Journalism, media and technology predictions 2013 final high quality

JOURNALISM MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY PREDICTIONS 2013 1

Nic Newman Digital Consultant: (nic.newman@gmail.com Mob: 07802 210886)

Executive summary

Mobile, social and visual remain the three key disrupters for media in general and journalism in
particular – along with the growing importance of real time media as a cross cutting trend.

To note in particular:

 The coming year will mark the BIG switch to mobile computing. It will overtake desktop use
for news – in turn driving more mobile first media
 Improving video capabilityand data graphics will be a major theme for news organisations
aiming to engage audiences using better screens and faster connections
 Live pages, live streams and live workflows become a key focus in newsrooms – with new
formats emerging for bite-sized news
 Thephablet is coming –a mix between a smartphone and tablet. Mid sized screens and
affordability will hit the sweet spot for many consumers
 We’ll see a further deepening of the social revolution across all platforms – accompanied by
a growing debate about the implications – privacy, controland all the new skills required to
manage it (we said this last year but it is worth repeating)
 In technology expectbig advances in gesture control (LeapMotion), indoor location, 3D
Printers - and the beginnings of wearable computing
 More disruption in banking &finance, retailing and higher education as the Internet
revolution begins to bite
 Start ups and small companies to watch include … NowThisNews, Circa, Tout

What did we learn in 2012: Surprises, triumphs and disasters

This was the year when ‘digital first’ went beyond a slogan and become a reality - from the White
House to the Vatican and beyond.

In a remarkable development, President Obama chose to make his acceptance speech on Twitter not
via traditional media. And this was no accident. His team have worked out how to reverse the flow
of news by building direct media channels and communities – and
allowing the network to do the rest. The ‘four more years’ message
complete with its carefully selected picture became the most re-
tweeted in history and the most liked post on Facebook - whilst
also being picked up by newspapers and magazines around the
world.

Even the Pope(@Pontifex)bowed to the inevitable. At time of
writing, Benedict XVIhas built up 2 million followers in 8 languages
and has posted around20 tweets. He showed a fine grasp of
crowdsourcing in his first week – another key digital trend.

1

2 JOURNALISM MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY PREDICTIONS 2013 NIC NEWMAN

It has been another extraordinary year for Twitter riding the wave of real time interest. There are
now over 10 million active users in the UK including new recruits David Cameron, Hugh Grant and
Gary Lineker.

Twitter played a big role in the 2012 Olympics too, bringing athletes and ordinary people together to
share in the experience, but the overwhelming story was how ‘normal’ and integrated digital felt.
The BBCs multiplatform coverage – with its promise to deliver coverage of ‘every sport from every
venue’ - went down a storm with audiences and critics alike. Switching between 24 live stream
audiences consumed more video than ever before – 106m video requests with peak traffic on 1st
August when Bradley Wiggins won gold.

But perhaps the biggest surprise was the extent to which audiences– in their desire not to miss a
moment of the action - embraced mobile coverage. LOCOG said that 60% of the visits to their
website came from mobile phones1; the BBC reported between 30% and 50% depending on the time
of day. Even the 3G networks held up - with rock solid streaming to mobile in the Olympic park itself.

Against that background, it is not surprising that we’ve seen a rush towards responsive design-
websites that adapt seamlessly to any device. This was another of our predictions last year butwe
didn’t necessarily expect the UK government to be amongst the first. The Guardian, the BBC are
some of the publishers to have adopted these techniques with these single HTML5 outputs also
providing the basis for apps such as the BBC’s Sport Olympics and the new BBC Sport product.

This was also the year when a number of newspapers stopped acting like newspapers. The Wall
Street Journal and othersran network style TV coverage on election night and the New York Times’
brilliant Snowfall documentary broke new ground for long-form multimedia journalism.

1
http://paidcontent.org/2012/08/14/official-olympics-numbers-online-engagement-was-mostly-mobile/

2


All this multimedia excitement was driven by the widespread adoption of HTML5, cheaper faster
broadband and by the explosive growth of tablets. A year ago we spoke about a doubling of market
share to around one in four households (pretty much spot on2). Given that even the cheapest tablets
a year ago cost well over £200 in the UK we felt it was bold to predict the first £99 tabletbut, sure
enough,it’s here with a further £10 discount for the January sales. The Kindle Fire arrived in the UK
with Jeff Bezos admitting the devices are soldpretty much at cost–Trojan horses for media content,
which is where Amazon’s money will be made.

But none of this tablet fever seems to be helping the news industry. The Daily – Rupert Murdoch’s
bold experiment in new form journalism - collapsed and with it came a growing realisation that there
can be no return to the simple newsstand models of the past.Even so, we suggested that green
shoots for newspapers would begin to emerge in 2012 and remarkably some corners are being
turned with digital advertising up and online subscription beginning to work for some. In the year of
the paywall,hundreds of papers in the US committed, for better or worse, to making readers pay for
the news online, after years of giving their content way for free on the web (see section on business
of journalism below).

2012 was another big year for new publishing models and the disruptive power of social discovery.

Fifty Shades of Grey started life as a self-published eBook and was popularised by blogs and
word of mouth recommendation. It went on to be the biggest paperback seller of all time,
gave the Kindles a reason for being and reversed the book-publishing model3.

Kony 2012, a self-published campaigning film by the charity Invisible Children, racked up
more than 100m views on YouTube and Vimeo and became the world’s most viral video4.
With no marketing budget, the film engaged young people around the world to take direct
action and even led to a debate and resolution in the US Senate.

2
Oliver & Ohlbaum Consumer Survey Survey shows Tablets at around 25% in the UK and US
3
Says Paul Dale (ITV) - On-demand printing and e-book engines like Amazon’s means that anyone now can turn a simple
word document into a saleable literary product- affordably and quickly

4
http://entertainment.time.com/2012/12/04/top-10-arts-lists/slide/kony-2012/

3


Both these examplesshow both how the old gatekeepers have lost their monopoly on tastemaking –
and the potent combination that can result from original content + the new distribution networks of
the digital age.

On the up …

Nate Silver – The high priest of ‘big data’ predicted the correct results
for every state in the US election by aggregating everyone else’s polls
and bringing a deep understanding of statistics into the newsroom.
Oftenportrayedtoday as a green fingered witch (right)

Raspberry Pi – One of the success stories of the year, this affordable (£30) credit card sized
computer board was designed to inspire a new generation to code. The
teamhoped they’d sell a few thousand but will end up shifting over a million
by their first anniversary in February. For 2013 there’s a new Pi store to share
programmes/games and a new focus on getting this to work in schools.

ITV’s news website – delivered an innovative approach based on live and social. It put ITV
News on the digital map both with the critics but also in audience terms peaking at 3.4m
uniques during the Olympics.

Buzzfeed – Emerged as the ‘defining media outlet of 2012’5 with its innovative coverage of
the US election. It is laser-focussed on building a media company from the ground up for a
social and mobile world- incorporating short form, long form and curated journalism.

Google has had another quiet year of spectacular success. Chrome became the world’s most
popular web browser in 2012 overtaking Internet Explorer. Android smartphones are
outselling Apple globally by 2:1

Oh dear …

BBC: The warm glow of the Olympics didn’t take long to dissipate
amidst ‘Chaos, confusion and a lack of leadership from senior
executives’.6 George Entwistle was forced out in 54 days over his
handling of the Jimmy Savile revelations as the BBC went through
4 DGs in a year (including one temporary one and one who has
yet to start).

