Can artificial intelligence impact newspaper’s subscription strategies and editorial coverage ?
On November 7 and 8, two intense days of conferences were held in Nice, as part of the European IQ Media project. Dedicated to innovation in the media, these days brought together renowned professionals from all over Europe to debate and exchange views on the current and future challenges facing the media industry. Among them, a conference held was meant to discuss the latest technology’s impact on subscription strategies and editorial coverage arrangements with Olivier Marino (deputy editorial director in Nice-Matin), and Lefteris Bidelas (Editor-in-Chief, Kathimerini).
Read the summary here.
See our videos to learn more about those two amazing days, just here.
Why to talk about it?
Are readers more attracted to long or short articles ? Which topics do they prefer ? What can make them like my newspaper enough so they subscribe to it ? Those are typical questions in many newsrooms. In this round table discussion led by Marion Wyss from The Audiencers, different members of different journals shared and compared their differences throughout the same problem : how can they bring more subscribers and keep them interested through the years ? And how can AI help? Well, this last question was lowkey answered, due to the lack of actual technologies using artificial intelligence to answer this problem. For now.
So what was mentioned ?
One of the first lessons learned in this conference was the “User Needs Model”. This system divides the reader’s desires into four verbs : to know, to understand, to feel, and finally, to do (find more explanations on the graphic down below).
There are three types of readers:
- anonymous readers
- subscribers who pay monthly or annual subscriptions to get advantages
- and recently was created an in-between possibility to subscribe for free, in exchange of personal data (such as your email, your name etc.).
The greek journal Kathimerini’s editor-in-chief Lefteris Bidelas mentioned convincing anonymous readers to choose this in-between solution to get access to personalized pages based on what its public was reading. Lefteris Bidelas also noticed that using this method created levels of interest, the higher the price, the more articles were read throughout a month.
It then got compared to the French daily local paper Nice-Matin, represented by deputy editorial director Olivier Marino: “Personalization is key, although newsrooms don’t always agree with the most liked articles”, such as miscellaneous facts or local life.
So when does AI get mentioned ?
If technology is obviously used to get all the data needed to get those informations, artificial intelligence finally comes up when Marion Wyss presents us Newscorp Australia. What does it do ? It attacks the performance of articles by evaluating how likely it is to convince readers to subscribe.
It is clear now that marketing and journalist teams have to work hand in hand, although this may not please journalism ethics to write for information, not money. But it is not new that it had to become a motivation for newsrooms to survive.
LILI-JEANNE BLUTEAU (In partnership with IUT de Cannes, school of journalism)
