Torry Pedersen from Norway is the Head of Editorial, Schibsted Media. Schibsted Media Group is an international media group that owns the leading newspapers in Norway and Sweden. On his recent visit to Dhaka, Torry Pedersen spoke to Prothom Alo about the present state of media, that onslaught of fake news, the print-digital dilemma and more.
Prothom Alo: What is the state of media and journalism globally today?
Torry Pedersen: You can say there has been a rebirth in the understanding of the importance of media. What has made this happen is the election of Donald Trump. He has every day been saying ‘fake news’, fake news’, and ‘fake news’. And then you read New York Times and Washington Post which have scoop after scoop. People really understand good journalism. In big proportions of the population, there has been a deepened and more profound understanding of the role media plays in democracy. On the other hand, some say that the mainstream media is not reporting what they are experiencing, their worries and concerns. For instance, the immigration issue was quite big in the election of Trump. And though globalisation has been good at large for humankind, for some people in industrialised societies have been left behind because the production has been moved to Bangladesh or some other place. So some pockets of those societies feel left behind, not understood by the politicians. Even the mainstream media has not probably put enough emphasis on this. I will not lose my job as a journalist or editor because of immigrants coming from some place who can do better than me and more cheaply. But some other workers might be experiencing that. As for the big media in the Scandinavia and the US, we are living in a privileged bubble.
Prothom Alo: What are the main challenges faced by the news media globally at present, particularly the future of print media?
Torry Pedersen: The main challenge is to be able to uphold a sustainable business model. Print has had a very sustainable business model. You are either paid for it or you get ad revenue. It gives healthy finances for a sustainable newsroom. When you transfer that to digital, the competitive landscape grows extremely bigger. At the tip of your fingers, you can access information from all over the world. In the old world there was scarcity of information. Today there is an overload of information. We all feel a bit stressed with all the emails, the Facebook Messenger, the Whatsup, WeChat, it’s all around us all the time. But the fundamental challenge is the sustainability of the business model. Good journalism is costly.
As for the future of print media, it is very different from continent to continent. If you look at Scandinavia and the US, it is declining quite rapidly because they are very technologically advanced. Everyone coming into the market is digitally savvy. When it comes to print, I think there are big differences in different markets. I learnt, for example, in India print circulation was still growing up until a short time ago. So that was one of the things I wanted to find out when I came to Bangladesh, whether print circulation was still growing. More and more people in Bangladesh and India are becoming literate and improving their standard of living. So there is a market still. In the long run, digital will change the way we consume and disseminate the stories.
Prothom Alo: The revenue issue is a struggle for online media in Bangladesh. How have you all solved this problem?
Torry Pedersen: I will not say that we have solved this problem. The challenges we face and the challenges you face are astonishingly similar. The only difference is that you all are some years behind us. Your print circulation has probably been growing till very recently, whereas we peaked 15 years ago. So there is a decade’s difference. There are opportunities in Bangladesh because you are such a huge country and the economy is growing year by year. You will then be able to attract more users and be more attractive for the advertisers. The revenue is growing now, but from a low starting point. For a newspaper, every reader pays with hard cash. Online readers pay by being exposed to ads, they don’t pay money to read it. To be sustainable over time, you have to have both ad revenue and, in one way or the other, have the users to pay. To get started, you have to experiment and find out. All readers shouldn’t have to start to pay for all of your content as of tomorrow, but you should train them to pay for something in which they have a special interest.
Prothom Alo: The ads are going to non-journalistic platforms like Google, Twitter, Amazon, Facebook. How do we overcome this?
Torry Pedersen: Everyone is trying to solve that. We are in a transformational stage. But I do not think that we will be the last generation that understands the importance of journalism. It will be clear that journalism is paramount and fundamental for democracy. There might be some solutions, something regulatory from the law. There might be development in how people behave. Facebook may not be the biggest thing 10 years down the road from now. I am not even sure that it will be there. There have always been developments. For example, Sony sold the Walkman before the ipod and then these disappeared.
Technology had made things easier for the advertiser. When you are on Facebook, they have all the data. They know you are a man, they know your age, they know of your interests, they know who you are interacting with, where you go. According to psychological studies, it takes eight or nine likes in Facebook to understand you better than your colleagues in office. When you cross 150 likes, Facebook understands you better than your wife. Then when you pass 300, Facebook understands you better than yourself. This is a scientific approach. Privacy is virtually dead. But I think there will be a backlash. Over time, serious advertisers will like to be in an environment which is trustworthy. They would not want to be on YouTube in an environment where there is child porn or domestic violence. They want to be in an environment where there are trustworthy stories that people relate to in a good way. We in the serious media should really push that forward and try to harvest examples of how ads are placed in a very bad manner, in a lot of non-serious places and speak about how we are doing it in a serious environment with high journalistic quality. We have to of course be better at harvesting data about our own news subscribers, to profile them more correctly.
Prothom Alo: What are the different ways you bring in the revenue for the online news?