The crisis is hardly the ‘worst in 50 years’7 but has dented public
trust at the same time as sapping the confidence of staff. The BBC is set for another year of

5
http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/politics/106490/buzzfeed-influence-campaign-reporting#
6
The words of Nick Pollard in his review of the Newsnight editorial processes and fallout
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/pollard_review/pollard_review.pdf:
7
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/jimmy-savile/9625257/Jimmy-Savile-worst-crisis-in-50-years-at-BBC-
says-John-Simpson.html

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internal soul searching – not ideal conditions for digital innovation and leadership. That’s
bad news for the rest of the UK media industry too

Facebook: We did predict a Facebook backlash last year but nothing on this scale. The
botchedFacebook IPO, rows over privacy and another over terms and conditions within
Instagram have made it a tough 2013 for Mark Zuckerberg despite breaking through 1 billion
users. All this has put a spring in the step back into Google who’ve come to recognise that
maybe missing the social media boat wasn’t so bad after all.

The Apple maps fiasco did more to hurt the company's image than anything else in 2013.
Apple's key selling point is that its software and hardware just work – every time. Yet this
mapping application felt like an early stage beta; Australian police warned against using it in
case you got lost in the Outback. When Google finally released its new maps application for
iOS6, its elegance, accuracy and speed blew Apple out of the park with 10m downloads in 48
hours.

Consumers voting with their feet - against Apple – on an issue of product quality proved a
huge blow to company pride and to the share price. Despite the strong success of the iPad
mini and the eventual arrival of the iPhone 5 with its bigger screen (as we predicted),
nothing really moved the dial In terms of product innovation. Apple increasingly looks like a
normal company in post Jobs era and the pressure is on Tim Cook, Sir Jonathan Ive and the
rest of his reshaped team8 to deliver something inspirational in 2013.

Indeed, as CES opens in Las Vegas with ever-bigger screen TVs and revamped Internet fridges, we
are left wondering if “everything that can be invented has been invented”9. Are we set for decades
of optimisation and refinement or are there some staggering new leaps still to come?

Perhaps it is just that the innovators have become the incumbents and we’re in a creative lull. In the
developed world, we seem to be settling for a monopoly (or duopoly) of supply, with everyone else
over the hill and on the slide. You buy an iThing if you're rich, and an Android if you're not. You use
only Facebook to keep in touch with your friends and share stuff. You use only Twitter for real-time
gossip creation and consumption. You use only Microsoft if you have to work. You use Google for
everything else. 10

In that respect, thank heavens for the innovators of 2012. This time last year we said watch
Pinterest,Summly and Waze – all largely unknown start ups at the time but today making headlines
with successful user friendly products that fill a real audience need with style and elegance.

There was much that we got right - more that we didn’t. A more detailed list of last year’s
predictions is in the appendix of this report.

8
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/10/29Apple-Announces-Changes-to-Increase-Collaboration-Across-Hardware-
Software-Services.html
9 th
Famous misquote attributed to a US patent commissioner of the 19 Century
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell (thanks to Paul Dale)
10
Observations on homogenisation of supply from the BBC’s Richard Cooper

5


Smartphones, apps and the rise of the mobile web

It won’t happen all in one year but the conditions are now right for the ‘BIG switch’ to mobile
computing. Fast reliable networks, mainstream smartphones adoption (50%+) and more and more
great content and services that are actually designed for the device.

The UK is already the biggest user of mobile data in the world – according to Ofcom11, despite having
slower and patchiernetwork coverage than Angola and Uzbekistan. But that could be about
improve.More 4G services launch in the UK in the spring with download speeds five to seven times
faster than existing 3G networks (Ofcom) – pretty similar to current home broadband speeds12.

Just as importantly, the tethering of 4G devices to laptops and tablets will further stimulate Internet
services and usage out of the office. The biggest driver of mobile usage remains social networking
sites (40% of traffic) along with mobile shopping. Timely content such as News and Sport is the other
big driver (around 30% use on a smartphone compared with 16% for general web traffic)13.

Globally, the change is happening even faster as many developing countries have moved straight to
mobile. In some countries, more than half of all web traffic already comes from mobile devices
(Zimbabwe 58%, Nigeria 57%) and India will reach the tipping point this year.14

In terms of platforms, Apple continues to dominate in the US with 50% of the smartphone market
but in Europe it is a very different story. Here, Android phones account for 61% with Samsung taking
44% on its own. Blackberry RIM lost 10% market share this year in the UKand will continue to scrap
for third place with Nokia/Windows.

Apple’s app economy remains a big advantage in both the smartphone and tablet space but
improvements in Web technologies (browsers, HTML 5, CSS3, APIs etc.) will eventually drive more
publishers towards cross platform open Internetapproaches – and these favour Google. As it gets
harder to distinguish between an app and a website, an important new differentiator will be data
integration – but as we’ve seen with maps this is not Apple’s forte.

Given the growth of the mobile market, it is still extraordinary that at the end of 2012 so many
publisher websites are still not optimised for smartphones. Getting content to display beautifully for
Apple and especially Android devices should be a key priority in 2013 along with rethinking
commercial and content models for the mobile world.

Specific predictions

Major news and sport websites report 50%+ of traffic coming from mobiles and tablets by
the end of the year

11
Mobile web browsing, video streaming and social networking in the UK now outstrips Japan. The average UK mobile
connection used 424 megabytes of data per month, whether for social networking, streaming videos, web browsing or
downloading music.http://www.itpro.co.uk/644680/ofcom-uk-tops-world-mobile-data-usage-chart
12
Downloading a CD album that can take 20 minutes on an average 3G connection will take 3 minutes via 4G
13
The BBC and Guardian reported an average of more than 30% of traffic coming from mobile sources in 2012. Ofcom say
16% of all webtraffic comes this way.
14
Figures from http://gs.statcounter.com/

6


Amazon enters the smartphone market. Android moves to 70% market share in Europe but
Apple continues to drive most of the revenues. Blackberry bombs (in EU/US) despite
excellent reviews for new operating system (BB10) and range of phones.

We’ll still be asking the question – apps or mobile web in a year’s time? It’s both for a while
longer.

Average UK data usage will rise to 750MB (+60% ) per user driven by new services and better
connections. Leading to bill shock as consumers push through current allowances.

Tablets get smaller and EVEN cheaper. Beginning of the end for e-readers

While the Kindle, the Kobo and the Nook were among this year’s most popular Christmas gifts,
monochrome devices are already being outsold by the next generation of small tablets. The iPad
Mini and Nexus7 are leading the way: "Tablets will become so cheap, the screens will get better,
battery life will improve significantly and then e-readers will only be kept alive for sentimental
reasons", says Forrester’s James McQuivey. He believes Amazon may eventually have to give the
Kindle away for free to encourage customers to keep buying content.

They’ll need to do something because the latest whitepaper version of the Kindle is now more
expensive than the fully featured, all colour Kindle Fire HD tablet(from £129).The Nexus7 is now just
£179 with similar spec machines coming onto the market for around £120 in the spring. The chart
below shows a further explosive growth in tablets predicted to reach 45% of UK Internet users by
November 2013 overtaking e-readers for the first time.

However, we shouldn’t think these devices are the only game in town. Businesses in particular are
still looking for one deviceto keep down costs. Smartphone and
tabletshaven’t helped in that respect so hybrid devices that can be
touchscreen and keyboard entry and easily dock at home or in the office
(mostly Microsoft powered) will gain ground.

7


Most tablets still don’t integrate with VPNs and so still don’t work with content inside the firewall.
Apple will fix that problem and develop more solutions for business customers this year. Overall
we’ll see more blurring of the laptop and mobile devices in terms of OS/UI and app stores. Windows
8 is just the start.


E-reader sales are badly affected by the growth of the 7” tablet market, which has a bumper
year. Nexus proves the big competitor for the iPad mini in Europe not the Kindle Fire.
The term Phablet will enter dictionaries this year – describing the oversized
smartphone/undersized tablet.
Newspapers will start bundling distribution with content - 'free' tablets with annual
subscription for about the price of an old print sub15.
Google Chrome laptops become quiet hit of the year

Social media and the role of identity

At some level we have always known that social networks are not free. With every tweet and like,
with every addition to our profile, every photo and every connection, we are providing ‘a little bit of
ourselves’ that can be sold to advertisers. We are the product, but we do it because, on the whole,
the benefits for us outweigh both the intrusions and the risks to our privacy. This was the year when
people started to question that balance.

