With inflation, staff negotiations are coming faster (every 3 months fast enough for you?) PLUS other WAN-IFRA takeaways from @WNIP and @GoogleNewsInit

October 03, 2022

We start with a couple of good roundups of WAN-IFRA's World News Media Congress that took place in Spain last week. What's New in Publishing and Google News Initiative/Google News Partnerships both took a look at takeaways from the conference. One thing that leapt out at me was how inflation is affecting employer-worker relations. One LATAM publisher told WNIP that they were renegotiating contracts every three months. That shows how problematic rampant inflation is, not to mention what is doing for print inputs like paper and ink.

The other message from WNIP that really stood out is that being big doesn't always mean being better. Smaller shops can be more nimble. Fewer resources have their own set of constraints, but it also means that decision making is streamlined.

Plus we have some great advice on Google's Helpful Content update and also how predictive modeling can support personalisation.

I'm doing interviews for Pugpig's State of the Digital Publishing Market report, which we'll release in November, and personalisation is definitely a major area of focus for publishers.

We’ve just returned from a week in Zaragoza attending the World News Media Congress 2022. We will be posting a number of in-depth features from the conference in due course, but below are some key ‘front of mind’ takeaways from last week’s event. Bottom line: Publishers need to keep agile, very agile. The WAN-IFRA World …

There are a lot of interesting tidbits in this roundup. Not only are is inflation changing the employer-worker relationship but also is the desire for hybrid working - especially for staffs in large cities. To respond to this, publishers are moving their work centres to university towns where staff want to come into the office.

The other point, which is again, highlighted in the research that we're doing right now amongst Pugpig clients is that it isn't a case of advertising versus subscriptions but both revenue streams. The challenge is balancing them and also, again, being nimble in order to optimise that balance between the revenue streams.

Ana Rocha de Paiva shares what she learned at this year’s WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Zaragoza, Spain.

The Google Team also highlighted their takeaways. They also talked about tweaking the revenue mix, but they also discussed the innovation imperative and how diversity not only is a worthy goal but can also increase your audience by tapping into a larger audience.

Here’s why you should care – and why you shouldn’t stress – about Google’s helpful content update. – Content Marketing institute

Google is constantly tweaking its algorithm, and the most recent update is the Helpful Content Update. "Is your content clear and well organized? Is it original? Think along those lines."

Your models are making a prediction and you have a next-best action — now what? Why personalisation, of course.

As I said, we're hearing from a lot of Pugpig clients that personalisation will be one of their areas of focus in 2023. A lot of this has to do with increasing relevance to reduce churn. This article looks at how predictive models can help you identify opportunities to deliver personalisation and also different ways to do that.

WAN-IFRA is launching the fourth edition of Table Stakes Europe. The programme will once again welcome twenty-four European news enterprises participating in 2023.

Google and WAN-IFRA have been working together all around the globe, and Table Stakes has been a very successful programme in the US to support publishers with their digital transformation efforts. It's great to see it expand in Europe.

The two companies have joined forces to help close the gap between buyers and vendors by shining a light on the multibillion-dollar ad tech industry.

This is a smart tie up between the two companies. Digiday starts going deep on an subject that needs illumination and simplification - ad tech.

Zuckerberg Confirms Meta Is Downsizing, Cutting Team Budgets - 09/30/2022

Reports have been swirling for the last couple of weeks that Meta was going to trim its hiring initiatives, and now we have some details.

Consumer Reports CEO Marta Tellado sent out the following to the staff: Dear Colleagues, As a mission-driven organization, we have a profound obligation to deliver trusted information, especially when it’s in short supply. And we must continue to hold big companies and powerful interests accountable in order to create a more fair and just marketplace. Our mission […]

Another bit of data on how publishing groups are starting to trim their budgets as economic uncertainty increases and central bank interest rate rises start to cut into spending and growth.

Tech companies working with AI are outsourcing data collection and training to academic/nonprofit research groups, shielding them from potential accountability and legal liability.

Interesting. Basically, Meta is using academic data sets to train its AI. The recently graduated master's student in me is fascinated by the ethics of it.