What media must do next

BitDepth#1514

MARK LYNDERSAY

SPEAKING at the 2025 Caribbean Media Summit hosted by the University of Guyana and managed by the Media Institute of the Caribbean, Juan Senor had blunt words for media workers and their managers.

“You need to produce journalism worth paying for, because only journalism will save journalism worth paying for. Where is the next big thing in journalism? It’s journalists.”

But before he got to that closing note of his feature address on the first day of the two-day summit on May 23, he had some practical advice to share with media practitioners.

Senor, president of Innovation Media Consulting Group in London, pointed out that it was time to forget about not just the trickle of revenue from programmatic ads, but also about the coming losses in Google search revenue as well.

Online media outlets that depend on digital ad revenue can expect that stream to dry up even further.

He suggested that media houses revisit paywalls, looking to online services like Netflix and Spotify that drive subscription revenue by offering audience targeted product.

He also warned that search and social media will soon bring diminishing returns for online media houses.

“You need to bypass the mediators to build a direct relationship with readers. The key metric you want to be looking at now is direct traffic. Indirect traffic will disappear for many of you very quickly, and you should try to diminish (your reliance on) it as much as possible. That means traffic from social traffic, from Google search and traffic from other platforms.

“We cannot build a business on these platforms, it’s impossible for us. It's greatly beneficial to them. The latest idea that we should associate ourselves with influencers is exactly a mistake in strategy. Their reputation is very dubious and associating with them is just not going to bring us the direct traffic. They have the direct relationship.”

Senor also believes in the power of vertical publications, which can either address niche interests or deliver reporting that addresses specific business interests.

“In a world of digital abundance, you need to find your scarcity. This is a skill that we, as journalistic brands, have that nobody else can have, and indeed is something that we can profit from. That means being an inch wide and a mile deep.

“How do you begin this process? With many of your titles, you can offer the story as text, but for the audio version of the story, please register. If you want to comment, please register. If you want a podcast on this issue, please register. You need to have the confidence to begin to introduce data walls. Without that, it's very difficult to build a business if all you do is give it up for free on social and it's impossible to establish that direct relationship.

“Clicks are the future, but it’s not more clicks, it's the right clicks; otherwise, reach is useless. Trust builds slowly and it can break very fast. We’ve seen a lot of publishers putting their content out there on social media in irresponsible ways or trying to be TikTok cool. We shouldn't be obsessed about just going for reach, because in associating with those platforms, trust can be broken fast.

“A newsroom should not be just a feed, it should be a filter. The mistake we're already seeing with people using AI is that you think you can do more volume, and then you end up with a lot of content that’s irrelevant. But that's not who we are. We take the massive feed that is out there, and we are the filter.

“Journalism should provoke thought, not outrage. In this age of phenomenal AI-driven content, we are the signal within the noise. We report the facts, not the frenzy. Journalism is and should continue to be the pause button on the chaos. We're not here to reflect the frenzy, we here to resist it.”

We’ve been bedazzled by the social media promise, which is the promise of a false prophet. We're not broken. The news industry's not broken. The algorithm is they're trying to write us out of the algorithm. But the desire for quality journalism is higher than ever before and is demonstrated in the facts out there today. So it's about luring them to your land, to your asset, to your app, to your website, to your podcast, not about feeding content to the social media empire, because we are renting our reach and when you rent your reach, you risk your relevance. These platforms are defining your product, and they're owning our audience so they own your future. And we've had 16 years of this.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there