How to differentiate as a journalism platform
There really are no journalism platforms yet. Most journalism is distributed on social media platforms, but the work is seldom done or distributed as a platform.
Nevertheless, this text anticipates such development and investigates how journalism products can differentiate as platforms.
In other words, I’m not concerned in this text about how journalism in general is differentiated from other information products — itself an interesting question! Instead, I’ll draft some ideas on how the future of platform journalism ought to look like.
Traditional differentiation of journalism products was based on space, time and nicheness
Differentiation between media products in different eras can be understood by looking at supplementing product categories that emerge. This is because even if the total market size for all journalism products changes, the differentiating strategies carve segments out of this total market based on consumer preferences and resources.
In Finland, newspaper circulation grew at the same pace with GDP growth all the way until the big recession hit in the 1990s. The circulation fell during the recession, and did not bounce back with GDP growth that started rapidly in the middle of the 1990s. The loss of circulation in the early 1990s happened all over the Nordic countries, and was actually largest in Denmark, 34% between 1989 and 2004, even if the recession was much worse in Finland. Finland suffered a 22% drop of total newspaper circulation during the same time.
Looking at the loss of circulation during this period more closely one notices that individual newspapers didn’t often lose readers. Instead, many secondary newspapers in different areas and many party funded newspapers disappeared completely. Similarly, some large newspapers, such as the Savon Sanomat, shrank their territorial coverage significantly, thus improving profitability on the cost of losing revenue.
The timing of the circulation loss colluded with a change of the public structure in Finland, moving from party dominated publics to the singular, monotonous public. This public was dominated by the presence of a handful of TV channels. Those channels, with one large local newspaper, were sufficient for most of the readers for accurate and reliable information. The party papers had vanished when the old more politically oriented working class shrank, and to serve the emerging lower income middle class, new weekly and monthly magazines emerged. They tapped into a new kind of cultural differentiation that was based on more topical content than spatial reach. These magazines included scandalous gossip (e.g. 7 päivää, 1992) and many niche and hobby topics. Women’s Magazines, often founded earlier (e.g. Me Naiset, 1932), changed their style to include e.g. more empowering narratives for women, increasing their circulation.
Unlike the usual narrative dictates, the decline of the circulation of daily newspapers and the emergence of new topical magazines happened before the widespread emergence of the Internet. Instead, what happened was that television and radio and magazines were able to carve to themselves a portion of the journalism market size that previously belonged almost solely to newspapers. The private television and radio channels started broadcasting in Finland as late as in the 1980s.
Supporting this sentiment, a similar development can be seen in the US, where the decline of the newspapers started much earlier, already in the 1940s. It coincides with an increase of various kinds of periodicals, while the dominance of the television similarly played a role in the decline later on by creating a more shared public sphere where multiple newspapers were not needed.
There are many things to learn from these developments, but the most important one here is that the differentiation in the journalism markets where television created a singular public was conducted between axes of space, time and nicheness. Paper based journalism was either local and covered topics broadly, or national and covered niche topics. The historical reason for this kind of differentiation was that it was expensive and difficult to maintain broad national circulation for daily newspapers, as was the case with Savon Sanomat still in the 1990s, and it was as difficult to maintain a national audience with journalism that covered broad range of topics, because someone with more local and timely publishing model could always come and cover a specific sublocation of the large circulation area.
Television, then, was able to be national and niche at the same time. In television, however, the limitation was the number of channels and the inability to save programs. Thus, the economics of differentiation were different: television directly challenges a portion of the total journalism market, but the timewise differentiation dictated that it could really challenge only a portion of the time segments in the whole day — the prime time. The traditional media product was thus either a national niche product (a magazine), local general product (a newspaper) or a time-bound national product (television program).
Niche differentiation can work in two different ways. Either the product can differentiate as a niche based on its contents (“a skateboarding magazine”) or based on its intended consumers (“women’s magazine”). Of course the content and the audience are closely linked, but the latter approach to niche differentiation provides broader opportunities to reach different audience preferences, making the product more sustainable.
For newspapers and magazines, there is an optimal number of subscribers after which new investments are needed and new kinds of packages for advertisers need to be created. The benefits from the economics of scale depend on the penetration of the product in the population as much as the overall scale of the operation, and both of these cause certain thresholds for the scale of the publishing.
In local newspapers, especially when they are delivered to home in the morning, the preferred penetration is quite high.
Also reach can be guaranteed by two different means after the emergence of the broadcast media. It can be either reached in space as with the local newspaper or reached in time as with prime time television. It was indeed so that the biggest contribution of the television was to create the opportunities to differentiate in time, not through space.
The emergence of cable and satellite television and then the Internet was soon to change this situation, though.
Internet removed the ability to differentiate in time and space
The ability of journalism products to differentiate between space, time and nicheness disappeared when the internet devoured different means of delivering journalistic products. One could no longer find a safe place in the content production ecosystem by differentiating on those axes.
