Mario García, author and founder of García Media, desperately wants news media companies to run toward the two revolutions facing news media today: Mobile and AI.

“The reason I’m worried is that … only 25% of all media companies in the would could be called mobile-first,” he told attendees at the recent INMA Media Subscriptions Summit in New York. “And here we have at our doors AI. And the two of them need to be addressed at the same time.

“What I’ve learned in 55 years is you can get the best CMS, change the architecture of the building, but if the people who are creating the content are not transforming themselves mentally, it’s not going to happen. And it has nothing to do with age. I’m 77.”

García teaches a class at Columbia University in New York called The Journalism of Everywhere and Interruptions. How do newsrooms today write for the “journalism of interruptions?”

Firstly, newsroom must be mobile-first, he said.

All stories can be told in a linear format, he said, using a New York Times article to illustrate:

“You plan everything from small to large. You don’t plan for large and dump into small, which is how it’s done for many newsrooms.”

Other news media companies shared how they are meeting reader needs — often via mobile — and focusing on important journalism, thus increasing digital subscriptions and increasing reader revenue.

The Dallas Morning News reponds to metrics showing what readers read

When Katrice Hardy started her job as executive editor at The Dallas Morning News, the Texas media company had seen significant declines in local audiences.

“We had a newsroom of almost 180 people yet we weren’t actually having an impact with the people who live there. We also had low market penetration, 2%. We used to run 130 stories every day; most people stuck with it for 10 to 20 seconds. None of it mattered. We didn’t have impact. We also didn’t have a strong way to track how our stories were doing. We weren’t audience-first. We wrote what we wanted to write and not what people wanted to read.”

Recently, the biggest focus has been nailing down the metrics, Hardy said. Reporters now know what content is attracting audiences and what isn’t.

For the latter, the newsroom is now focused on: food (one reporter covers Hispanic food), faith (the company received a grant and now has a faith writer, whose content doubles or triples the engagement of other content); transportation, the Texas Rangers (the local baseball team), real estate, public safety, watchdog, and breaking news.

One recent content success was Deadly Fake, 30-day of stories about fentanyl. The series included first-person stories from doctors, drug dealers, parents, and drug educators.

“We got the community talking,” Hardy said. “We got a print story to 100,000 middle school students. We ended that series with a wonderful community event, asking parents who had been struggling with this to talk to us about their experiences.”

The series got 263,000 pageviews and 272 subscription conversions.

Outriders embraces non-linear stories

Jakub Górnicki wants newsroom teams to know this:

“Non-linear storytelling is a problem for editors. They check the story and they’re like, ‘Where’s the ending?” And they crash. But the audience has no problem with it,” the co-founder of startup Outriders, based in Poland, told summit attendees.

The average length of audience time spent on Outriders content is 19 minutes, the average length of a Friends episode, Górnicki pointed out.

One example of non-linear content success is a series rolled out in October 2022 to let audiences experience everyday life in Ukraine. The mobile experience was set in five Ukrainian cities that were were on the front line of the Russian attack. Partnering with local journalists, reporters for Outriders spend three to four hours in each city and created two-minute 360-Virtual Reality segments.

One such segment was based on time in an underground shelter created for locals to enjoy football. This was just six weeks before the World Cup.

“Don’t think of mobile as just push notifications,” he said. “Every day, we would unlock a new city. You decide what you see. Yes, I go there with the camera, but with your phone, you decide on the details you want to stop and see.”

A lesson for traditional news media companies: “We didn’t tell the audience how to feel. We let the audience create their own emotions. The audience felt like they were on a journey with us and spent over 15 minutes time per story. Forget about the desktop. Focus on the UX, not the design. Audiences are not afraid of non-linear storytelling. Audiences like to have a choice so publish journalism in many formats. 

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism counts on journalism to become sustainable

The UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism opened in 2010 with the “deep public purpose of investigations,” explained Rozina Breen, editor-in-chief and CEO. The non-profit’s mandate is to spark individual or policy change with its journalism. 

“We are delivering the most expensive long-term journalism,” she said. “We don’t have a daily news agenda to work to. We don’t have a calendar to work to. We can keep on with them for as long as we’d like.”

In 2023, the bureau did 100 investigations. One story took 1600 days of reporting, 4.5 years, and resulted in huge media coverage, the collapse of XX business model, and the resignations of council executives. 

While it has distribution partners like BBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, and Financial Times, these partners don’t pay for the Bureau’s content — 95% of the Bureau’s revenue comes from foundations.

“That’s not sustainable,” Breen said. “Like many other newsrooms, we’re transforming how we do journalism.”

The goal is 70% foundation supported, 20% reader revenue supported, 10% commercially supported. The revenue model factors in an internal belief that all content should be free to access.

In November 2023, the company launched a membership structure called Bureau Insiders. And leaders are also changing the culture of how the newsroom thinks about content and money. Until Breen arrived, most of the editorial staff didn’t have details about how the Bureau was funded.

“We can’t forget the power of journalism,” she said. “We know that people will support that because they want good outcomes and good accountability.” 

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