By Lawal Ado
Baku (Azerbaijan) – Ms Megan Brown-law, the Editor of Australian Entertainment and Media Outlook, has listed innovation, diversification and use of technology as ways to sustain the future of news agencies.
She said this in a keynote address at the fifth News Agencies World Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Wednesday, stressing that
one needed to fish where the fish were.
Brown-law added that the ability to broadcast news could now be done by anybody, and that news agencies must follow the trend of what consumers like by moving away from text to visual imagery.
According to her, visual imagery rolls out 60,000 times faster than the text and therefore having visual news is critical to future news agencies’ operations because that is where the whole world is going.
The editor said news delivery to mobile devices was now a must because it could be found in everybody’s pocket.
She advised that when planning visuals, one should plan them for mobile devices, emphasising that quality news had become very important because of the effect of the social media.
She, however, identified social media as good for relief, stressing that news agencies’ core values of objectivity and accuracy must remain.
According to her, news agencies of the future need revenue from multiple sources and should diversify consumers, lamenting that newspapers’ revenue has declined while cost of production is always increasing.
She said corporate organisations had also become publishers, seeking brand-safe content to reignite trust in customers.
Brown-law said there was therefore the need now for multiple platform, multiple formats and messages which presently had more users.