How this happened is of course common knowledge. On-demand video publishers such as Netflix, online news sites such as theguardian.com and various kinds of podcasts offered people the ability to consume media on-demand, destroying most of the time based differentiation — except what was delivered right now. Further, digital content is non territorial, and it can be endlessly niche because of the vast amount of accessible content, so making e.g. local news becomes almost impossible. This is because there is always someone “more local” willing to share their point of view via digital cameras, text messages and recordings to an even smaller audience.
The destruction of differentiation via space, time and nicheness caused an inversion of the news logic which is currently ongoing and of which I am researching. While it’s impossible to know how exactly will the new media landscape look like after the inversion, it’s still possible to imagine how journalistic products can differentiate in it. In other words, while it is possible to know that the old way of differentiation does not work because it was based on physical information product features such as reach and timeliness , it is possible to imagine new axes of differentiation based on the features of the digital information products.
New way to differentiate
Differentiation in the new media landscape can happen on two different axes of the nature of digital information products. Digital information products are either viral or nonviral, and nonrival or antirival.
Some digital information products can be also rival, but as a general rule they should fall into the category of consulting and other private information production, not journalism, so I’m not concerned about those here.
NONVIRAL goods are goods that don’t or cannot spread organically. Many societally important news topics ought to be designed to operate in this category. In my startup Scoopinion the algorithm shared stories based on passively monitoring reading behavior, so many stories gained traction that were not shared via clicks or likes. These were stories that covered topics such as mental health, home violence or drug addictions. Similarly to traditional newspapers, nonviral content needs to be pushed to the consumer also in the platform journalism era. People and special advocacy groups are willing to pay for access to these stories.
VIRAL content is designed to spread due to behavioral nudges. It’s often — but not always — content that presupposes an identity building project of the consumer, and thus it is designed for people in very specific roles. Viral content does not create shared publics, but instead helps people to differentiate themselves to small tribes.
NONRIVAL content is content that can be shared to anyone without extra cost. Most digital information is like that, but because there is no inherent cost involved, making sustainable business models around such content is very difficult.
ANTIRIVAL content improves based on actions and activity of the consumers that study and react to it. This can mean that the content is co-created or crowdsourced, or that it passively tracks the behavior of the users and changes itself accordingly.
Putting these information product features in a graph provides four different ways to do journalistic products as platforms.
Push packages. Nonrival nonviral products are niche packages of push journalism. This is the position that most public broadcasters should take, as well as journalism that is paid by foundations or donations. Because the era of single publics is no more, push journalism should target underserved audiences and underserved, often difficult topics. While public broadcasters should look especially at the underserved publics, understanding that it’s their responsibility to care for the fragmented publics spread across the online space when those publics are large enough to gather around their own bonfires of representation and amplification, the traditional style profit seeking newspapers can also fall into this category by targeting difficult topics. Such newspapers aim to create habits for their readers, making their home page the landing page for as many as possible. To create and maintain such routines, they need to push content through apps and emails to a much larger audience.
Pull articles. Viral nonrival content is the on-platform content we often see today. It’s based on identity and role and the lifetime of the piece of content is short. While the typical example of viral nonrival content is clickbait journalism articles, also many books fall into this category, as well as some documentaries and infotainment.
Behavioral aggregation. Creating antirival nonviral content creates a feedback loop form the user behavior back to the content packages by tracking passively the user behavior. This can mean tracking the content consumption, as was the case with behavioral aggregation based on reading behavior done in Scoopinion, but it can also mean passively tracking preferred topics of peers for content personalisation, layout or style preferences for automating the finalisation of information or using the behavior of the users to sort out quality content from a large mass of subpar content, which is what is done in Tiktok.
Shared knowledge platform. An antirival viral journalism uses the characteristics of the information products to cause double network effects. They use both the network effects of the use of product and the network effects of distribution of the product to create a double loop business model that uses multiple markets and their externalities to create or update contents that function as social objects for interaction and discussion. Such examples are rare still, but one can imagine a game where people self-organise to understand a phenomena and its complex impacts, inviting more people to join in the research as the vastness of the task is slowly revealed. Wikipedia could be this kind of a service, especially if more readers would participate in creating and updating its content.s. Another possible example could be a web service that collects information by asking the users to find pieces of information that are yet to discover.
Differentiation means that these different forms of media I have imagined compete against each other for people’s time and attention — sometimes even money. As I mentioned in the beginning, this is a lesser of two competition happening in the future of media space. The main competition that journalists should concern themselves with is the competition between journalistic information products and nonjournalistic information products. The main task of any journalism business should be to increase the share of the total journalism market in the whole information market. Only then should they concern themselves about the internal differentiation between new categories of journalism.
