Saving Travel And Journalism, In One Fell ... Post
Photo by Matt Popovich on Unsplash.
I just happen to have more than a passing acquaintance with two of the industries hit hardest by the pandemic: travel and journalism.
In fact, you could say I'm at the epicenter of the destruction, because one of my main incarnations is as a travel journalist. I'm no longer the New York Times type of travel journalist I once was, but I get some bylines here and there. And regardless of my current status, I’ve seen first-hand the devastation the pandemic has done on these two industries.
Let’s start with travel. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, here’s the year-over-year decrease in international travel to major world regions by American travelers:
Europe: -86.34%
Caribbean: -67.01%
Asia: -82.91%
South America : -66.66%
Central America: -67.68%
Oceania: -72.30%
Middle East: -70.43%
Africa: -63.85%
Yeowtch. Think of all the industries, national and domestic, large and small, hurt by this: airlines, travel agencies, travel insurance companies, makers of travel accessories, hotel chains, and small businesses of all types along both sides of both borders.
There are many instances where you can find a silver lining in even the darkest of economic clouds. This is not one of those cases.
Now, consider journalism. According to The New York Times, as of December 2020, “an estimated 37,000 employees of news media companies in the United States have been laid off, furloughed or had their pay reduced since the arrival of the coronavirus.”
Newspapers keep going under, broadcast outlets keep reducing the amount of time devoted to news – real news, not opinionated bloviating – and many regions around the country are actually being called “news deserts,” for their lack of local news outlets.
Two industries, two tales of devastation … and two distinctly different paths for recovery.
Now, I'm no horse whisperer, I don’t have a crystal ball, and I don’t spend my life reanimating extremely large humans, but I do have a few ideas on how we can bring back these vital industries.
First, travel.
Everyone everywhere, get vaccinated.
That’s it. That’s the cure.
Seriously, if everyone were to get vaccinated, most protocols would simply fall to the ground like shackles off a ghost. Anyone could go anywhere and see anyone or anyplace they wanted to see – and if not immediately, within a very short time.
But, as the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle noted, the one black spot in our happiness is the shadow of ourselves, and that’s certainly the case here. Americans keep insisting on being Americans – which is to say, continuing to divorce responsibility from freedom – and Europeans keep insisting on being Europeans, which means huge stinking dungheaps of bureaucracy.
If Americans could see getting vaccinated as a democratic responsibility and Europeans could take a page from America’s vaccine-distribution playbook, we’d be jetting all over the globe – but we’re not. Yet the literal cure is out there.
Fixing journalism will take a bit more work.
Journalism has failed because the subscription-based, advertising-supported print model has failed.
So what precisely has failed in this model?
Not the subscription part. More than 158 million Americans subscribe to Spotify, and The New York Times has 6.9 million online subscribers. The latest numbers on online news subscriptions, as reported in MediaPost, show that “U.S. consumers who say they pay for online news more than doubled from 9% in 2016 to 21% this year.”
Not the advertising-supported part, either, because some streaming and premium services notwithstanding, almost every type of online media has ads.
Photo by Water Journal on Unsplash.
Print has failed, but that shouldn’t be a killer in and of itself. Sales brochures and other printed collateral material have transitioned to digital just fine.
You’d think that print journalism should have been able to make the transition as well, but when print outlets launched their digital channels they showed a staggering lack of understanding of how people consume information online, how online ads can work, and what a viable subscription model might look like.
Print may have totally botched the transition, but even at this late date it’s getoverable – and not only is it getoverable, it’s absolutely vital that it be gotten over.
Here’s what print news outlets have to do in order to regain their stature, build their coffers, and do a better job of providing their important service:
1. Reconsider the service they offer
The first thing news outlets need to realize is that there’s enough news being created out there, in between what’s being created by the remaining news outlets along with individuals’ social posts and information shared via Reddit, Nextdoor, and other outlets.
There’s video of car wrecks, fires, and public meetings, local sports results, and more. There are obituaries. There are people telling important stories. What missing is:
a) Editing; and
b) Context.
Journalism doesn’t need writers. Journalism needs researchers, to dig up all this stuff and augment it with data from publicly available sources, and editors, to strip away the bias and shape it into news.
In essence what the next journalism should be is an editing service, restoring impartiality and integrity to opinionated and uninformed raw material that nonetheless contains a kernel of news.
Bring back the gatekeepers, in other words, and build a business around the fact that the gates are being kept.
Photo by Sticker Mule on Unsplash.
