Ashley Norris

The last session of the first day at DIS featured Nick Rockwell, the CTO of New York Times. He took as his theme ‘News in the Age of Algorithmic Recommendation,’ and used the slot to explore the newspaper's innovations in the personalisation of content.

Keeping up with the demands of digital innovation as well as ever changing media marketplaces, has lead to a boom in mergers and acquisitions. In recent years we have seen publishers buying businesses to develop their existing brands via tech, events or digital services, or to acquire rivals and strengthen their positions in a specific market sector.

How do you take a world renowned print brand and transform it into a multi-platform media company? That was the task facing Vince Errico, when he took on the role of chief digital officer at Trusted Media Brands (formerly known as the Reader's Digest Association) three years ago.

Last year Facebook hired Jesper Doub, who was then CEO of German media giant Spiegel Online, to lead its new media partnership team. In the past the high profile executive has been both a critic of Facebook and a passionate advocate of its Facebook Journalism Project.

There is a lot of discussion within the content marketing, and indeed the publishing industry in general, as to how recent technological innovations are going to change branded communications. Christine Beardsell, chief content officer and board member of C3, and presenter at DIS 2019, is among the figures leading the conversation. 

ProPublica is something of an American institution having been breaking investigative news stories since 2007. In an era of fast news where scoops invariably don’t stay that way for long ProPublica has among other things innovated in coverage of hate crimes, abuses by big tech companies and most recently the scandals that have dogged the Trump Administration.

The Canadian publishing market is a fascinating one - with the local media not only having to create content in two languages, but also facing fierce competition from across the border in the US.

There is a lot of discussion in media and tech circles about automated content and how it might change the dynamics of the way that shortform stories, especially in the newsroom, are created. Yet behind the scenes innovative startups have been quietly working away to set up pilots, experiments and now live partnerships where machine learning bots actually deliver that structured, data heavy content.

There is a growing number of startups who are looking to find new ways to bridge the gap between journalists and the communities they serve. Hearken is one, and its founder, Jennifer Brandel, will be speaking at this year’s Digital Innovators' Summit (DIS). Another innovative startup in the sphere of ‘service journalism’ is Outlier Media from Detroit, which was founded by Sarah Alvarez.

One of the big media events of last year was the announcement of the launch of Tortoise  - the ‘slow news’ startup helmed by a quartet of high profile execs. Between them, ex BBC News Director James Harding, former Dow Jones president Katie Vanneck-Smith, independent director, Ceci Kurzman, and former US ambassador to Sweden Matthew Barzun hope that they can disrupt the the way people consume news by delivering it a more thoughtful, less instantaneous way.