Social networks have been testing what consumers will put up with. Sponsored Tweets and
Facebook posts now appear in timelines, Terms and Conditions have changed at a moments notice
giving networks more control over your photos or personal data – as with recent Instagram row.16
The boundaries are moving relentlessly but incrementally and we can expect more of the same in
2013 not least because Facebook at least now has to answer to shareholder expecting real world
economic returns. Just as news organisations have done, expect social networks to increasingly
focus on business models and revenue streams beyond advertising.

With the IPO out of the way, Facebook in particular will be looking to experiment with shopping
services and distributing entertainment, building on the partnership with Apple's iTunes for
Facebook gifts. But they’ll also be trying to make social ads work across the web.

Allied to this, we’re seeing a growing push towards real names, real identities and real locations -
backed up by more visibility of those profiles online. Google’s core strategy now (see how Google +
profiles are integrated right across their services) is to build up more personal information to
support more relevant results – but also around which they can sell more context specific services.
All they need to do is get you to register once, connect to friends - job done.

And let’s not forget LinkedIn, which has already built a profitable line in selling our personal
information to headhunters and advertisers (revenue up 73% in 2012). The addition of
15
Prediction from Stephen Pinches at the FT (though we did also suggest this in our 2010 document – a bit too soon)
16
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2249952/Facebook-sell-photos-Social-media-giant-claims-owns-rights-
ALL-Instagram-pictures.html

8


‘endorsements’ and other sticky features in particular have increased homepage traffic by 60% -
making the network even more valuable and relevant to news companies too.

Against this background, anonymity is increasingly hard to find. Expect social networks to be the
target of campaigns to simplify T&Cs, be more transparent about changes to service and have more
fine-grained control over settings.

The desire for control - or not see irrelevant content - is also behind the relative failure of
experiments in ‘frictionless sharing of news’ that were all the rage this time last year. Initial spikes in
activity around social newsreading apps from the Washington Post and the Guardian tailed off when
Facebook was forced to turn the volume down (down by 95% and 75% of their former levels
respectively17). Facebook users were getting fed up with ‘thoughtless’ sharing that produced content
that often had little relevance their own interests.

For 2013 sites like the Guardian are abandoning their Facebook app and refocusing on providing
social hooks on their own site where users explicitly choose to share content. Product Manager
Anthony Sullivan says “In the future, users on our site may be able to agree or disagree with
comment pieces, take part in polls or express their view on the likelihood of a football rumour
coming true.“ Expect too pushing out of new formats within social networks (not just links and
embedded video) to make the most of Twittercards and the like. We also expect to see better social
integration with journalist workflows and content management systems.


Facebook and Twitter offer ‘paid for services’ to consumers (e.g. paying Facebook for hi-res
photos and fewer ads, added location based services)

Expect a bigger focus on social networks making money from warehousing and reselling data
to companies and businesses looking to mine social media. This will be accompanied by
increasing restrictions on the free API limits

More rows about Terms and Conditions, privacy and more calls for new legislation to protect
citizens especially in Europe (e.g. Right to Forget legislation)

Twitter heads for IPO in late 2013 making its founders and employees rich. Realistic pricing
means share price goes UP after launch.

Take off for fun photo and video sharing services like Tout and also SnapChat and Poke
(where messages self-destruct on viewing) especially with the young.

17
In April, The Washington Post’s Social Reader had 12m monthly active users now it has 600,000 according to
Poynter acticle quoting AppData (decline of 95%). The Guardian had nearly 6 million monthly active users of its
Facebook app in April. Now it has around 2.5m – a decline of about 75%.http://www.poynter.org/latest-
news/media-lab/social-media/199113/frictionless-sharing-is-an-instructive-failure-of-2012/

9


TV disruption and the rise of over the top video (OTT)

Consumption of on-demand content through the TV and other ‘authenticated devices’ is on the
move. Ofcom says that the UK now leads the world with nearly one in four (25%) catching up on
their TV via on-demand services such as the iPlayer and SkyGo at least once a week. The US came
second with 17%, followed by 16% of people in Spain.

Over the Christmas period, the BBC reported record on-demand viewing with 77million programme
requests. Overall, the iPlayer mobile app was downloaded 1 million times over the festive period
with viewing on smartphones and tablets (combined) overtaking that via computers on Christmas
Day and Boxing Day for the first time ever.

Bell Labs research in the United States points to a dramatic shift in viewing habits over the next few
years, as consumers switch from broadcast content to video-on-demand services, which will grow
to 70% of daily consumption by 2020, compared with 33% today. It predicts a 12x increase in
Internet video content as cloud services, news sites and social networking applications become
more video based. Overall, the research also predicts that video consumption will also rise to seven
hours each day, compared with the current 4.8 hours – and much of this additional viewing, it says,
will be via tablets at home and on the go and involve multitasking.18

18
Bell Labs research: How the tablet generation is pushing networks to the edge http://bit.ly/100aK4l

10


Against this background, it is not surprising we are seeing so much activity in the OTT video space.
Smart TVs and Internet connected boxes are all the rage at the annual CES show in Las Vegas. Google
TV for example is launching a new generation of software and devices that take voice commands
and integrate seamlessly with Google Play - with Android tablets and smartphones.

Surely this is the year when Apple will up its game in the TV space.A ‘TV app store’ is expected along
with a full-blown Apple TV– something that plays nicely with all your other Apple devices.

But Apple may struggle to get the licensing agreements in place in the US (as they did with music) so
won't be as disruptive as the iPod or iPhones. UK and European launches will be even more difficult -
and much later too. Few existing players want to see OTT providers taking up to 30% of the revenues
or a significant slice of advertising revenue - and the biggest driver in television remains access to
compelling and original content. Broadcasters remain in a good position if they can maintain both
their rights and their reputations – and then it comes down to who is going to do deals with whom.

2012 saw significant innovation in the technical underpinnings of Internet (over the top) television.
During the Olympics, both live and on demand video were delivered using IP across multiple display
screens simultaneously and with record demand. The key challenge now is how to monetise this
across a fragmented multiple device landscape.

Not surprising then that we’ll see renewed interested in ‘addressable’ or targeted TV ads. With
more data available on who is watching and what their interests are, the nature of television
advertising will gradually begin to shift with new low cost options at least for on-demand viewing.


Interactive TV will remain a buzzword, but the emphasis will shift to 'over the top' boxes +
more emphasis on the mobile tablet as the place to browse and select content, and then
play on TV (e.g. Google TV and YouTube pairing, Apple airplay and eventually Intel’s Widi).

The Apple TV will launch late in the year with a screen size of over 42” and a price tag of
around $1500. The key selling point as the main interface for the living room across multiple
devices

More innovations and efficiencies in IP-based networks and packet-based global signal
delivery. Existing wired infrastructures struggle to cope with exploding internet video
consumption

The rise of the visual web (or think about your words more carefully)

For hundreds of years the written word has dominated – partly because of the costs of production
and the constraints of distribution. Now with the arrival of the ‘uber-platform’ (online) those
constraints are falling away and storytelling can revert to a more natural and more colourful form.

Have you noticed how Facebook and Twitter feeds are filling up with pictures and videos where
previously there were only words? Is it a co-incidence that we find a Ted talk a convenient way of

11


exploring a big idea where previously only a book or New Yorker article would do? Picture laden
entertainment and celebrity stories have been at the heart of the success of MailOnline. With the
arrival of Windows 8 we even navigate by pictures these days.

