Throughout 2024, INMA’s Product & Tech Initiative has monitored the changing media landscape. And as she opened the recent INMA Product & Tech Town Hall, Jodie Hopperton, initiative lead, shared her insights into some of those learnings. 

Before bringing on a slate of speakers, Hopperton asked attendees to participate in a poll to share what topics had been their main focus throughout the year. Not surprisingly, AI, GenAI, and subscriptions were some of the primary concerns. 

Those results, Hopperton said, align with what she has seen across the industry and with the initiatives INMA has focused on in 2024. 

Looking to the future, she shared results from a poll of c-suite leaders taken at the INMA World Congress in May 2023: 58% of them reported that innovation and tech adoption was one of the top long-term challenges for their company. 

“This is something that’s really important for people. How do we keep up without spending too much money being the first adopters? How do we make sure we’re investing the right things? This is very much top of mind.”

Throughout the year, Hopperton said the Product & Tech Initiative had focused on three themes:

1. Staying nimble in a legacy landscape

Two things keep a news media organisation nimble: team and culture and tools and technology. 

Focusing on the latter, Hopperton said a sustainability survey INMA conducted with Google and FT Strategies found a direct correlation between spending on product and tech and a company’s financial performance. “So making sure you’ve got the right amount of spending in these areas is really important.” 

One trend Hopperton observed is that news organisations are moving to modular tech stacks. This allows them to switch components as needed, making the most of innovations as they emerge and keeping them relevant and competitive. This is more cost-effective than the previous tech stacks organisations depended on. 

“Technology is moving so quickly right now,” she said, not just with AI but in all areas. “I think a lot of organisations had these big CMSs that encompassed everything, but we are now seeing that actually we might want to work with best in breed; we might want to put in different components and switch them out.”

2. Fluid cross-platform media experiences 

With so many places for content to live, organisations must provide a seamless cross-platform experience for users. Different formats work better on different platforms, and not all users want the same formats. Technological advancements help with reformatting and distribution efforts, but it must not be done at the expense of the brand. 

“One thing we need to be really clear of is who we are: What do our brands stand for? What makes them stand out? What do people get when they see our brand there? What do they think of?”

Right now, she said, the industry is not there because it’s “a hard problem to solve.”

That’s something INMA will continue looking into.

We are in an era of “liquid content,” Hopperton emphasised, where audiences “watch audio, listen to text, and read video.” While the news media wants to provide stories in text form, they must change to offer users what they want in the way they want it. Although news companies talk about being mobile-first, they still do everything on desktop, she said.

“We’ve got to understand the different consumption habits around that. What do our audiences and our users want, both on our own platforms and other platforms?”

3. Foundational processes that support the business

The “boring nuts and bolts” of the business can’t be ignored, Hopperton said. While getting it right is rarely rewarded, “getting it wrong can be catastrophic.” 

“Let’s be honest, this is never going to be the exciting thing everyone wants to talk about,” she said. 

However, because of its importance, it continues to be an underlying principle within the Product & Tech Initiative.

Lessons on the mobile Web

As an increasing amount of traffic comes from mobile, Hopperton said publishers need to adopt new best practices and look at how to improve the mobile experience, placing an emphasis on navigation and speed. In addition to talking about being mobile-first, organisations need to walk the walk. 

“We know it’s essential to our business, yet we pretty much do everything on a desktop,” she pointed out. “We really need to change those habits. We need to make sure that when we are looking at new products and we are looking at mobile, we’re not looking at them as screens on a desktop.”

One way to start rethinking that approach is to look at how and when people use their devices and create an experience tailored to that. It’s also important to “simplify and declutter” screens for a mobile-first world: “More is not more … particularly when it comes to mobile. It needs to be visually appealing.”

Things like responsive visuals, images cropped to fit mobile, and shorter headlines are key. Also, ads should fit with the content. 

“AI is changing our products so much. So making sure that ads are additive, not distracting, they’re part of the content, and they look and feel good for users and for brands that are advertising with us — that’s important.”

4 themes for 2025

Looking forward to 2025, Hopperton identified the four themes that will be front and centre for the Product & Tech Initiative:

1. The new rules of product distribution. This will include identifying the key touchpoints and developing best practises for each. 

2. Building a future-proof tech stack, which will include benchmarking tools. 

3. Branding in an AI era to make products stand out in a sea of content. “When we don’t always control that end output, when it’s on other platforms, how do we make sure that our branding stays true to who we are?”

4. AI relationships that work. “How do we navigate the AI players? There are definitely some different things that people want, and we can help you navigate them,” she said, adding she is writing a report on this topic INMA will release in January.

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