By trial and error: how the media are mastering the new digital reality

On what factors influence in the era of the Internet to the print media says assistant professor of marketing REU them. G.V. Plekhanov Inga Koryagina.

First, according to the expert, these are the platforms from which the bulk of the traffic comes, since the owners of access to the network audience - Google, Facebook, Yandex, VKontakte and other giants - seriously influence the publications themselves. For example, Facebook recently changed the ranking of its users' news feed, prioritizing not the media, but the posts of friends. And immediately the publications started having problems with reaching the audience. Therefore, by the way, the trust of the media business in Internet platforms has also been seriously shaken. In addition, messengers and platforms themselves develop their media projects, and very actively, thus becoming a media.

For example, Apple has launched a service - Apple News +, in which, with a single subscription, you can read magazines, newspapers and online publications for just $ 10 a month. Moreover, advertisers will no longer be able to receive information about users, and therefore, publishers have lost the ability to artificially influence the choice of their readers.

Already Google, followed by Facebook, offered the media to pay for their content. And Yandex, in the course of an experiment with Zen (Dzen - editor's note), is already sharing advertising revenues with content authors. Mail.ru and Rambler became the largest online media holdings in the country, while Telegram overtook the once popular LiveJournal to become the largest media channel.

But PR specialists, together with such a strengthening of platforms, can work with their audience directly, but the logic of working with editorial offices of the media, which have become more and more dependent on platforms, needs to be changed by PR specialists.

Journalists today are increasingly focused on producing

content that grabs the attention of users, getting as many views as possible, and the media has to analyze the responses of their audience to understand what content is in the greatest demand, because the media needs traffic. That is why many online media began to open special sections in which readers themselves can create content on blogs, thereby bringing additional traffic to the publication, and an additional opportunity for free promotion in the media - PR specialists.

While the style of journalism will remain the same, editorial offices need to become more flexible, change business models and completely go digital.

It is also interesting that in Russia the desktop is already inferior to mobile Internet media consumption by 52% versus 69%. Digital serials and online media (for example, Curios and 1968.Digital) created deliberately for mobile are no longer uncommon, and their number is growing, forcing the media to reorient specifically to mobile consumption.

Messengers have already become the most popular applications in smartphones, so a breakthrough in media consumption and in them is not far off, and therefore the media will lose the ability to influence the ranking of their content. In the near future, messengers will learn how to personalize and target content in the same way as social networks do, becoming extremely popular advertising channels.

So, according to the expert, the media no longer set the direction of media consumption, platforms and technologies have taken their place, and this situation will only get worse. In the meantime, the media are getting used to the new reality, developing new criteria for their work by trial and error...