Much of this is driven by the explosion of powerful devices made for multimedia with screens that
see at same resolution as the human eye - but it is also driven by our own impatience.
Pictures and videos are often quicker to create and now they are quicker to publish and distribute
than an article. And for certain types of stories (e.g. a natural disaster like Hurricane Sandy, floods)
they are becoming the default way of telling the news.The big implication of this is that newspapers
need to employ fewer writers and more photographers and video storytellers. The wordsmiths that
remain need to become expert at teeing up a piece of multimedia, at crafting the perfect headline or
short form accompaniment and curating the work of others.

Here comes video …

One of the most striking aspects of the US election coverage was the TV style election coverage
mounted by teams from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Huffington Post. All
are building up digital teams to produce more video news.

From sets at the heart of the newsroom, reporters comment on stories as they emerge – a low cost
brand extension but one that is targeting growing advertising interest19.
WSJ has been equipping reporters with cameras for several years and launched an ambitious new
service in August 2012called Worldstream. Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray said shooting raw
footage from the ground via smartphone - without lights and production teams - was freeing up and
“revolutionising journalism”. The Washington Post has announced a video channel for politics -
playing catch-up with Politico.

But it is not just traditional news companies making moves in this area. Witness
the success of Now this News a short form social video news service started by
two of the Huffington Post's founders. It targets the always-on digital natives

19
Currently this is more brand extension than anything else but advertisers spent $2.9 billion in digital video advertising in
2012, according to eMarketer, up 47% on last year.

12


more likely to stumble across their news on Facebook than NBC and is mobile first. 25 employees
produce 8 to 10 short videos daily that are distributed via apps, social media and through
distribution deals with publishing partners like The Guardian and Buzzfeed. Stories are chosen based
on newsworthiness and the likelihood of viral success. "We believe that especially younger people
are getting their news from social mobile video channels," General Manager Eason Jordan says. And
co-founder, Eric Hippeau adds:“Video is coming into its own and we're trying to figure out what
news content should look like in this format.”

And then there’s the tech innovation. Products like GoPro, the world’s most versatile camera20,will
increase the quality and ambition of both UGC and professional video. Tech start ups like Condition
Onewill offer more creative opportunities for video storytelling with its immersive editor and player.
And WatchUp can handle aggregation and distribution of content.

In 2013 we’ll see more experimentation with short form video –- that will burst the
complacency of traditional media companies.This area offers a significant opportunities for
newspapers and start-ups to disrupt traditional broadcasters who will find it hard to break
free from old formats

Other journalism trends to watch

News streams, bite sized news and real time web

A number of companies are experimenting with reordering news to fit the needs of real time,
personalisedmobile lifestyles. This is inspired by the success of Twitter and Flipboard but
nowpublishers want a slice of the action. We'll also see a lot of news companies rethinking how long
articles need to be. Twitter has re-trained people to think in different ways about news and news
consumption, and we'll start to see more experimentation in the space in
between 140 characters and a full article, with new UX around this21.

Expect to see publishers taking the success of live pages and making them
separate products in their own right. In this regard, publishers like the
Guardian are looking at what they might do with mobile apps in a way that
don’t just replicate the current article based approach. In the States, the
Atlantic is showing the way with a slick new ‘mobile first’ business app (it’s
actually HTML5), Quartz,built around streams and obsessions. It’s a big play
and has 20 journalistic staff - with funding coming from sponsorship as
much as advertising.

Buzzfeedhas attracted huge interest around its combination of a technology
platform for detecting viral content with an editorial selection process to provide a snapshot of the
best bits of the viral web. The site had around 40m monthly unique users in December 2012 with
over a third of traffic coming from mobile devices.22 Watch Flipboard too for significant

20
Adam Smallman – Lloyds List
21
Stephen Pinches at FT
22
Buzzfeed has just raised a further $20m in funding and plans to increase the amount of original content including video.

13


improvements in its ground-breaking products mining the real time world of news - available for
Android tablets for the first time in 2013. Expect more content deals and new commercial link ups
withpublishers.

Long form journalism and e-book publishing

At the other end of the spectrum, we’re also seeing a number of attempts to reinvent long-form for
the digital age. This areaalready provides a payment mechanism, proven distribution platforms and
distinct value for the consumer (unlike commodity news)23.

Matter is a British start-up founded by Bobbie Johnson and Jim Giles who are trying to find a market
for investigative, very long, original articles in the fields of technology, medicine, the environment
and science24. They are Kickstarter funded (to the tune of $140,000) - effectively managing to draw
in high-profile endorsements and create a social buzz. So far they have produced two investigations
which can be purchased for 99 cents apiece— via online or as an e-book that can be read on Kindles
or iPads. The design is digital first, simple and uncluttered.

The Magazine is another example from the US. Focussing on technology it publishes four medium
length articles every two weeks for $1.99 a month. Rather than telling readers everything that
happens in technology, The Magazine delivers meaningful editorial and big-picture articles.

We’ve already mentioned Snowfallfrom the New York Times – also available as an e-book for $2.99.
This multi-part feature attracted 3m visitors to the New York Times (one third of who were new
visitors) to an exhaustive article about an avalanche at Tunnel Creek in early 2012. But this wasn’t
just about John Branch’s investigation; it was an example of visual storytelling at its best from the
NYT interactive team. Videos, photos, and graphics were integrated in a way that made multimedia
feel natural and useful, not just tacked on25. Other examples of great visual storytelling come from
ESPN and Internet music publisher Pitchfork.Many of these ideas involve working closely with
technical teams and borrow extensively from experimentation with the iPad in recent years. They
are a far cry from the two-dimensional articles we been so used to on the web.

Data scientists and the personalisation of news

Expect to see news companies invest further in harnessing ‘big data’ to produce more personalised
and relevant experiences. Publishers will rely less on their 'nose' and more on hard data about what
people actually do with content, says academic and blogger Paul Bradshaw:“That doesn't mean
chasing traffic (although some will make that mistake), it means using data to test out products and
the 'hunches' that often drive publishing decisions.”

The New York Times, The Daily Mail26, News International and the Guardian are all looking at
interrogating data toimproving relevance (and profitability) this year and several have employed
data scientists to drive insights27.

23
Paul Bradshaw
24
Hat tip Kevin Hinde (Nature)
25
http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-US/articles/how-we-made-snow-fall/
26
Daily Mail bought CRM company VELTI in 2012
27
New York Times has a data scientist and the Guardian is recruiting one
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/mar/02/data-scientist

14


Cheap access to analytics tools, running in the data centre or in the cloud, will open new possibilities
in data analysis but the big gap is the skills one as theEMC2 chart (above) shows based on a recent
survey.As Alberto Nardelli points out “Big data" will follow a similar trajectory to social last year:
“We'll stop talking about big data and just use large amounts of data more effectively across sectors
and organisational functions/actions.”

CNN is also well placed to do more with big data following their acquisition of Zite last year but have
so far done remarkably little apart from the disappointing CNN trends.

Mining and visualising data for news

There were some standout examplesof this related trend from 2012.
ProPublica continues to push the envelope with its free the files app
that aimed to cast light on the dark arts of ad spending in the
presidential election. Volunteers processed hundreds of thousands of
pdfs and other returns to turn these into a consistent database of
activity in 33 swing states. And they then wrote stories that explained what was happening.

Around the Costa Concordia disaster, Lloyds List mined its exclusive databases on shipping
movements to prove that the cruise ship had previously steered a
course even closer to the Island of Giglio. Data points were plotted and
then visualised through Tableau. TheBBC, CNN and many others picked
up the resulting scoop.

Tools to analyse and visualise data (see also Visual.ly) will become ‘must
have’ rather than ‘nice to have’ for many publishers in 2013

Blogger and academic Paul Bradshaw points to new new data-driven operations like Rafat Ali's travel
website Skift and fashion data properties like Editd. They see a future where the journalist's role is
not to churn out commodity news but to provide the investigation that unearths data, and the

15


analysis to make sense of data.If you haven’t invested in these new skills or approaches then now is
the time.

