Richard Kendall's List: News industry

• There are hundreds of people around the UK who are a dab hand at covering the world of media on their blogs and on twitter, and so it has been a difficult task drawing up lists of our personal favourites. But we have done some list-whittling and each present our five favourite bloggers and five favourite tweeters.

• The BBC remains a uniquely trusted institution around the world at a time when there is an increasing premium on reliable, high quality news and information. Globalisation requires a better and more sophisticated dialogue. This kind of soft power is one of the principle means of ensuring Britain and British values still count for something.

• And now, as news consumption becomes more mobile, news companies must follow the rules of device makers (such as Apple) and software developers (Google again) to deliver their content. Each new platform often requires a new software program. And the new players take a share of the revenue and in many cases also control the audience data.

   

  Those data may be the most important commodity of all. In a media world where consumers decide what news they want to get and how they want to get it, the future will belong to those who understand the public's changing behavior and can target content and advertising to snugly fit the interests of each user. That knowledge -- and the expertise in gathering it -- increasingly resides with technology companies outside journalism.
• When the final tally is in, online ad revenue in 2010 is projected to surpass print newspaper ad revenue for the first time. The problem for news is that by far the largest share of that online ad revenue goes to non-news sources, particularly to aggregators.
• online news, cannot really progress until the industry settles on how to measure audience. There is no consensus on what is the most useful measure of online traffic. Different rating agencies do not even agree on how to define a "unique visitor."
• The new conventional wisdom is that the economic model for news will be made up of many smaller and more complex revenue sources than before.
• Online, most believe there will be many different kinds of revenue. This is because no one revenue source looks large enough and because money is divided among so many players.

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• Today’s daily newspaper companies have little chance of surviving in anything resembling tomorrow’s form very far in the future.
• You can’t find anyone who says he yet has a proven, sustainable business model for moving forward.
• a new digital reader revenue line could be one important building block of a stable new business model, though it won’t be enough by itself.

• Citing the familiar trends of increased advertiser choice, mobile reader migration, the social web revolution, and print decline, Waller’s “conservative” projection forecasts that, by 2020:

   
   
  • Print circulation revenue will drop by 50 percent;
   
  • Classifieds revenue will drop by 90 percent;
   
  • Display revenue will drop by 30 percent;
   
  • With online ad revenue, growing at a compounded maximum 11 percent rate, there will be “no way to close the revenue gap with online advertising.”
   
   

  All of which results in a “huge revenue gap.”
• Waller’s conclusion: “Digital advertising will play an important role, but without paid content, publishing houses with a big editorial infrastructure for daily quality news will not survive.”
• The threat of oblivion should be a powerful motivator, and we now see — finally — after a decade of decline, its specter moving us away from incremental, “experimental” tests to a fundamental restructuring of the business of news.

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