People will pay for quality online news, says iHNed boss Lucie Tvarůžková
How are Czech newspapers dealing with the shift to an online world? Is their present, mainly free model sustainable? And what will the media landscape look like in a decade? One person well placed to discuss these and similar questions is Lucie Tvarůžková. She is the boss of iHNed, the news website of the leading Czech financial daily Hospodářské noviny, whose data journalism team recently won a prestigious award.
“It’s been a great advantage. Because I could see the way that people think and work in different parts of the newspaper and different parts of the brand.
“I could see how it’s better to explain to people from the newspaper that we need them to work also for online. And I could explain to the online people how to put a story in the newspaper.
“So I think I have a very broad perspective and I think it’s been an advantage. I’m not only a paper girl or an online girl – I’m a journalist, [overall] newspaper girl.”
How does it work in terms of workflow? For instance, I sometimes read stories on the Guardian’s website on a Saturday that are dated Sunday’s Observer. Do the stories that appear on iHNed have to first be in the paper version?
“No, actually quite the opposite. We now have a rule that anything that appears in the newspaper, in the paper edition, stays in the newspaper. Because we want readers who pay for the newspaper to have their exclusivity.
“More and more we’re trying to divide the content, so you read different content online and different content in the paper.
“The only exception is when we have some really, really big scoop. Then we share it in both channels. But we try to maintain this division – it’s still worth reading the newspaper and it’s still worth checking the website, because they are different stories.”
In general, how do you think Czech newspapers have reacted to the changes in the world and everything being more online. Frankly, I often pick up a Czech newspaper and see a story that for me feels like a day or a day and a half old?
“To make a change in the newsroom, to make a change in journalists’ work is very hard. So far we haven’t been very successful, so people keep doing the things they did 10 years, 20 years ago without realising that their readers have changed a lot, that they way they consume news has changed a lot. I think we’ve overslept a bit.”
Do newspapers need to become a little bit more like magazines?
“Yes. There is a big discussion about it, but this is something that I strongly believe – that the future of the newspaper is to become more like a magazine, to become more visual, to have deep, contextualised stories, infographics.
“If you look around Europe, there are still some newspapers whose readers and subscribers are increasing, including among young people. These are exactly the newspapers that are moving to the magazine style of writing and presenting information.”
iHNed was, I believe, the first Czech news site to create a dedicated data journalism team. Data journalism is a big buzz term. For our listeners who don’t know it, what is data journalism?
“Data journalism is still old, good journalism, where you are looking for the story. But the sources where you are looking for stories are quite different. You look at big data, a mass of data which you computer process. And you are looking for trends and stories in them.
“For example, now we have collected the data on all the people who are missing in the country. It’s like 7,500 people. And we’re looking for trends within this large number of stories. What is the average age? What is the average time of these people being missing? So, it’s work with a big amount of information.”
“Even though I think we still underestimate the power and influence of social networks, it’s been huge and we’ve been able to see it.
“So far we’ve had a conservative view about the website, and we always thought that the home page was the most important page – the same as applies with a newspaper. We have a tendency to put the most important stories on the home page and we expect them to have a higher amount of readers.
“But suddenly we could see a different trend. There are stories that are hidden deep within the website, but the next day we could see that they had the most readers.
“This is what social media causes. You could have a story hidden, but if somebody puts the link on social media that could make a bestseller out of it. That makes a very big difference for the way we think about our job.”
Also you need to make these kinds of things attractive, to instantly get the attention of people.
“Yes. Suddenly you have to start thinking about your work completely differently. But you also need to hold your horses. Because what works on social media is not always good for a journalist to focus on. Lots of times it’s a small thing that is not important, that don’t have any information value.
“Many times you knew instantly that something would be a hit on social media. But then you have to ask the question, is it really something that has journalistic value? Is it something that iHNed or Hospodářské noviny should write about? So it’s a very challenging job.”
The archives of Hospodářské noviny, or of iHNed, are now behind a paywall. Does anybody pay to see them?
“This is something we did because we didn’t want the content to lose its value for the readers who paid for it. They could have felt, this is not fair, I paid for it but now it’s free all over the web, so next time I’m not going to subscribe to Hospodářské noviny; I will wait and read it online.
“But this is not the way for paid content. I think we will need to develop new paid content, but we are not there yet.”
As far as I know, no Czech media outlet is behind a paywall. Is the [free] model that all the papers use now unsustainable?
“It definitely is unsustainable. There is one big difficulty in this country, I think, something that everybody is worried about, and this is Seznam.
“Because this is an anomaly all over the world – that some internet search engine also has such a big position as a news provider, with Novinky.cz. They’ve made it clear so many times that they will never go behind a paywall.
“And I think everybody knows, or maybe no one will admit it honestly, that we are still not able to produce content that is so good that it will make people pay for it on a massive scale if there is still an alternative that is for free.
“But I think it is definitely the way for Hospodářské noviny, and it is something that we are now working quite hard on.”
Today, everybody is used to getting everything more or less for free on the internet. But at the same time the media is moving more and more online. How do you think the media will look in general in maybe five or 10 years time?
“I think and I strongly believe that there will still be paper newspapers. But I think who reads them and how much money they pay for them will change.
“I think the paper newspaper will be more expensive and have fewer readers. They will be, as somebody once told me, something like haute couture. So the haute couture of journalism will be the paper newspaper.
“And I think we will see – and I’m very optimistic about this – people willing to pay more for online content as well. There will still be people who are willing to pay for quality.
“If you offer it, I think they will pay, no matter whether they live in the Czech Republic or anywhere else in the world.”
Finally, I believe you and your organisation – not only Hospodářské noviny but the whole Economia group – are moving soon. Tell us about the big move.
“We are moving not only physically – we are trying to move mentally as well. Physically we are moving to a new newsroom which was built out of a former factory. It’s one big open space where there will be 350 journalists sitting all together.
“We are trying to use this move to change the way that we are working. We are introducing lots of new positions, we are introducing more technology stuff.
“We are changing the way that people sit next to each other. So it won’t be that all the people from Hospodářské noviny sit together, and all the people from other publications sit together.
“It will be that all the people who write about law sit together, all the people who understand energy sit together. So they can discuss and somehow compete together.
“We are trying to create a more open newsroom where it is easier to work in ad hoc teams consisting of journalists, of programmers, of graphic designers, of data journalists. We believe in teamwork and the fact that technology needs to be at the heart of everything we are doing in the future.”