2. Redefine the news feed.
Facebook has a news feed; Twitter has a news feed; Google and Apple have their eponymous news services. Problem is, these feeds and services generally don’t have a lot of pertinent local news, because it’s either not being created by what these services consider to be news outlets or it’s not being created at all.
What if there were a channel that had lots of actual local news in its news feed? How great would that be?
Pretty great, actually, and a really good model for the new journalism – a news feed of news, curated from multiple sources, and carefully edited to journalistic standards for accuracy and consistency.
People would consume it the way they consume any other news feed, and in the process, they’d get a lot more information than they’re currently getting.
If you make news easy and familiar for people to consume, they’ll consume it. After all, they’ve consumed some of the most unbelievable garbage over the last couple of years, simply because it was set in front of them.
They’ll do the same thing with the truth, too.
3. Embrace advertorial
People overlook the fact that advertorial material has existed for a long time in journalism, whether a special section of a newspaper or a two-page spread in Life magazine carefully designed to look like just another story.
Just as Twitter and Facebook insert ads into their “news feeds,” this new-style journalism can do the same thing. Again, there’s nothing nefarious about this, as long as things are clearly labeled. It’s been a staple of journalism for a long time, and it can serve as a profit center in this new model, taking its design and pricing from Facebook and Google ads, for starters.
4. Enable micropayments
One of the most serious criticisms of a hypercurated model is that it’s predatory – that is, it appropriates the good, honest reporting of an outlet like National Public Radio and shares it in its news feed for free.
The answer to that is: Don’t make it free.
Around five years ago, the thought was that micropayments would save the music and newspaper industries. In fact, Spotify made micropayments the standard reimbursement in the music industry, and while you can castigate Spotify for its penurious ways all you want, fact is musicians are making money from having their music played when the alternative is not making money for having their music played.
However, on the journalism side, when micropayments produced mediocre results in limited trials they were quickly abandoned in favor of paywalls.
The problem there is the number of paywalls keeps growing and the number of people who want to go inside local paywalls keeps shrinking, and as a result, people have to look through the bars at information they need to know.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run across a story I'd like to read but can’t because of a paywall. I don’t want to subscribe to the outlet; I just want to read the damn story. And I'm more than willing to pay anywhere from a quarter to a couple of bucks to read the story.
Photo by Phillip Strong on Unsplash.
It’s time to revisit the micropayment concept in conjunction with a paywall and a newsfeed service. The paywall would provide unlimited access while micropayments can unlock selected stories that are currently locked behind the paywall.
It’s easy to see how this would work in the context of a news feed. In addition to free stories, curated and edited from public sources, there would be stories that might be available for free elsewhere but would be available via micropayment in the news feed, as well as stories that are otherwise only available via paywall that would be available for a micropayment in the feed.
Think of it as a local, monetized version of Google News, if Google really cared about providing news.
Here’s something else to consider with this model: If we really are to take Facebook and other outlets at their word, and if the end of third-party cookies and data whoring means they’ll have to charge for access to whatever odd morsels of substance and value they offer, the free-internet era is soon ending. That makes a micropayment-based news service an even better idea.
5. Focus on audio/video
Clubhouse is booming and video-based social has been huge for years, so the question is: Why can’t local news outlets get a bigger piece of all this? The answer is: because they’re still creating content primarily for old paradigms.
One of the key tenets of modern marketing is you need to match the medium to the message and the message to the medium. We’re not seeing better content from local news outlets because the content isn’t being created with digital platforms top-of-mind. It’s created for the old platform first, and then the leftovers are being made into online-friendly material.
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash.
By removing the need for broadcast or print from the equation, everything changes in the way information is gathered, edited, and presented.
Speaking of presenting, this also means death to the old, hard-to-navigate news-outlet site. There are worse things than a local news outlet’s website, but they generally involve being tied to a conveyor belt with a fiercely spinning buzzsaw at the end.
Going native means more than just pivoting to video. It means a total reconsideration of the customer experience – something that’s rarely been done in the news business.
It’s no longer a take-it-or-leave-it proposition for outlets delivering a news product. They need to face the fact that consumers have a plethora of choices when it comes to gathering and consuming information, and only a small number of them involve “traditional” news outlets.
To the end user, it’s news. All the useless distinctions are made on the providers’ end.
This model isn’t a panacea. I support the ideas being floated surrounding tax credits for news providers, subscribers, and advertisers – but only if they come with changes to the online delivery model. Without those changes, it’s Trump propping up the coal mines all over again, and no one needs that.
I truly believe that marketing can come to the aid of journalism, and apply techniques and lessons learned from decades of building audience in an online world to that needed, wanted product called news.
And as for travel, well, get your shot, folks. Everything else will fall in line.