Torry Pedersen: The prime value position for our brands is of course journalism. For some of them, we are able to attract huge traffic. We have one outlet in Norway and one in Sweden. Then we have other outlets where the main value proposition is to attract subscribers. They may not have huge traffic, but they may have an inclination to pay for it and have a deep engagement with those who do it. To utilise that traffic position, we either start by ourselves services that are adjacent to this or we acquire startups that we see will fit into our portfolio. Then we build a system to give them a boost and take up market positions quick. One of the things that we have been doing is the weight club where we give advice about staying slim or losing weight because there are a lot of people eager to get advice on that. They pay for this. It’s a subscription-based service.
Prothom Alo: Did the journalists themselves have to make big adjustments in the emerging online scenario?
Torry Pedersen: It’s not rocket science. I am totally convinced that a good journalist will be able to tell stories in a good way even in the digital arena. I would say the best of journalism I read today, is the best I ever read. They are able to put things in front of me in an intriguing way digitally, on video, through animations. I can have deep dive or shallow overview. The best journalist is better than ever. A newspaper was a bundle of different stories. It was foreign news, it was politics, it was home affairs, it was sports, it was entertainment, it was culture, it was television, it was cooking, it was travel, and that sort of thing. Online is different. For example, I would never read the travel section of an ordinary newspaper, I would go to the experts on travel. It’s the same for cooking, because it is all available. There is a nichification. But there is place for general news organisations like Prothom Alo as well. You have to be even more conscious about what are your main strengths for the community and build even stronger on that. There may be things you are covering in print which you can stop online because someone else is doing it better. It is much better to concentrate on what is your prime position, what you really want to convey to society.
Prothom Alo: Now another challenge to mainstream news media is the social media, packed with all sorts of news and fake news. How do we tackle that?
Torry Pedersen: The US election had been a wakeup call to many people, with the fake news, a lot of trolling and trying to influence people from abroad. Probably not just one country but probably a lot of countries will try to do the same. It probably might even happen here when it comes to the election. But it was a wakeup call that we have been a bit naïve in our approach to the social media, because, given the model on which they are constructed, they are totally agnostic towards the quality of the material. There is fake news and there are the investigative stories. There has been debate lately about what to do about this. My guess is that this will come higher and higher on the political agenda because we cannot allow our democracies to be undermined by this system.
Prothom Alo: From whatever you have seen so far, what is your take on Bangladesh media?
Torry Pedersen: I am not in a position to evaluate the reporting. I am not in a position to evaluate freedom of expression because I am not living in this society. But there are astonishing commonalities to what I see wherever I go. You have the same aspirations. You want to do good for society. That is what drives journalists. You cannot change the whole society maybe, but you can make the world a bit better for someone. That aspiration I find here as well. There are some huge opportunities here as well because you are 160 million or more people. The level of education and income level is gradually growing. . There are opportunities waiting if there is a climate where there can be real reporting.
I am very privileged to come from a country which is on top of the democracy index in the world as rated by economists. Our press freedom is top of the world according to Reporters without Borders. The standard of living is tremendously high [in Norway] thanks to being an oil producing country. But when I go in the newsroom here [Norway], it feels like any other newsroom I’ve been to whether in Japan, USA, Argentina or Scandinavia. You want to do good through journalism. That is why you go to your job every day. You want to do good for society. You want to correct what is wrong. You want to reveal corruption.
Prothom Alo: Did you get any sense of pressure on the press here?
Torry Pedersen: Just from what I hear about deterioration in the ability to report freely in recent times and a sort of self censorship. In Europe we are definitely experiencing that in Turkey. There is a lot of self censorship in Turkish media when it comes to the media these days. Turkey is the country with the most arrested journalists. Big companies are under pressure not to advertise. It is the same thing that happens in Poland and Hungary where you have these more right wing political parties in power these days. They use this mechanism to put a lot of state-sponsored ads into publications that supports them and retract all ads from those that are free or critical. I do not have firsthand experience here, but I have heard about things in this regard. And now there is the next election coming up, so let’s see. You know better than me.
Prothom Alo: Robotics is another factor emerging in the media. That seems extremely futuristic to us.
Torry Pedersen: Robotics is more successful where there is more fixed data. A robot can use a database, analyse and write an article very quickly. But robotics hasn’t been able to challenge the fantasy or the ability to write as a good journalist can. I don’t think it ever will be. A lot of routine work in the newsroom can be handled by robotics, so we can move our resources to the really important tasks where we can utilise our strengths.
Prothom Alo: Is there any sustainable business model for the media?
Torry Pedersen: With print obsolete, there is no waterproof sustainable business model which is clearly established, but there are different ways of doing it. There is BuzzFeed for example. Their business model is to expose their material on a business platform as much as possible so you can get as much traffic as possible and utilise that to take care of the advertisements. The New York Times business model is very clear. It is subscriber first. For Prothom Alo, digitally today, the business model is very clear - ad revenue. But that will not be sustainable. You have to start experimenting with user payment as well. Or you have to experiment and develop services that people will utilise and which can give you revenue.
Prothom Alo: Any message for the Bangladesh media in general?
Torry Pedersen: What I have learnt in these two days is that you are very well aware of the challenges. The only ones that can solve the challenges are you yourselves. No one can come and solve the challenges for you. It is the competence, the fantasy and the innovational spirit that will solve it. You have to grow as a team. The team spirit will give you a prosperous future.
Prothom Alo: Thank you
Torry Pedersen: Thank you