2012 brought us news-org-sponsored hack days, new data journalism prizes and the launch of The
Data Journalism Handbook28. Decoded is reporting record demand for its course to teach code in a
day and have added extra courses for data-visualisation. Once again the Knight Mozilla Open News
Fellows will be bringing their hacker-journalist skills to newsrooms in 2013 in the second year of this
innovative scheme.

Pop up news

Big sites to experiment with unbranded single topic niche news blogs like Syria Deeply. Using the
resource and experience of an established newsroom, but decoupled from big production systems,
Wordpress/Tumblr or similar can be used to quickly deliver a mobile-optimised standalone
website29. The key will be to find the right story …

Human curation comes to the fore

In 2012 we saw more examples of cut-through people driven curation services that separate the
signal from the noise. Maria Popova’s Brain Pickingsis “a human-powered discovery engine for
interestingness’ which has
achieved some kind of lift-
off with 1.2m readers per
month.
Popova’s blog, which
thematically links to
articles around the web,
takes around 5000 hours
a year to produce and she
says will remain ad free –
funded purely by
subscriptions30.

Dave Pell’s excellent daily
newsletter, NextDraft
continues to go from
strength to strength. He says the problem with email has always been the content not the platform -
which is why he focuses on adding value: “I'm not just cutting and pasting material. I am anchoring
the day's news”. For 2013 the service has moved to mobile with a new app optimised for iPhone,
iPad and iPad mini.

See also Circa – one of our companies to watch in 2013.

28
http://datajournalismhandbook.org/
29
Prediction from Martin Belam (Emblem)
30
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2012/dec/30/maria-popova-brain-pickings-internet

16


The business of journalism

In 2012 metered/porous paywalls went from being "experimental" to widely adopted. As the
Economist’s Tom Standage puts it: “A paywall is just a way to charge some readers for some content
some of the time. In retrospect this will seem obvious.”

A recent study suggests there are now more
than 300 US newspaper paywalls – twice as
many as this time last year31. A different
survey by the Alliance for Audited Media,
which includes the majority of top
publishers in North America, showed 48%
of newspapers with a paywall and almost a
quarter of consumer magazines32. It is
estimated that the introduction of a ‘soft
metered paywall’ leads to an average fall in Source: Alliance for Audited Media members survey (United States)
33 December 2012
traffic of only around 20% . This means Source: Alliance for Audited Media members survey (United States)
online advertising revenue can be largely sustained at the same time as opening up a new revenue
December 2012
stream.

And this is a global trend: newspapers in Brazil, Germany, Canada34 and elsewhere have taken the
plunge. In Slovakia, Piano Media is a data driven company that is helping their clients not only
provide payment solutions, which are easy, but also decide on which content to charge for.

The New York Times, which started the trend in March 2011, has seen the number of digital
subscribers rise to more than 450,000 at the same time as seeing a rise in daily web visits. 35
Significantly, the digital subscription revenue ($56m) – alongside a price rise on print copies – will
make 2012 the first year the Times has earned more from circulation than from advertising.

What’s odd is that we have not seen similar trends in the UK. With the exception of the Times,
which persists with a ‘hard paywall’ in the face of all reason, and specialist titles like the Economist
and FT, other national titles remain free. This will not continue in 2013 and plans are being readied
for ‘metered models’ as declining circulation and falling print advertising revenues bite.

Part of the reason is that digital advertising rates continue to fall to a level that will never sustain
significant journalistic news operation. In the future newspapers will need to shift away from their
dependence on advertising towards subscription and a range of other income streams. Mary Meeker
ofinvestment firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers noted in May that CPMs - cost for reaching a

31
http://mashable.com/2012/11/04/paywalls-infographic/ Oft quoted 550,000 includes IHT
32
A handful of publications are using a paywall only for certain types of content (e.g. local news and sports at the Waco Tribune-Herald) or
a two-site approach where one is paid and the other is free (as at the Boston Globe).
33
JP Morgan study quoted by the Economist http://www.economist.com/news/business/21567934-after-years-bad-headlines-industry-
finally-has-some-good-news-news-adventures
34
The Globe and Mail in Canada introduced a paywall in late October and the Toronto Star launches its version in early 2013.

17


thousand users - were averaging $3.50 (£2.20) for a desktop web ad and just 75 cents (50p) for
mobile. That means revenues of just $350 for an article achieving 100,000 page views ($75 for
mobile).36

Commentator and blogger Andrew Sullivan is turning his back on advertising in 2013 – and not just
for economic reasons. He says advertising-based models over the last decade have encouraged
blatant ‘traffic whoring’, such as galleries of topless celebrities, or more subtle corruption evident in
special issues created for advertisers. In a reversal of the consolidation of successful blogs into big
media companies, Sullivan has decided to set up on his own again. He is leaving the Daily Beast and
trying to make his blog work on a subscription model with a bit of Kickstarter like funding thrown in.
Sullivan has appealed to readers to give more than the standard $19.99 a month - suggesting they’ll
get more content the more they donate. He’s already talking about a monthly tablet magazine called
the Daily Depth37.

Clearly advertising will remain an important part of the mix though. More important for publishers
that command a niche and attract the right demographics. Wired Magazine reported that digital ads
delivered 50% of all advertising revenue for the first time last year- despite the fact that it still has a
substantial print business38. Most of this (90%) came from the PC web, not from mobiles or tablets.39

More than 10% of consumer time is spent with the mobile phone but only 1% of advertising is spent
this way. This gap will close a bit in 2013 but given the small screen the options remain limited. The
vast majority of mobile revenues currently go to Google via text ads (up 160% in the last year) but
opportunities for growth come from developing
and mobile first formats such as sponsored
messages in timelines (right)40, sharable ads,
video ads and location-based ads which carry
much higher premiums. Responsive design and
infinite scrolling allow ads to appear as users move down the page – potentially changing the terms
of the debate about ‘below the fold’. 41

More publishers in 2013 will also experiment with events as a way of driving new revenue from
niche expertise. Advertiser spend is clearly moving from buying a display placement
surrounding editorial content (magazine / website) to paying to be involved in
editorial-driven events. UBM has made the transition from parochial magazine
publishing to global confex company with an impressive range of events in BRIC
nations42.

36
Roy Greenslade article in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2013/jan/01/paywalls-us-press-
publishing
37
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/03/daily-beast-andrew-sullivan-daily-dish
38
As a comparison that figure was 10% in 2006 when Conde Nast bought Wired.
39
http://adage.com/article/media/digital-cracks-50-ad-revenue-wired-magazine/238986/
40
Row over APs decision to put ads in its Timeline shows how hard this will be
41
http://mashable.com/2012/12/18/digital-advertising-2013/
42
UBM is also leading the trend of editorial projects with commercial aims, as seen in its Client Solutions Division and the
TechWeb unit in America

18


This is a growth area for consumer magazines and newspapers too. The Guardian and Times have
been experimenting with training and conferences for some time with limited success43.

There will be many stumbles along the way but the funding of journalism looks like a complex mix of
businesses and revenue streams - what John Paton CEO of Digital First calls the ‘stacking of digital
dimes’.


The Washington Post and at least two national UK newspapers join the metered paywall
club in 2013
Further cost rationalisation across the media in 2013 as market realities drag down the
offline and online advertising economies. We’ll see consolidation in the national UK
newspaper market and more regionals will go from daily to weekly, following recent moves
by Johnston Press and Newsquest, with yet more titles closing.
In B2B publishing a whole plethora of titles will either shut their print editions or take
weeklies to monthly. 44

Digital advertising and marketing

“Advertising innovation from media companies should become as critical as content innovation” – so
say the WSJ’s Raju Narisetti .45Too many news organisations have for too long looked at the high
returns from print and scoffed at the low margins in digital while companies like Google created a
dominant position in digital advertising. “If news organisations don't begin to compete aggressively
for digital advertising, they will either have to develop alternate revenue streams or fail”, says digital
strategist Kevin Anderson. “They have wasted more than a decade dithering when it comes to digital
revenue, and they can't afford to waste a second more.” This point
is emphasised by the chart below from the Economist which shows
how newspapers have failed to capitalise on rapidly increasing
digital spend partly because sales teams have been locked into
antiquated KPIs and have commission structures that reward print
over digital.

