I HAVE and it’s no joke, especially if you run a business
that is haemorrhaging ad revenue to the digital giants while they also take
advantage of everybody else’s freely available content.
Henry Faure Walker, chief executive of regional publisher
Newsquest, accused the web giants of “free-riding off of the great content that
professional publishers produce” for years, adding: “If we are lucky we get a few
crumbs off the table.”
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| ANIMATED: Henry Faure Walker from Newsquest |
We’re at the Digital Journalism Summit 2017, held at News
UK’s swanky headquarters in London Bridge, where media professionals from
seasoned exponents to wide-eyed wannabes are eager to catch the latest trends
and hear what those in the know really know.
Conference organiser and editor of Press Gazette, Dominic
Ponsford, did a great job assembling representatives from all three digital
behemoths that added an extra frisson to the expectation in the room. As one
tweeted: “Panel of Google, Facebook and Twitter... suspect they may feel a bit
of hostility from the room.”
Sadly for the non-combatants in the audience there was no blood on the conference floor. There were few answers from the assembled triumvirate – in fact it’s now getting difficult to even remember what the questions are.
Even when needled by Ponsford who asked what their thoughts
were on Press Gazette’s Duopoly campaign calling on Google and Facebook to
‘stop destroying journalism’, Google’s UK director of news partnerships
Madhav Chinnappa said he “did not accept the premise of the campaign”.
He said: “When it comes to display advertising, Google is a
supplier, that means we only make money when publishers make money so we want
that to grow. We are part of that ecosystem.”
Patrick Walker, Facebook’s head of media partnerships, said
that a lot of the money the platform had been making from digital advertising
was from new advertisers.
“The world is moving very quickly. This is explosion of
digital advertising is an opportunity open to everyone,” said Walker. He also
pointed to work Facebook was doing to help news outlets sell subscriptions on
the platform and through the Facebook Journalism Project.
Meanwhile, out there in the real digital world Mary Hamilton
posted a valedictory piece entitled ‘13 things I learned from six years at
the Guardian’ from her time there as executive editor, audience.
Coming in at No 7 was: Platforms are not strategies, and
they won’t save news.
“If someone else’s algorithm change could kill your traffic
and/or your business model, then you’re already dead,” Hamilton wrote. “Google
and Facebook are never going to subsidise news providers directly, and nor
should they. Stop waiting for someone to make it go back to the way it was
before.”
- A full conference report appears in the next issue of Production Journal. To subscribe click here
ALAN GEERE has been to the summit but also toiled in the
foothills of journalism in his 40-year career. E: alan@alan-geere.com T:
@alangeere
