How Silicon Valley is Transforming News Business
This event took place on Tuesday, 20 April 2021
– live and online from New York, Paris, London
Sign up to watch the video recording
What our participants say
Denis Teyssou
Medialab R&D Editorial manager, AFP
“NWE delivers a unique and insightful view on today’s news business by gathering leading media scholars, top innovators in journalism and highly experienced media executives. The result is really impressive and knowledgeable.”
Dmitry Shishkin
Independent Digital Consultant
“NWE session on lessons news publishers could learn from Silicon Valley was an insightful conversation with people who are clearly in the know, and a wonderful chance to get involved with the most experienced and brightest minds in our sector.”
Sebastien Hersant
Director of Digital Transformation, ESH Médias
“Very Interesting debate around social networks, confirming the need for news media to use these platforms mainly to redirect to their own websites; and to deploy a proactive policy of offline presence.”
New World Encounters 2021 brought to you some of the world’s news media innovation champions to discuss innovation, risk and experimentation and how news media can learn from the tech giants and start-ups in Silicon Valley.
Under the lead of moderators Prof. George Brock (London) and Ioana Sträter, Co-Founder New World Encounters, the discussion included Edward Roussel, Chief Innovation Officer, Wall Street Journal (New York), Pierre Louette, the President and Director General of the French media group Les Echos-Le Parisien (Paris), Frederic Filloux, Creator of Deepnews.ai & Editor at Monday Note (Paris) and others. We explored how the disruption in our industry is an opportunity to create the business models of the future and to achieve and maintain sustainability for media companies.
These topics were discussed
How to establish an innovation mindset
We all know the business model of the media world is changing dramatically, moving from a reliance on print advertising to an increasing focus on digital subscriptions. Many media companies understand the need to lead this transformation, but it requires constant innovation. It takes an “innovation mindset” to achieve and maintain sustainability, where publishers continuously explore what attractive new revenue streams can be incorporated into their diversification strategy.
What can we learn from Silicon Valley tech companies?
Silicon Valley companies have long been known for driving innovation and disruption. They are successful in changing their industries and the world. We will have a deeper look at what you can adopt from their strategies.
How to embrace adaptation
On the road to innovation, it is important to become a more fluid and adaptive company and explore new areas of opportunity as they occur. This means creating, assessing and analysing a new generation of products and services for customers. A culture of constant learning and experimentation is essential. And new products mean new people who have the right skills to work on them.
How to take risk
Innovation requires risk; without it you cannot innovate. You need to focus on the future and move away from the revenue sources that are not going to withstand the test of time.
What does it look like in practice?
You will have insights of best projects and best practices from our speakers and their teams.
The dialogue included these expert speakers
George Brock
George Brock is consultant, speaker and author. He consults in newsrooms and speaks where people debate journalism, disruption and misinformation.
He worked as a newspaper journalist in Yorkshire and at The Observer and, for many years, at The Times (of London) where he was Managing Editor, Foreign Editor and Saturday Editor.
Former Professor of Journalism, he ran the journalism school at City, University of London 2009-2014.
George is the author of “Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age“. In this book he talks about the fact that the digital technology is demanding transformative change. Journalism needs to be rethought on a global scale and remade to meet the demands of new conditions.
Edward Roussel
Edward Roussel is Chief Innovation Officer at Dow Jones, responsible for identifying areas of new opportunity, with a focus on startups and relations with Silicon Valley companies. Edward joined Dow Jones in June 2013 as head of digital product development, overseeing projects including the redesign of The Wall Street Journal’s website and apps. Edward recently reached a global agreement with Google and News Corp/Dow Jones.
Before joining Dow Jones, Edward worked at the Telegraph Media Group in London for seven years. As Executive Editor, Digital, he headed the Telegraph’s website and mobile products, playing a central role in reorganizing the newsroom to place digital journalism at its core.
Edward worked at Bloomberg from 1992 to 2004, playing a key part in the company’s rapid editorial expansion. He oversaw global financial coverage, leading a team of more than 130 journalists. In earlier roles at Bloomberg, Edward was bureau chief in Brussels, Paris and London.
Frédéric Filloux
Frédéric Filloux is a French journalist and an entrepreneur. He is the creator of Deepnews.ai, a project aimed at surfacing quality journalism from the web by using machine learning algorithm, a project that he started as a Knight Fellow at Stanford.
He is also the editor of the Monday Note, a newsletter/blog that covers digital business models and technology since 2007. The Monday Note reaches between 30,000 and 60,000 media professionals each week and the newsletter has 13,000 subscribers.
Since 2018, he is an associate professor at Sciences-Po Journalism school. During the academic year 2016-2017, Frédéric was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, along with seventeen other media professionals selected for the program.
Frédéric is a board member of Reporters sans Frontières (Reporters without Borders).
Pierre Louette
Pierre Louette is the President and Director General of the French media group Les Echos-Le Parisien and one of France’s leading experts on new communication networks. He is also President of the publishers’ group, Alliance de la presse d’information générale (APIG).
Pierre is well-placed to address the issues of innovation, risk taking and experimentation in this virtual discussion, to be held on 20 April next. Before becoming head of Les Echos-Le Parisien in March 2018, he was Deputy CEO of the telecommunications giant Orange, which he joined in 2010. He has served as audiovisual advisor to the French government, and is author of the report, “The Information Superhighways.”
Across his long career, Pierre has been both in conflict and cooperation with “GAFA”, the technology monoliths Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. In his new book, “Giants and Men” (Des Géants et des Hommes), he acknowledges the companies have created remarkable things and have changed the way we live, but believes their dominance now calls for increased regulation.
“When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight.”
“CEO of CEOs”, 1935-2020
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