The Mario Blog

Only yesterday I had a very early breakfast meeting with Jeroen Zanen, CEO of the Dutch company, Crowdynews, which offers social media curation for publishers. As usually happens this time of the year, our conversation turned to what is likely to happen in 2018 for our business.

We covered the usual themes:

1. We are likely to see more of the smaller, regional publishers globally aiming for more of a firm digital transformation.
2. There will be greater need for training, especially in the area of storytelling for mobile.
3. We will see more experimentation with advertising strategies, especially sponsored content.
4. More experimentation with video, too.

I recommended to Jeroen to read this wonderful piece from my friend and colleague, Earl Wilkinson, CEO of International News Media Association (INMA).

Earl has just completed a Silicon Valley Study Tour and his observations are right on the money.

Earl wrote that:

Drinking from the fountain of Silicon Valley on last week’s INMA study tour, it is easy to get lost in the conflation of emotions: gurus talking innovation, wowed and concerned about Google and Facebook, ping pong tables masquerading as culture tools, and the inevitable collision between what is a trend vs. what is a sales pitch.

But he concluded with six themes that should resonate with all of us. There are two that I am fond of :

If I were to distill a full week of the INMA Silicon Valley Study Tour, with a heavy bias toward what is most relevant to me, it would be these themes:

1. Personalization: Personalization of content, content architecture, newsletters, alerts, and more is the universal answer to optimising discovery.

2. Video: I am continually vexed about the trends in digital video vs. the lower levels of engagement on news media-generated video. Yet maybe an answer to this is going to be less about video channels and more about making video ubiquitous through simpler and simpler tools – and integration with text-based reporting.

I believe that we will see greater efforts made to provide personalize information to our audience. This is already happening rapidly, especially with Scandinavian newsappers, such as Aftenposten, of Norway.

I also think that video use will be more refined for news in 2018. In fact, it may be the year of video, the time when we come to terms with using shorter, more focused videos, with the realization that the way we consume videos on a small screen of a phone is not the way we do on computers or on TV.

More predictions to come for 2018 in the days ahead, but for now, these two should get us thinking about our strategies for the new year.

April 18-19, 2018-–Newscamp ,Augsburg,  Germany.

May 26, 2018 —Associacion Riograndense de Imprensa, Univesidad de Santa Cruz (Unisc), Brazil

June 3-6, 2018—The Seminar, San Antonio, Texas.