News organisations around the world are grappling with a series of challenges that range from audience engagement and reliability, to the rise of digital and social media platforms and adapting news formats for these mediums. This transforming news landscape, its opportunities and challenges were the focus of a panel discussion at the recent BroadcastPro ME Summit KSA. We bring you a summary.
News consumption in the MENA region is undergoing massive changes, driven by factors such as increased mobile connectivity, high internet penetration and social media usage, according to a report by Strategy& Middle East and Google News Initiative. Newsrooms, therefore, have had to evolve rapidly. The news panel, moderated by Karim Daoud, Partner at Strategy& Middle East, and featuring Riad Hamade, Director of Business News at Asharq News; Ruba Ibrahim, COO of Blinx; and Jamie Angus, COO of Al Arabiya, discussed this changing landscape at the summit.
Strategy&’s Karim Daoud kicked off the discussion by stating that digital and social media platforms have become the preferred sources of news for global audiences. He was referencing a Reuters worldwide survey, where 22% of the respondents said they start their news journey via a website or social media app. The digital acceleration has created a new dynamic and news organisations are constantly innovating to meet these changing preferences.
Evolution of news broadcasting in the digital age
There’s a marked shift in news delivery as well as consumption patterns, noted Jamie Angus, Al Arabiya’s COO. Most legacy news organisations are now rebranding themselves as ‘digital first’. In terms of consumption, the trend is to offer news where the consumer is. He cited the example of digital displays in building elevators, which have started screening news headlines in addition to commercials.
“What’s changed in the digital world is that your news consumption comes to you based on where you are and what you’re doing at the time. The time when audiences used to lean forward and have an appointment to view or read the news, that’s still in place but not universally,” he explained.
He also stressed the importance of remembering that consumption patterns are changing not only for younger audiences but also for older people. “The UK’s communication regulator Ofcom says that 10% of adult audiences get their news from social media platform TikTok now. In the United States, 40% of the TikTok audience is aged between 30 and 49,” he said, accepting that he too spends as much time finding news on TikTok as on the Al Arabiya or BBC websites.
Riad Hamade, Director of Business News at Asharq News, suggested using the term ‘building multimedia platforms’ instead of ‘digital first’ to describe the transformation the news industry is undergoing.
“The concept of ‘digital first’ implies that there are two types of media: outdated legacy media (such as print and TV) and digital media. At Asharq, we are not a TV station that has a website and a social media presence. We see ourselves as a multimedia platform that tries to reach our audience in multiple ways. It is a conscious decision to keep TV as one of our platforms,” he explained. “We accept that people of all ages are consuming news in different ways. Some want a big TV screen and some prefer smaller screens such as those in lifts or on mobile devices. We just see these as different ways to convey information.”
Hamade also emphasised the need to use different visual formats for different screens. “Each platform has its own requirements and this is coupled with the pressure to innovate for every kind of platform. We are constantly learning and trying new things,” he said, describing how Asharq is experimenting with an “L-shaped visual format” that includes lots of information and data along with the presenter’s visual profile. Such a format is great for office settings which keep the TV running on silent. “With this visual format, if the audience sees something interesting on the screen, they can raise the volume and take in more details.”
Improving news storytelling in broadcasting
Blinx, which boasts a robust native digital-only platform with content produced specially for Gen Zs and millennials, did not aim to be a news organisation but events such as the war in Gaza forced the platform into covering them. This was a challenge, since it didn’t have resources on the ground to become a news provider. Another challenge the company faced was its audience profile. Initial research conducted by Nielson Media Company for Blinx showed that the platform’s target audience “doesn’t like the word ‘news’ and wanted to be entertained even while consuming serious issues”, revealed Rubai Ibrahim, COO of Blinx.
Blinx found the answer to this with a novel “non-news format that is reliable and appeals to the youth. Our stories are short, informative, inspiring, entertaining and most importantly, credible,” said Ibrahim. “We didn’t want to compete with news players; news channels provide enough information. So we decided to cover the news through telling the stories of people who make the news. We steered away from political leaders; our heroes are the common people. That’s how our stories resonate with our audience. We portray stories of children and families and the challenges they face due to lack of resources. We offer a human perspective on social, political and economic situations.”
Tech innovations: AI and virtual studios
Blinx was able to implement this format quickly due to its extremely flexible digital set-up, showing that technology plays a vital role in helping media outlets keep up with audience demand for different types of formats. “People get bored very quickly, meaning that studios get burned out fast. There has to be a lot of flexibility and diversity in production and this is where technology plays an important role,” explained Ibrahim.