In the future media companies need to embrace the opportunities
of digital, need to break down barriers between commercial and
editorial team and need to hire more of those data-savvy advertising
professionals and statisticians who can understand, analyse and
package their audience data into coherent products and campaigns.

There are some signs that publishers are increasingly starting to
ditch the age-old, print-era idea of reach = success and focus insteadon high value journeys and high

43
The Guardian’s Open Weekend project made a sizeable loss.
44
Thanks to Patrick Smith of Media Briefing for some of the insights in this and the next section.
45
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/12/hope-reality/

19


value customers.The trading of display advertisements online is becoming more data-driven,
targeted, real-time and efficient. We’ll see a big shift in the direction of real-time bidding (RTB)46.
eBay was aiming to put 40% of its online ad budget into RTB by the end of 2012, with more than 70
% of its US budget already being spent that way. Netflix is an enthusiastic buyer of display ads but
nearly 100% of its budget is programmatic.

Patrick Smith at Media Briefing notes that data analysis, RTB and programmatic are “in no way a
saviour or a route to higher margins, yields and revenues, but they are a way to take back control
from low value ad networks which serve irrelevant, annoying, bottom-feeder banner ads to
disinterested consumers.”

More widely we could see some progress on better online metrics. The industry standard ABC
measures have become increasingly criticised for over-counting online usage47. They are also overly
focussed on one part of the media sector. Advertisers and the industry in general are looking to take
a holistic view of consumption habits offline and online such the National Readership Survey
initiatives. Expect more publishers to leave ABC for more credible and multiplatform ways of
measuring total audience behaviour48.

Organising the digital enterprise

So in the face of these changes, how should companies organise for digital success? PWC’s global
media outlook report 49 says that we are at the “end of the digital beginning as companies reshape
and retool for life in the new normal".

Successful companies need to be agile and responsive. They need to work horizontally instead/as
well as vertically. We’re seeing new roles like product management, user experience and data
analysis - and new cross-disciplinary units to drive innovation (e.g. the New York Times interactive
team). Editorial and commercial teams are beginning to talk and collaborate.

With digital now at the core of business-as-usual, PWC believes that experimentation and execution
are no longer sequential but will proceed in parallel. Not many traditional companies are set up to
do that. Nor are they set up to attract and retain the right people, as Econsultancy CEO Ashley
Friedlein points out in his blog: “Start-ups, and internet companies like Google, have been cleverly
luring the best digital talent for years. It seems only recently that bigger ‘traditional’ players have
woken up to just what a problem they have in attracting and retaining digital talent”.

Perhaps this year we’ll see an end to unrealistic targets and restructures that undermine morale –
and a renewed focus on mechanisms that value all staff - editorial, technical, design and commercial
– with rewards for initiative, performance and innovation.

46
http://www.emarketer.com/newsroom/index.php/realtime-bidding-poised-quarter-display-spending/
47
http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/2012-09-11/nrs-print-online-data-traffic-smaller-than-we-thought
48
The FT, Centaur and UBM’s built environment titles use PwC metric to monitor readers cross various print and digital
platforms.

49
http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/global-entertainment-media-outlook/index.jhtml

20


Policy and regulation

While the Leveson report focussed almost exclusively on the historic behaviour of the press, this
year we can expect the focus to switch to forward looking issues raised by convergence and the rise
of the Internet.

With audiences demanding that news brands communicate across television, radio and online, it
makes less and less sense to have regulation divided by platform. The press will have its new post
Leveson system, broadcasters and telecoms have Ofcom, the BBC has yet another regulator and
online has no rules at all – despite its huge importance as a source of news and the growing power
of online gateways. The much delayed new Communications Bill is supposed to be dealing with
some of these issues, but a major legislative process every decade (the last one was in 2003) seems
hardly fit for purpose given the speed of developments. There are a number of big issues bubbling
away …

The ownership of UK media institutions; how to recalibrate the nature of influence and
ensure plurality in the new multimedia landscape
The increasing dominance of US technology companies (Amazon, Google, Facebook) over
gateways to news/books/TV etc
The declining economic prospects for newspapers and the implications for investigative and
watchdog journalism
The viability of maintaining legislative underpinning for impartial television news in a digital
age – as video news takes off on the unregulated internet

We can expect much heat but little light on these big issues with a renewed focus on the future of
the BBC Trust following the leadership crisis thrown up by the Savile revelations.
In the long-term, logic dictates a coherent approach to media regulation together with a single
approach to journalistic ethics for all professional news organisations along with a simple and
transparent process of audience redress. That won’t happen this year or any time soon.

What we can guarantee is continuing rows about privacy on two counts. There are government
attempts all over the world to increase their power to monitor our electronic conversations (email,
social media etc). Here in the UK, the Data Communications Bill is being redrafted following heated
rows first time round. Plans to get ISPs and mobile phone companies to track and store all users’
activity were roundly criticised as impractical and an unprecedented invasion of privacy. But the
government is committed to pressing ahead, seeing the bill as a crucial weapon in tackling terrorism,
serious crime and paedophilia50.

More widely there’ll be pressure on major companies to be clearer and more transparent about the
extent of their snooping on our behaviour. The EU’s cookie directive has done nothing to reduce ads
that follow you round the web – just adding to the clutter of pop-ups that we can’t wait to close.
There’ll be more unwanted ads in your social media timelines this year and a growth in mobile spam.

50
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/oct/31/communications-data-bill-honeypot-hackers-criminals

21


With big companies continuing to push the boundaries in pursuit of profit expect pressure to grow
for more consumer protection against unwanted intrusion.

On the legal front, we can expect more calls to end “mob rule” and “trial by Twitter” (Lord Leveson’s
words). The Twitter prosecutions of Sally Bercow and others following the naming of Lord McAlpine
will play out with potential settlements running into many thousands of pounds. If you have under
500 followers, it looks like you are safe to say whatever you like, but by year end there’ll be a
growing realisation that what is said on social media is not beyond the law. Look out for more high
profile Twitter and Facebook prosecutions along with new social media education programmes in
schools and workplaces.

Finally there is the regulation of the Internet itself. Can it remain free and open for all or should
countries, ISPs or mobile phone companies have the right to filter content or levy charges on it?
These issues were raised and seen off at the World Conference on telecommunications last year –
but they’ll be back along with discussions about a new overarching governance structure for an
Internet which is no longer dominated by the US and Europe.

Local TV and public service broadcasting

Jeremy Hunt may have left the Department of Culture Media and Sport but his "big idea" lives on
and comes to fruition in 2013. Nineteen (19) towns and cities will get a ‘licence to broadcast’ from
Ofcom but are likely to find the speed of digital change has made this type of operation largely
irrelevant to most audiences. Video is growing in importance, but not distributed in this way51.

Outside the UK, we are seeing the beginning of the end of the era of public service broadcasting –
certainly as currently constituted. Unlike the BBC, most European PSBs have proved unable to
weather the storms of competition and have lost broad public support. As a result, they have
become easy pickings for politicians looking for budget cuts. Jonathan Marks from consultancy
Critical Distance sees their future as ‘government sponsored narrowcasters’ and says some genres
like drama will only be produced in a handful of countries52.

Four new technologies to watch …

1. The wearable web and augmented reality (the fifth screen?)

This year the phone will start to control what we see and what we wear. Vuzix smart glasses
(available this year) are visual displays that take augmented reality to the next stage. Now you don’t
need to look under the table to get the football results – they can be beamed directly to your eyes.
Face recognition linked to Facebook or LinkedIn can provide an instant biography at a party – saving
much embarrassment or providing useful lines for a potential business opportunity.

