SavetheNews.us

Greetings from not-so-freezing-anymore Helsinki. My name is Olli Sulopuisto (@osulop) and I’ll be your live-blogger for today’s event.

Tanja Aitamurto will be delivering her opening speech in just a moment. Her reseach was funded by the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. Today’s panelists are – as per the previous enty – Helene Auramo, Jyri Engeström, Mikael Pentikäinen, and Mikael Jungner.

For the people who aren’t present: we’re looking forward to your questions, so leave comments on this entry or use the hashtag #jourfut on Twitter.

Update: Jyri has started a Buzz about the panel.

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The Discussion

Last Question: What’s the future of journalism?

Pentikäinen: Content that matters to the readers.

Jungner: Professional journalism… keep the people interested.

Engeström: Participation.

Auramo: Online video.

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16:04 – Pentikäinen: Printed paper is awesome, at least to most people.

16:03 – Audience Q from Esko Kilpi: what about better user interfaces? Printed newspapers are v clumsy, difficult. Will the innovations come from trad media or 3rd parties?

16:02 – Pentikäinen: We’ve got Sanoma Digital that generates quite a lot of revenue and has nothing to do with journalism.

16:01 – Ville Vesterinen: Classifieds subsidize a great deal of what Sanoma is doing in Finland

16:01 – Jungner: Ilkka has been quite interesting in Finland, they’ve invented things other media companies haven’t.

16:00 – Pentikäinen: In the Netherlands we do a lot of stuff with event organizing. So yes, there’s a lot of potential there.

15:56 – Audience Q, Matti Lintulahti: Yearly 80M eur in search engine advertising in Finland already; small companies want to work with local media but have they got proper services available? So will the media companies stick with what they’re doing now or will they try to expand into new areas, like event organizing and such.

15:54 – Aitamurto: HuffPo has 40–50 employees. The company has ~$40M USD in funding, so they’re pretty free to experiment with revenue models right now. They say they’re in the black already.

15:54 – Pentikäinen: Hopefully HS will not cut down on the amount of reporters in the near future.

15:54 – Audience Q from Markku Huusko, Uusisuomi.fi: Helsingin Sanomat has 300 journalists, Uusisuomi.fi has 6 and some of them part-time. What’ll happen to the number of reporters at Helsingin Sanomat in the near future? And in what shape in HuffPo on the business side?

15:54 – Jungner: Monthly payments are the key. And the material needs to be interesting: the long tail stuff but also the big stars, cos they draw people in.

15:52 – Pentikäinen: Yes, you cannot paywall generic news. Combining different media products into a saleable product is a different matter, interesting but nothing happening at Sanoma right now that I could talk about.

15:51 – Audience Q: Esa Väliverronen (Uni Helsinki): Paywalled online publshing might work for niche magazines and WSJ, but probably not for general purpose news.

15:49 – Audience comment, Markus Ossi of TarkkaMarkka

15:48 – Jungner: Everybody’s got ideas, but how do you nurture the idea into a working business? We need an ecosystem that can support it.

15:46 – Engeström: New ways of paying for editorial content will come up. Compare to what’s happened with music. Maybe people don’t want to pay for music but they might want to pay for a possibility to publish their playlists?

15:44 – Pentikäinen: Well, people paying for news they like has been done in the past. It’s known as newsstand sales and subscriptions. We just haven’t listed everybody online who bought a copy of Ilta-Sanomat.

15:43 – Jungner: Finnish journalism is like an insurance. You need an infrastructure that can be harnessed to do Important Work, say like the reporting that’s been done on the campaign financing.

15:40 – Aitamurto: Crowdsourcing and Kachingle. Allows (micro)donating money to worthy causes and telling others what you’ve donated to. Using Kachingle I could pay to read David Carr’s pieces, as I’m not that interested in the sports pages (obviously NY Times would get a cut).

15:37 – Auramo: What pulls in the biggest audiences in the fashion blogging world? Experts? Nope, relatable people. Sorta like reality tv, I think.

