At Journalism.co.uk, we are focused on highlighting the latest trends in digital media, looking at how technology is changing journalism and offering case studies of these transformations in newsrooms around the world.
Journalism.co.uk has been online since 1999, chronicling media news with a growing focus on digital transformation for the best part of this time. And just as it is important to understand the changes taking place in the media today, it can also be helpful to look back at the media’s relationship with technology in the past, and reflect on how news outlets have previously worked with their audiences and the big online players in the digital landscape.
In our Throwback Thursday series, we take a look at what the key figures in media were thinking in the past, based on the Journalism.co.uk archive, and how those issues can be related to the current challenges and opportunities that dominate the conversation.
In this first installment, we go back 10 years ago, to July 2007.
Rusbridger: 'Ten year act of faith' needed for digital publishing future
In 2007, a Lords Communication Committee was probing media ownership and news. Speaking in front of this committee, Alan Rusbridger, then editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said he was pessimistic about the future of the printed local newspapers and said declining revenues from classified adds were an “urgent problem” for newspapers more generally.
He said: ”For at least 10 years we are going to have to have an act of faith and pump money into digital markets without significant return… and we will do it with the expectation that things will change.”
News apps on Facebook?
While not a dominant force in the news ecosystem, Facebook was three years old in 2007 and becoming an interesting proposition for news organisations.
Back then, developers could create apps on the platform that featured quizzes, games, or news, and some in the media industry were debating to what extent these apps could become a distribution channel and in what ways Facebook users (20 million in 2007) would want to engage with news on the social network.
After a meeting with Facebook, Rob Curley, vice president of product development for Washingtonpost.newsweek Interactive at the time, wrote that the Washington Post couldn’t just share headlines to people’s Facebook profiles, but still had to remain faithful to its mission and style.
“We needed to build things that would really work on a social-networking site, but that the very last thing we would want was for The Washington Post to look like Pat Boone rapping. There’s no point in trying to pretend you’re Jay-Z (or even Yahoo!), when your stars are Bob Woodward and Tony Kornheiser.”
The Washington Post has continued to pursue a distributed news strategy, going all in on Facebook Instant Articles and experimenting with emerging technologies.
"We're fundamentally a news organisation that's very driven by technology," Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, told Journalism.co.uk in June 2017.
Online video dilemmas at the BBC
Online video has become a core component of the digital strategy of many media organisations over the past few years – media analysts are now wondering if video is the next bubble to burst, and "pivot to video" is as close to a meme as industry jargon can get (run a Twitter search, we'll wait).
Back in 2007, the BBC was concerned with the types of video it served alongside articles online, and how they should compare to what was being broadcast on television.
Pete Clifton, then the head of BBC News Interactive, said: "What irritates the hell out of people is if they click a story which says 'Britain buys 100 new tanks for the war in Afghanistan' they then click on the video and it's just a bloke standing in Whitehall saying 'they’re going to buy 100 new tanks for the war in Afghanistan'. The viewer could say 'you've wasted my time'.
"We have done a lot of that. We have put up hundreds of pieces of video on the news site and too often they have replicated what the story has already said. We should do less video but be much more focused on how it works and give it a higher profile where it can work alongside the story."
Communities and networks 'that are excluding us'
Speaking at the Future of News conference on 5 July 2007, Deborah Turness, then editor of ITV News, announced ITV was about to launch a platform called Uploaded to engage citizen journalists and get 'real' people more involved with reporting.
"The millions that are blogging, exchanging views online and uploading clips to YouTube are building communities and networks that are excluding us," she said.
"What are we doing about the fact that every second spent talking about news online and outside of our communities is a second spent not watching us, in our environment, on television news? The truth so far is very little."
Blogging was over
On 4 July 2007, Journalism.co.uk wrote about Newsnight journalists managing Facebook groups to engage with their audience, getting story ideas from viewers, including one which suggested Newsnight should send Jeremy Paxman on a reporting tour by bike.
Speaking to Journalism.co.uk for the story, Paul Mason, who was business and industry correspondent for the show at the time, was excited about the potential of social networks compared to blogs, which had lost their grassroots appeal.
"Personally, I think blogging is so over now," he said. "Once Guido got himself onto Newsnight, albeit SAS-style in silhouette, and Iain Dale got himself in the Telegraph, I could feel the zeitgeist moving away from blogging."
See you next week for more Throwback Thursday! Do you remember any predictions that never came to pass, or any quotes that were spot on from 'back in the day'? Tweet us at @journalismnews.
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