The way people consume news has changed dramatically over the last few years with an increasing number of people paying digital media a visit several times in a day to get their doses. Traditional media houses have realised with time that to grasp this change and ride the wave, they need to go beyond their structured thinking. They need to step into digital shoes. That brings us to the emerging trend of 'digital first' publishing or reverse publishing.
Simply put: a media house chooses to publish news online first even if it happens to primarily be a print or broadcast player, indicative of where the audience shift is happening. Even until a few years ago, print news was shovelled onto the web with little or no changes.
Fast forward to 2013 and you will find print journalists breaking news as it happens online rather than holding it until the next edition. Broadcasters now do a simulcast of important news on their websites and on television while some even create multiple versions of the same story online as it progresses. According to the latest Oriella Digital Journalism study conducted among journalists globally, 39 per cent of journalists in countries like Canada, India, Russia, Italy and Sweden admit that their motto is now 'digital first'.
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Digital first publishing allows traditional publishers the leeway to experiment with unconventional stories that have a more niche audience or are hard to categorise. The fact that it's easy to measure readership on the digital medium also helps. While digital first publishing might be a great rallying cry for the struggling publishing industry, it is important to note that multi-platform delivery requires great investment in mobile apps and mobile-optimised websites.
The models for generating revenue via digital journalism are changing too. Paid-for smartphone apps for rich media content are becoming more popular globally while the dominant monetisation model - ad-supported content -is fading off somewhat.
If media groups indeed peg their long-term future on mobile devices, the implications for brands are significant. This will make news content far more interactive as touch-screen interfaces open up new possibilities for storytelling. One example could be interactive graphics (or digigraphics) that allow readers to navigate their own path through stories. The New York Times and Guardian have adopted and extensively used this area to their advantage. Second, there may be a difference in how journalistic output is published. We may see shorter, quicker news formats emerge. This can give media brands greater prominence - and consequently larger traffic - in search rankings, news readers and 'social news aggregator' apps such as Flipboard and Pulse News10. We need not go far to find examples of digital first publishing in India - Indian business daily Mint from the Hindustan Times' stable launched a free special iPad edition sometime ago which is available on iTunes.
Journalists are also becoming social media savvy, the Oriella study further reveals, with 51 per cent using microblogging sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Weibo to gather stories provided they trust the source.
That said, digital for digital's sake is a recipe for disaster; publishers will have to use digital in a relevant way to get readers to flock to them. That's the big challenge. The other issue is more fundamental: while rushing to adapt to the changing times, newsroom leaders must also figure out ways to follow the rules of the road and hold onto traditional values of developing news judgment, managing complex stories and staying on the right side of the ethical line.