15:35 – Pentikäinen: Sure, see no problems with that. But the firewall between editorial and advertising stays, because that’s part of what makes Helsingin Sanomat valuable. People will pay for quality products, which is partly why I believe why the Finnish media will make it.

15:33 – Engeström: Media innovation requires technological innovation. It cannot be about content alone. Now I hope that there will be no advertorials in Helsingin Sanomat, but let’s say there’s a story about a new product – can the newspaper provide a link to a webstore (and get a commission from it) or is it eternally impossible?

15:31 – Audience comment, Tuija Aalto: Mind you, me jumping ship (a hypothetical situation) wouldn’t do much harm to Yle as a whole, because if the network is strong, it won’t need one node.

15:29 – Jungner: What we at Yle try to do is facilitate self-expression. Right now we’re working on Kohtaus, where people get help with screenwriting, might even get published. Re: discussion – our strategy is to have people talk about Yle’s programs in existing forums, e.g. on Helsingin Sanomat’s webpages. We want to see Yle’s people participate in social media.

15:28 – Pentikäinen: Audience participation has gone way, way up in Sanoma’s newspapers. The ways vary from newspaper to newspaper. Vartti and Metro publish a lot of readers’ photos. Is Finland actually so much behind the US?

15:26 – Pentikäinen: The change is already upon as. Helsingin Sanomat has 1 million readers, and 1.5 million readers online. Ilta-Sanomat has almost 2 million readers online.

15:23 – Jungner: In Finland there are people on the bleeding edge and then there’s the rest, who I will call the ABC gas station people. The question is: when will the big, huddling masses start doing what the digital pioneers are doing now?

15:21 – Pentikäinen: Obviously stuff happening across the Atlantic will have an effect on Finland but we’re still not the same. In 5 years our business model will be pretty much the same but the distribution online/print will have changed a bit.

15:20 – Audience Q: What’s happening in the US will end up on Finnish shores sooner or later. So my question: how will Sanoma Corp make money in 5 years? Another Q: what’s happening with media timeshares?

15:16 – Ville Vesterinen, Arctic Startup: Our goal was never to build a business model but to do meaningful stuff. What we do to make money is organize events, sell our expertise.

15:13 – Jungner: The Long Tail isn’t only about the tail. Take Sanoma for example: they’ve got the name recognition, they’ve got the expertise – shouldn’t be too threatening for them. Also case Elisa Viihde – people will pay for things they find valuable.

15:11 – Pentikäinen: Trad. media spends a whole lot of time thinking about what the readers want. Journalism might change from a profession to a hobby, which is a worrisome development. Niche online publications might make some money for a few people but will not support mass media, especially in Finland.

15:10 – Engeström: www.newsmill.se seems to be working fine, one of the funders is Bonnier. Social media tends to trend towards a more personal approach, ie. from institutional bylines to branded reporters/readers/et al.

15:05 – Pentikäinen: Don’t see a lot of innovation coming out of Yle either. And I’ve never heard of a meeting where people were scheming to stop Google. We’ve thought about how to deal with Google, sure, but that’s different.

15:03 – Jungner: What has Finland contributed to the worldwide media development? Pretty much nothing. We don’t have a culture of innovations, our institutions go to a lot of trouble to stop development (how to stop Google, Apple, Kindle?). Slowly eroding the basics of our culture. We need to spread the optimism that Tanja Aitamurto shows in her report.

15:02 – Pentikäinen: Two questions here. Number 1: Business models. Number 2: What will happen to journalism, the journalistic process? Lots of possibilities there, we’ve only begun exploring #2 in Finland. But we have to take care of the business models too, otherwise independent media will die out.

15:00 – Pentikäinen: If what’s happening in the States happens here in Finland, you need to be rich, work for Yle, inherit a fortune or possibly just go beg for money.

14:59 – Engeström: Discussion, putting a face on people is what the internet does to the media.

14:58 – Engeström: We’re approaching this thing upside down, always talking about making money first. But if I were to take part in a new startup, it’d first and foremost have to create something people want to see.