51
Jonathan Marks Critical Distance
52
http://criticaldistance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/be-prepared-for-worst-then-hope-for-best.html

22


Google has already demonstrated something similar (Google Glass) but that won’t be market ready
until 2014.Initially the focus for Google Glass is lessabout augmented reality and more of a wearable
wireless camera that allows you to record and share images and videos – along with push
notifications related to email and the wearer's location53.

The final shape will become clear by the spring when a developer version will be released ($1500)
but the company is wrestling with issues such as video display, battery life – as well as the mix of
functionality and style that could make wearable computing the next big thing. Apple and Microsoft
have also obtained patents for augmented reality displays

Other smartphone driven connected screens involve the return of the smart watch. Pebble
(Kickstarter funded) is set for big success with devices which can receive emails and calls, control
music and track your movement when running. The watches cost about £100 and there are already
85,000 pre-orders.

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was stuffed with gadgets and applications to
help you lose weight or track your fitness regime – linking health based sensors with smartphones
and cloud-based analysis.

And for the more flamboyant there are dresses implanted with
electronic displays that project your latest social media updates
onto the fabric. These clothes are becoming softer and more
comfortable every year and already go through the washing
machine. This is the year when they become more affordable
but not necessarily more socially acceptable.

53
http://www.informationweek.com/internet/google/google-glass-vision-for-future-unclear/240145387

23


2. Machine interaction breakthroughs
2013 will see breakthroughs in the way we interact with machines. Leap Motionis a new technology,
which will enable you to interact with your computer using gestures. Even better - the controller is
the size of an iPod and costs less than $70. Leap Motion’s technology can track movements to
1/100th millimetre—smaller than the tip of a pin—with no visible lag time. The Leap Motion
controller has a 150-degree field of view, and tracks individual hands and all 10 fingers at 290 frames
per second.It is pre-shipping now as a stand-alone unit but the real value will come when it gets
integrated into devices and applications moving touchscreens to the next level (gesturescreens).54

Leap Motion started 2013 with a new funding round worth $30m and a deal with ASUS who will be
one of the first manufacturers to bundle the technologies into its high-end notebooks and PCs.

Other innovations to watch in this area include further progress with driverless cars. Toyota and
Audi are showcasing test models at CES while Google already has a fleet of a dozen testing on
private tracks in the US and the occasional public road55. Nevada was the first
US States to offer a public license in 2012. Despite polls showing widespread
consumer resistance to the idea, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the
company “will have autonomous cars available for the general public within
five years”. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
anticipates that driverless cars will account for up to 75 per cent of cars on the
road by 2040.56

3. Indoor Location

We spend most of our time indoors – at home, in shops, offices and restaurants – where GPS doesn't
work or is not sufficiently accurate to be useful. New indoor positioning technologies will enable you
to pinpoint the exact location of a painting in an art gallery or items on your shopping list – all via
your smartphone.IndoorAtlas uses magnetic variations found naturally inside buildings to sense
location. Bytelite manages location in relation to LED ceiling lights.WifiSLAMuses ambient Wi-Fi
signals. Whatever the technology, opportunities for advertisers include targeted promotions or
coupons at the time they will have most impact.

4. 3D Printers come of age

54
Hat tip to Stephen Pinches at the FT for this one
55
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car
56
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/economy-lab/self-driving-cars-coming-soon-to-a-road-
near-you/article6630552/

24


3D printers aren’t new nor are they particularly expensive – you
can get them for less than £400. But until now it hasn't been
possible to do professional quality printing on that kind of
budget. Now a group of MIT graduates have replicated the most
expensive laser-optic manufacturing techniques in a device (the
FORM1) that fits neatly on the desktop. Watch out in 2013 for
Formlabs which has also crowdfunded its working capital –
raising almost $300,000 via Kickstarter - meaning it doesn’t have to sell its soul to venture capitalists.
3D printing will spawn new businesses for designers and fashion creatives. It will also and trigger a
new round of copyright wars with designs being bought, sold, traded, ripped, mixed and stolen57.
Watch also Shapeways, Ponoko and Sculpteo.

Crowdfunding, peer- to-peer lending and innovation in banking and financial services

It’s looking like a difficult year for those who’ve been making a pretty living out of financial advice.
Banks and traditional institutions are under pressure as never before. New legislation is forcing more
transparency at the same time as a new wave of tech start ups are ready to repeat the kind of
internet disruption we’ve already seen in the music business and the travel industry.

Funding Circle is a peer-to-peer marketplace, which puts savers in touch with borrowers looking for
low cost loans. Lancashire Council is using the website to sidestep the banks and pump prime small
local businesses to the tune of around £100,000. Funding Circle has already lent around £70m with
gross returns averaging over 9% for lenders.

In the US, SoFi is transforming the student loan industry by connecting student and graduate
borrowers with alumni investors economically and socially. Whilst further afield, Lenddo combines
community-based microfinance techniques with social media data, pioneering a new approach to
serve the underbanked.

57
Prediction Paul Branna (Digital consultant)

25


More generally watch out this year for and explosion of crowdfunding sites and schemes this year.
Kickstarter launched in the UK in November 2012 and has already driven more than £2m of pledges
for 400 projects. Kickstarter has already been used to fund a significant number of journalism
projects including Homicide watch in Washington DC, the funding of a blog network for reliable
source in Southern Sudan, and a Spanish language podcast.

Other Successful schemes include the Ostrich pillow for sleeping on the go(raised £150,000)and
Bamboo underwear, made from recycled wood, paper and empowerment – “making the luxury
underwear market interesting”.

Mobile banking and mobile wallets

Meanwhile for consumers increasing amounts of our life will be controlled with our mobiles in 2013.
One by one, bank cards, loyalty cards, travel cards and boarding passes are being sucked out of our
physical wallets and becoming integrated into smartphone software. That means new challenges for
the credit card companies.Watch for the mobile operators in the UK -- EE, O2 and Vodafone – who
have teamed up to provide a single mobile marketing and wallet service for smartphones this year.
Competition comes from Google and also form Facebook which will launch a "buy button" - similar
to its "Like" button but to purchase using FB currency across web, mobile and offline58. Others in the
space (Zopa, Square etc.) will continue to grow with Squarefounded by Jack Dorsey tipped for IPO in
2013. InAuth recently introduced a voice authentication module for mobile banking and as new
processors deliver greater computational power biometric entry to services using voice, fingerprint
or iris recognition will start to replace passwords59.

Online shopping

Expect astellar year for online retail partly driven by mobile and apps, partly by lack of choice on the
high street. Electrical goods, books and media remain the frontier. Jessops was the first to go into
administration but we’ll also see thelast big CD and DVD retail chain,HMV, leave the high
streetforcing purchasers to download or buy from supermarkets. The brand will be sold off to an
58
Prediction from Alberto Nardelli
59
Hat top Paul Brannan

26


online retailer. Watch also how many retailers reduce their physical footprint but team up with
supermarkets and others to provide more ‘click and collect’ services instead.

Universities are changing too …

Massive Open Online Courses (Moocs) were the most talked about trend in education technology in
2012. In the United States, New players like Coursera, Udacity and edX have already recruited
millions of students to hundreds of degree-style courses from top-name institutions like Stanford
and MIT - all for free.60 12 universities in the UK including Bristol and Kings College London will start
doing the same this year. Students generally receive a certificate for completing the online courses,
but do not receive academic credit toward any conventional degree qualification.

Is this economic folly – undermining the core business of higher education? Or is it smart marketing
by a set of forward-looking institutions thinking about the opportunities of global markets and life-
long learning? Either way it is the start of another major upheaval driven by the Internet that is likely
to have long-term implications for future education provision.

