Taxes won't solve journalism problem

BitDepth#1277

AT THE end of October, Gabriel Faria, CEO of the TT Chamber of Industry of Commerce, took up the call by Independent Senator Charisse Seepersad to tax digital platforms like Amazon, Google and Facebook.

Faria's statement surprised me. I have never heard any businessman in TT call for taxes as a solution for a business problem. Also, he has run an actual media house, so he must know that it won't work.

At the core of the problem is the continuing need for a wrenching reorientation of what it means to be media in 2020.

Facebook and Google have scooped up the lion's share of online advertising revenue, crippling the financial prospects of media houses the world over.

They have also done so while producing no actual journalism. Google indexes the content of the web, while Facebook offers an empty jar that's filled with fractious comment and opinion it doesn't pay for.

Both companies learned early on that there were two critical elements to online success. Get people to use your service, and then collate and mine their data to target advertising to them.

To this day, media houses still persist in treating the broadcast or publication as the product, and focus spending and attention on maximising its reach, while continuing to ignore its real product, refined information (I warned about this in 2012: http://ow.ly/oweN30rk2Np).

Time spent trying to tax tech giants is wasted time. Media managers need to learn the useful lessons that the success of their business model offers and adjust strategy accordingly.

These are things that media houses should be doing.

Revitalise comments.

The flood of comments on stories and posted broadcasts has been traditionally treated as an annoyance. Interaction with the news product used to be an occasional letter or irate phone call.

Modern media consumers expect to have a say in reporting that's often quite lengthy, often irrational, and sometimes obnoxious.

It's easier to shut down comments than it is to engage with them and moderate the course of conversation, but a story is just the start of the engagement potential with your audience.

Decide who you are and put your weight behind that.

The notion of the media as a blindfolded source of objective reporting doesn't work anymore. You can't be everything to everyone, so decide who you are as a media entity, hire people who think the same way and talk to the audience that's interested in that perspective.

Pull the production and creative staff behind the curtain.

Get everyone engaged in the mission. Give every journalist a dashboard so they can see what's happening with their work online, what works and what doesn't.

Share feedback received through traditional and digital channels, and encourage interaction, within corporate guidelines, with the online audience.

Know your audience, understand where it is going, and get there first.

Where is your audience going to be in five years? In five months? The answers will be found in your engagement with them and if you aren't communicating with them, you won't be able to anticipate future needs and interests. That's why businesses are adding audience engagement specialists on the payroll.

There are no big answers.
Try new little things, continuously. There is no such thing as the big launch in digital journalism. There is the start. Then there are the iterations and adjustments. All the time. This is the age of the continuous tweak

Add new ideas, give them a good, sustained push and then kill them if they get no traction. Now, you know what won't work.

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