The quest for a wider audience and cost effectiveness will drive decentralization and innovative delivery platforms for future media, Svetlana Mironyuk, chief editor of the RIA Novosti state news agency, said on Monday.
‘The time of the big newsrooms is coming to an end,” she said at the conference of the Global Editor Network in Syangan, Hong Kong. The Network is a professional organization uniting top media managers from all over the world.
In the pursuit of lower infrastructure maintenance costs, media organizations will eventually transform themselves into networks of hubs and stringers and will increasingly outsource news production to the general public, while fact-checking and marketing the content with the help of different platforms, Mironyuk said.
She offered as an example RIA Novosti’s YouReporter.Ru news portal, whose content is generated by non-professional contributors, and a RAPINFO project, aimed at the teenage audience. RAPINFO’s presentation, in which news is delivered online by rappers, stirred particular interest among conference participants.
Going after the audience requires perpetual editorial changes, Mironyuk said, pointing out the regular professional training for reporters and editors that the agency conducts and its rapid expansion into social networks. She also mentioned introduction of semantic online tools that make it possible to better target news consumers and development of multiple and more advanced multimedia platforms in order to increase penetration of the audience.
These changes, which RIA Novosti has consistently implemented, have resulted in 16-fold growth of the agency’s audience over the past five years, Mironyuk said.