Introduction

Online news publishing has entered a new phase: content paid for by subscription or membership is the ‘new normal’. Paid content pioneers have enlarged the opportunities for publishers to take the risks of abandoning – or at least limiting – free digital material.

This programme focusses on how to exploit those openings and examine situations that often pose challenges to news publishers, particularly those without a paid content business model such as: 

• How to design fast-market entry with a paid content offering in order to compensate for the fall in print advertising revenue
• What identifies the target group willing to pay and what requirements do those target groups have for a digital news offering that is “better than free”
• How to drive digital change deeper and faster in the organisation
• How to cope with the transformative challenges for all parts of the organisation – editorial and commercial – posed by switching to being ‘reader-revenue led’.

Programme Objective

Newsroom & Business Transformation APAC (NBTA2021) aims to equip and coach leaders tasked with quick-starting paid content activities with the tools to tackle these issues. The programme’s objective is to shortcut the time-to-market for paid content product development and to substantially increase the chances of success for those projects.

The programme combines webinar teaching and coaching, theory and practice, case studies from across the world, guest interview sessions and hands-on project work by participants. These projects will be framed to produce an actionable plan to deal with a go-live challenge at participants’ companies. To support these projects and overcome budget hurdles, Facebook will support NBTA2021 with a substantial grant for each participating media company.