Big Trends at GEN 2013 News Summit in Paris (or, I have seen the future of media and it’s pretty radical)

Paris’s city hall where the Global Editors Network News Summit took place last week, from June 19 to June 21, 2013.

If there was a revolution being tweeted at the Global Editors Network 2013 News Summit that just wrapped up in Paris last week, it’s that content, once king, is no longer.

That was the gospel being preached by many different media actors from across the spectrum, from CUNY journalism professor and media guru, Jeff Jarvis, to Shafqat Islam, CEO of NewsCred, one of the most successful recent media start-ups, to Mark Little, co-founder of social media news agency, Storyful.

“We are not in the content business,” Jarvis expounded, “It is a trap. Content is a fine thing, but if that’s all we do, we are missing out.” To an audience of mostly journalists he declared that, “we are in the service business…it’s about building relationships.” Which for most journalists is a dramatic (and not entirely comfortable) paradigm shift, in which the consumers of news take precedence over the providers of news – those erstwhile journalists.

We are not in the content business. News is a service and relationship business – Jeff Jarvis #GEN13

— Kenza Merzoug (@kenzame) June 21, 2013

Jeff Jarvis likes to shock, but there seemed to be consensus among the players at the GEN summit around the heart of his argument: that content, today, is…easy. Technology has made content ultra-accessible, broadcastable and consumable, and if media aim solely to produce great content—as we all once did—then they’re missing the point. Consumers are drowning in content. What consumers want are better ways to access the content that interests them most. What makes the difference today is the curation, packaging and design surrounding the content. In 2013, content and container are officially on equal footing.

Replacing content as king is, thus, the consumer. This was another big theme at GEN 2013: that the key to success in the new media ecosystem is being able to find out and anticipate what consumers want, and many of the media technology start-ups present at the summit were focused on just that. “You need to know your audience and how to get to them,” explained Benoit Raphael (@benoitraphael), co-founder of the start-up Trendsboard, a tool to help editors to predict what will be trending next. “Media should behave like brands,” he said. This was an echo of a common refrain, heard often throughout the several days of the conference, that media companies need to be technology companies – and to behave like brands. For Dennis Mortensen (@DennisMortensen), the founder of Visual Revenue, another tool to help editors makes strategic choices about the content they put forward, the rationale for media companies to develop tech tools and behave like brands is simple: why not make editorial decisions that also, incidentally, make money? Why not “optimize” editorial?

Storyful’s Mark Little (@marklittlenews, a former foreign correspondent himself) drew a slightly sharper line between media and tech when it comes to the core purpose of journalism today. “It’s not about technology,” Little explained, “It’s about the change in human behavior that technology liberates.” Which still speaks to the same revolution driving so much of the change in media today: because technology has enabled new forms of news production (amateur content, crowd-sourcing, real-time updates) and news consumption (mobile, downloadable, aggregated), the expectations of consumers have changed. And news media—this seemed to be everyone’s over-arching message at #GEN13—had better learn to listen.

Listening to consumers is what brands do best, which is why so much of the media strategy discussed at the conference sounded like brand strategy. Building relationships, trust, loyalty. Giving consumers what they want and how they want it. This is what Jarvis means when he talks about news today as a “service business”.  It’s also the way today’s new hybrid tech media start-ups are thinking. As David Cohn (@digidave), the director of news at Cir.ca, a recently launched and much-hyped mobile-news-app that breaks down news into its essential quotes, facts and data, explained: Circa is not about summarizing the news, but about “atomizing” the news, so that people can consume the news particles as they wish.

Journalism 3.0 is here.