Extended reality (XR) technologies which Blinx employs, such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR), allow production studios to overcome any limitations posed by mobility and geography, enabling them to place people in any environment realistically.
However, advanced tech is a double-edged sword. While it enables news producers to come up with innovative formats, it also permits the “creation of synthetic content at very high degrees of believability”, cautioned Angus. “The extremely low complexity set of inputs that current technology allows is immensely exciting yet utterly terrifying for news organisations. It points to a world in which people will be unable to distinguish easily, particularly online, between real and synthetic pieces of media content. This is going to upend our industry in lots of ways.”
Challenges and opportunities
In this scenario, reliability emerges as the biggest concern that news organisations are facing globally. Traditional media outlets are still considered more credible compared to social media platforms, which face elevated concerns about fake news. It comes as no surprise then that combating misinformation and reinforcing credibility are the top priorities for news networks. Angus believes it’s here that brand awareness becomes central to audience behaviour: “When people don’t know what to believe in, they will choose news organisations based on some sort of pre-existing awareness they have of that brand. Trust in the brand becomes their central proposition.”
For young digital brands like Blinx, organic growth is their strategy for brand building. “We are growing organically and this is a conscious decision we have taken to know our audience better. Organic growth does slow down our numbers, but it gives us complete transparency about our audience and their consumption habits. If we boost our content, it will be misleading.”
Additionally, several news organisations are tackling fake news by pivoting towards fact-checking products. Unfortunately, this isn’t enough. “The fact-checking content only ever reaches a fraction of the audience that the original content reaches,” lamented Angus.
“Fake news moves very fast but fact-checking doesn’t. By the time you get around to do a fact-check, which takes time and takes effort, the train has moved and millions of people have seen the fake news while only thousands see the fact-check,” added Hamade.
However, the panellists agreed that fact-checking efforts are valuable and have the potential to produce robust journalism. They also concurred that social platforms will have to be more accessible and offer more audience engagement while holding journalists more accountable.
Impact of digital and social media on news reporting
Moving to the topic of audience engagement, all the panellists agreed that digital platforms have made it easier and faster to get feedback from viewers. “There is a massive change in the culture in newsrooms – they are more open and listening to the audience. We now have instant feedback on stories, and this allows us to change stories that don’t work. Young journalists entering the industry understand that we’re making content to be consumed and not for a sort of nebulous and elevated purpose that just looks after itself. Whether you’re a commercial business or a state broadcaster, you have to measure audience engagement and consumption numbers with every tool available,” emphasised Angus.
Giving the example of Asharq, Hamade explained that as a business news channel they had to ensure that aspect was always the focus of their stories. “We are a business news channel and our primary audience is investors who are looking for information that will help them invest their money. So even if we cover politics, it is with a business or economic angle to it. The pressure to innovate doesn’t stop. We are constantly learning, trying new things and measuring audience engagement. If the engagement is not great, we stop and try something else. It is a continuous process and includes all platforms, even television.”
Live data-driven content has become the mantra for news platforms. “With live data, you know how people are reacting and if they are engaging with the story or not. This allows you to adapt and modify your formula along the way,” said Ruba Ibrahim.
For Blinx, data has been central to its operations right from the beginning. “Data sometimes gets you to certain alleys that you never thought of; this includes countries, gender and even ethnic groups,” Ibrahim explained. Armed with nuanced data, Blinx has not only been able to engage with its target audience but has also gleaned information about the audience who visited its platform looking for specific information and then catering to that segment.
“You cannot ignore the people who come knocking on your door; you cannot make them feel that you don’t cater to them. You want to retain them. Although we started with Gen Z as our target audience, we then saw older generations consuming our content too so we started measuring and tracking those journeys and modifying our content based on that data.”
Now digital media outlets can track almost every person who interacts with them: their bandwidth, streaming experience and whether they watch videos partially or to the end. Such detailed analysis allows producers to tweak their content in real time, making data a very powerful instrument.
Amid entertainment reels and videos that go viral, news is fighting to stay relevant. This is evident in the innovations and strategies that news organisations are actively adopting to push boundaries of content creation and delivery.
In the words of Karim Daoud: “The different approaches to news address one fundamental problem: an overwhelming [lack of interest] and disengagement on the part of audiences. But we need this category to succeed because societies function much better when the right information reaches the right people at the right time.”