Companies to watch in 2013

1. Yahoo: With ex-Googler Marissa Mayer at the helm, Yahoo couldturn a corner with its strong
focus on consumer-friendly tech products. Flickr could benefit if people are looking for a user-
friendly alternative to Facebook-owned Instagram.

2. Tesco: Is in a good position to capitalise on the collapse of high street retailers but they are also
are spending serious money online trying to compete with Amazon. They have a new innovations
unit in Farringdon61. Watch for new apps by summer and innovations from shopping to finance.

3. YouView/BT Sport:You View is already a good consumer proposition but will pick up surprising
traction as BT62 and TalkTalk take it to mainstream audiences. A big driver will be BT’s new sports
channels leveraging broadcast rights to 38 live Premier League football matches from 2013 to 2016,
as well as Aviva Premiership Rugby. Both Sky and Virgin suffer and will spend more on advertising
just to retain subscriptions.

4. News Corp: The new "old" media firm has new top leadership and an excellent technical team
and people who are innovative about business models

5. Al Jazeera: They have just spent $300-500m getting access to around 40 million US homes with
the purchase of the ailing Current TV. Expect them to create programming specifically for the US
market – not just to pump out their core news channel.

60
Hat tip from Kevin Hinde (Nature) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-
are-multiplying-at-a-rapid-pace.html
61
Hat tip Jonathan Austin (BBC)
62 th
BT launched its YouView box on 20 September and will roll out to customers
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/9669024/Buying-sports-rights-is-
winner-for-BT-Vision.html

27


6. Russia Today: Has proved a master at creating controversy on social media sites. The 30 million
dollar a year network has more influence than Chinese counterpart CCTV, France 24 or the ailing US
government-funded networks like VOA, RadioFreeEurope/Radio Liberty. Journalistic quality may be
variable but it’s a conversation starter.

Fivefor the future …

1. Tout:An app that allows you to create short 15 second video updates on
your life. This is trying to do what Twitter has done for text and pictures.
Constrain the length and drive creativity. The Wall Street Journal is already
using it to power its ‘Worldstream’ service. http://www.tout.com/

See also Snapchat and Poke (the Facebook version) for photos- already wildly
popular with the younger generation. Also Spreecast, a social platform for
face to face conversation.

2. Circa:News without the fluff, filler, or commentary. Circa’s editors gather top stories and break
them down to their essential points -- facts, quotes, photos, and more. It’s a bit like Ceefax really but
implemented with considerably more style and for a mobile lifestyle. http://cir.ca/

3. Zeebox: CNN’s Peter Bale is tipping Zeebox to have a breakthrough year in the world of
companion TV. It’s done well in the US (1m downloads in 3 months) but has surprisingly failed to
gain traction in the UK. Sky has now integrated Zeebox second-screen platform into the Sky+ iPad
app making it easier to interact in one place. Expect more tie-ups with other broadcasters this year +
audio (music) recognition linked to TV programmes.http://uk.zeebox.com/tv/home

4.Aereo: Is an application that allowssubscribers to view live as well as time-shifted streams of over-
the-air television on any Internet-connected device. It aggregates all the major broadcasters by using
a legal loophole whereby it leases each subscriber a remote antenna, which is stored in a data centre
in Brooklyn. Expanding from NY to 22 cities across America and will be hugely disruptive along the
way. Unlikely to make it across the pond any time soon – though it is a bit like YouView without the
need for a box.
https://www.aereo.com/

5. PeerJ: One of a number of open access publishers who are shaking up the closed world of
academia. PeerJ’s twist is to give scholars working in biological and medical sciences a ‘lifetime right’
to publish articles and make them freely available – in exchange for a single one-off
payment.Governments, institutions, and funders across the world are increasingly mandating and
encouraging open access and this is one twist in a process which is likely to lead to the vast majority
of academic content is published under an open access licence.
https://peerj.com/

With thanks to …

I am indebted to all of the below for their generous insights

28


Tom Standage (Economist), Peter Bale (CNN), Stephen Pinches (FT), Steve Herrmann, Richard
Cooper, Jonathan Austin (BBC), Julian March, Paul Dale, James Mickelthwait (ITV), Ashley Friedlein
(Econsultancy),John O’Donovan (PA), Adam Smallman (Lloyds List Group), Alberto Nardelli
(Tweetminster), Martin Belam (Emblem), Anthony Sullivan, Laura Oliver (Guardian), Kevin Hinde,
Tom Scott (Nature Publishing Group), Paul Brannan (Digital Consultant), Paul Bradshaw (Academic,
Help Me Investigate), Patrick Smith (Media Briefing.com), Madhav Chinnappa (Google), Kevin
Anderson (Digital strategist, Knowledge Bridge), Andrew Betts (Assanka), Matt Locke (Storythings),
Jonathan Marks (Critical Distance),Max Gadney (After The Flood), Nicolas Flores (Digital Strategist)

Nic Newman is a Digital Strategist and former BBC journalist and New Media executive. He is
Associate Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University and
Senior Research Fellow at City University London.
Twitter: @nicnewman
Email: nic.newman@gmail.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nicnewman
APPENDIX A – Some of last year’s predictions assessed

1. Most explosive year yet for tablets with estimated sales of more than 100m units

Not exactly difficult butthe number was pretty close. Gartner reports worldwide tablet sales were up
98% to 118.9 million units. This chart shows that the PC market has completely stalled and all the
growth is coming from tablets. We’ve already mentioned our other correct prediction that we’d see
the first £99 tablet in the UK

2. Google unveils an iPad killer in the first half of 2012 reducing Apple market share to 50%

The Nexus 7 arrived in June if that counts with the Nexus 10 in October. It was warmly reviewed and
was selling about 1m a month in October. Apple still dominates with 56% market share but falling.

29


3. Apple launches a new disruptive TV initiative towards the end of 2012 or early 2013.63 Key
differentiators will be Siri voice technology and iCloud integration.

Not – yet but we’re holding it over for a bit later in 2013

4. Publishers make significant investments in richer content– moving beyond newspaper to
offerings with more video and greater interactivity.

Lots more video esp WSJ Worldstream, HuffPoLive etc (see section above)

5. We’ll start to move from social as a companion to TV to true social television. By year's end
most big live shows (>5m audience) are driving to their own second screen experience.

Significant movement. ITV reporting 250,000 concurrent users for Britain’s Got Talent second screen for
example

6. Olympics: Triumph for new adaptive http streaming technologies (HLS, HDS and MPEG DASH).
This allows more efficient and scalable streaming, faster start up and opportunities to cache live
streams

More than 1 million concurrent users to a single stream and in 2.8 petabytes on the busiest day with
the peak traffic moment occurring when Bradley Wiggins won Gold at 700 Gb/s.

7. More publishers move towards responsive design across phones and tablets

It’s been a big trend as mentioned above. There is more on the way along with the move to html5
mobile/tablet sites in addition to a more conventional desktop.

8. Watch intelligent social news readers (Zite, Linked in top news, Flipboard). Twitter makes big
moves here too – delivering its first news aggregation products

Twitter vastly improved its discovery interface around news, introduced weekly news round ups
based on a start-up it bought --- and are pushing further in this direction this year

9. EU cookies law makes little difference

Few ignored the directive, as we suggested they might, but the ‘carry on to view’ popups ensured
that no-one read the small print and cookies continue as before complete with all those annoying ads
that follow you round the web

10. Linked data and the semantic web moves further to mainstream

This remains a slow burn with ups and downs along the way. The data market' service from Talis,
called Kasabi, was pulled. We did see more moves towards ‘semantic google’ though with features
such as the 'entity' results box, author searches - working out more about the structure of the
content than just the links and the HTML. More quiet progress next year.

63
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/01/04/designer_jony_ive_reportedly_has_a_50inch_apple_television_in_his_studio.html

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