access through that app and this sort of thing.

00:40:23: And they also had a kind of, you know, donation tip jar where you could just make a contribution

00:40:29: to the Guardian.

00:40:30: I was quite skeptical that that would work, but it has worked.

00:40:34: So I think there may be some other models that we need to explore, but I think the long

00:40:39: and short of it is that an entirely advertising-based model is extremely precarious.

00:40:46: And so I expect to see less of that.

00:40:49: And I expect to see more emphasis, even more emphasis than we've seen on subscription models.

00:40:55: And then the other model that we've seen more of lately is the philanthropically supported

00:41:00: news organization.

00:41:01: So something like ProPublica, where essentially you've got philanthropy supporting investigative

00:41:08: journalism.

00:41:09: And I think it's good that we've seen that and we've seen, you know, some of the big,

00:41:13: you know, foundations and tech entrepreneurs investing in separately in journalism because

00:41:20: it's something they want to see survive.

00:41:22: So I think, again, we're going to see more of that, more people basically stepping up

00:41:28: to fund journalism, which is otherwise not going to happen.

00:41:32: Tom, thank you very much for your insights.

00:41:35: Thank you.

00:41:36: Okay.

00:41:37: Today we were at the guest at the British Business Magazine Economist in London.

00:41:46: We've learned from breaking news not always about success, which stories are liked to be

00:41:51: read and how long it will take to give.

00:41:53: I thank you for listening.

00:41:55: Until next time.

00:41:56: That was today's episode of "Walter gedacht, der Podcast der Witzheit".

00:42:06: If you liked it, subscribe to this podcast, follow us on Instagram and TikTok and look

00:42:10: at our website wz.at.

00:42:13: Do you have any questions or suggestions for our next episodes?

00:42:16: Then send us a message via WhatsApp.

00:42:19: Our number is 06648348344.

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