The International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin opened in April 2011 with Vivian Schiller, until shortly before that the president and chief executive of NPR, setting seven reasons for optimism against the bad news in that year’s State of the Media report.
Conditions had finally become right, she argued, to give paywalls a fair shake: scale still mattered but brand was back, iTunes had shown audiences can be trained to pay, and tablets were gaining ground. Local was still up for grabs — legacy media had the people and the brands to win local audiences, though she doubted they would make the investment. Twitter had become a newsgathering vehicle, and she pointed to Andy Carvin’s curated feed as an extraordinary complement to routine newsroom work.
Apps she called the “holy grail of engagement”: 80 per cent of NPR’s Android app users were already NPR listeners, and people who listened to audio consumed ten times as much content as those who only read. Even so, the web was not dead. Only 20 per cent of NPR.org users listened to NPR radio, which made the browser the best way to acquire news users. “Do not give up on the web.”
The last two reasons were structural. Legacy organisations were ready to disrupt themselves, launching new brands such as the Washington Post’s Trove and The Daily. And journalism school enrolment was soaring, bringing in a generation Schiller expected to reinvent the business model rather than her own. She closed by quoting Clay Shirky and calling for constant experimentation.