Wednesday 21st June: Media industry resilience in the face of disruption

Good morning! Today's newsletter is brought to you by Peter.

When it comes to engaging Gen Z and young millennial audiences, there is a disconnect between publishers’ tactics and audience preferences— leading to missed opportunities for publishers. That’s the big finding of Digiday's new State of the Industry report, produced in collaboration with Arc XP. Based on surveys of 116 publishers and 114 Gen Z and young millennial consumers, the report maps the current state of publishers’ engagement tactics against the preferences of younger media audiences. Download your copy of the report to learn more.

FIPP Congress 2023: Media industry resilience in the face of disruption

I headed back to the Portuguese Riviera earlier this month to attend The FIPP World Media conference. The general feeling was that, despite this being the time of the permacrisis, resilience would bring reward if media operators faced up to the industry’s many challenges.

Yulia Boyle, FIPP Chair and Head of International Media at National Geographic, set the scene, opening by introducing a special delegation to the Congress from Ukraine. CEO of Burda Ukraine, Andrii Vdovychenko later described the daily fight for Ukrainian media to keep delivering, while Anastasiya Ravva of Ukraine’s Espresso TV told me of a colleague that had made the ultimate sacrifice after volunteering to join the Ukrainian armed forces.

AI, of course, dominated much of the conversation on and off the conference stage, but the advice from media consultant Juan Senor was to, “Understand it, don't fight it”. Tough economic times were addressed by Agustino Fontevecchia of Editorial Perfil, explaining how he copes with 150% inflation in Argentina. And despite all the AI chat, Flashes & Flames’ Colin Morrison told me community was his big takeaway from the event.

Germany’s Bild tabloid, the biggest-selling newspaper in Europe, plans to replace a range of editorial jobs with artificial intelligence as part of a €100 million cost-cutting programme. Staff were told in an email that the company would, “unfortunately be parting ways with colleagues who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by AI and/or automated processes.” Sigh!

In, hopefully, better news, two of the UK’s leading newsrooms plan to address the dominance on graduates in the industry. Journalism.co.uk is right in saying news organisations must think about alternative talent pipelines if they want to ‘better engage’ with their audiences. Hiring almost exclusively from the university graduate pool limits newsroom representation.

Semafor’s Ben Smith, reporting from Cannes, says the organizers of the ad industry’s top awards have ‘quietly’ instructed their juries to steer clear of politics and advocacy in favor of awarding more commercially-minded campaigns. Ben thinks the push to extract corporations from politics is part of a global trend away from the social-media driven progressive movements that dominated the 2010s. Stay tuned to see how that goes down with Gen Z.

More from Media Voices