Last night’s Tomorrow’s News 2017 event in London featured a dynamic discussion of the changing news landscape and what the future holds.
Panelists Madhav Chinnappa, Director of Strategic Relations for News and Publishers at Google; Maisie McCabe, Deputy Editor of Campaign; Nic Newman, Research Association at Reuters Institute; and Nathalie Malinarich, Mobile Editor, BBC News Online, joined moderator John Pullman, Reuters Global Head of Video and Pictures, to debate Reuters exclusive survey results of reader trends on news consumption, fake news, trust, social media and consumer behavior and perceptions of news brands.
Among the highlights:
–Chinnappa said that Google is “trying to give the answers that the users are looking for when they search, which is a very specific thing. So for us, when you look at false news, on some levels, that’s news spam. It’s people trying to game the system. And we’ve been trying to fight that from the beginning of Google.”
–Malinarich noted that brand attribution or recognition on social media is really difficult. “If you spend your whole day snacking on Facebook, you know you’ve read things about Trump or whatever it is, but you don’t who wrote them or made the video at the end. …it’s just kind of a jumble in your head and you remember the actual stories and the headlines, but you don’t really remember who provided that.”
–The way people buy online advertising, McCabe said, was to look for the cheapest way to find people who look like they might be interested in their brand. “That means they don’t pay attention to necessarily where the ad is going to run, so then you have the situation where people are chasing numbers by any means. It’s definitely something advertisers need to be wary of.”
–On fake news, Newman said “whose responsibility is it—is it publishers, is it platforms, is it users? In this world, it’s all of those. Users get the benefits of greater choice, but downside of that is they have to do more work themselves to work out what is true and what isn’t. They are, and they relish that. They see that trade off when you talk to them. From a publishers point of you, they need to do more about transparency. From a platform point of view, they need to do more as well to show the value of brands.
You can follow more of the discussion on Twitter by searching #tomorrowsnews.
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[Reuters PR Blog Post]