14:57 – Aitamurto: FTC wants bloggers to report their endorsements, testimonials.

14:55 – Auramo: Everybody at Indiedays has committed to following ethical guidelines, that include mentioning freebies. Trying to avoid what’s happened at Sweden, the US.

14:54 – Auramo: Ad funded, looking for new revenue streams. Organizing various meetings etc. looks interesting.

14:52 – Pentikäinen: Our revenue is ads/subs 60/40, now after the recession 50/50. Developing lots of stuff re: online advertising, for example regional targeting.

How do you follow the news?

14:51 – Pentikäinen: I seem to be the one who belongs to the museum … Printed newspaper in the morning, mobile and broadcast media during the day.

14:47 – Jungner: Well… Twitter is by far the fastest, might take two to three weeks for the mainstream media to catch on. I’ve picked 400 most interesting and smartest people to follow, it’s almost like the Nobel committee is having a party inside my head.

14:45 – Auramo: On the phone with an app, follows various media on Twitter and looks at friends’ links. Haven’t subscribed to nespapers for years.

The Panelists

• Mikael Pentikäinen, editor-in-chief of Helsingin Sanomat
• Mikael Jungner, CEO of Finnish Broadcasting Company
• Jyri Engeström, founder of Jaiku, works at Google on social services
• Helene Auramo, Indiedays

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Tanja’s Presentation

14:43 – Tanja: Thanks for listening, let’s move on to the panelists.

14:42 – Tanja: Let’s not concentrate on the failures but the success stories. Sharing good ideas hopefully results in not having to reinvent the wheel.

14:40 – Tanja: What to call many of these new players? They aren’t online publications per se, as they do much more than just publish – there’s curating, filtering etc. Maybe just simply call them ‘news organizations’.

14:38 – Tanja: Hyperlocal news. For example The NY Times has The Local where readers contribute (significant?) amounts of content.

14:35 – Tanja:: I believe online advertising has potential but it has to change. It’s not that ad revenues are down because of the economical downturn, the change is fundamental and permanent.

14:33 – Tanja: Generation gap: will the kids pay for content online or will they just look for an alternative outlet that doesn’t charge for it?

14:32 – Tanja: There’s almost an ideological war about paywalls. The New York Times has tried it once, relented, will now go for a metered access model. Wall Street Journal has a functioning paywall system.

14:30 – Tanja: Antithesis to the content factories: slow journalism, investigative journalism. There still seems to be a need for it.

14:29 – Tanja: Optimizing for advertising / reader demand, case Demand Media. Churning out a huge amount of content for a pittance.

14:26 – Tanja: Ways traditional news orgs are fighting this trend: integrated advertising (advertorials?), and advertising in social media, ie. feeding ads to readers of NY Times on Facebook or paid tweets on HuffPo. Other revenue streams: consulting, organizing conferences etc.

14:24 – Tanja: Structural changes on the business side: local media has long held a monopoly of advertising, but that’s breaking down. Also the advertisers can get direct access to consumers, so why should they pay the middleman (ie. newspaper) instead of just buying Adwords from Google et al?

14:22 – Tanja: A worrisome trend: nonprofits with an agenda, e.g. Kaiser Health News – can they be trusted?

14:20 – Tanja: San Francisco, where I mostly live, has sprung up a plenthora of alternative news organizations. Many do slow news, ie. less but more in-depth reporting.

14:19 – Tanja: Begging for donations. More and more nonprofits are taking over the task of reporting the news. Their goal isn’t to make a profit but to e.g. raise political awareness. They’re funded by donations, sponsorship, advertising.

14:16 – Tanja: Traditional advertising counts for 70–85% of the media’s income in the US. The challenge: advertising on the web isn’t as lucrative, plus most of the content is available for free, which eats away at the revenue. But there are more readers than ever before, so it would seem there’s future for the media.

14.15: Tanja takes to the stage. Thanks the funders and her professors Heikki Luostarinen and Turo Uskali.