Ashley Norris

Over the past decade social media has provided a rich source of news for media companies. Yet the phenomenon of fake news, and in particular the emergence of deep fakes, has meant that organisations have had to tweak their approach.

In recent years, the Amazon-owned livestreaming video platform Twitch has become an increasingly attractive option for both brands and media companies who want to engage with young audiences. A site that was largely built on gaming activities has now evolved and features all kinds of content, including video from media behemoths like The Washington Post, Sky News and Cheddar.

“Literally anybody can create a podcast,” argues Declan Moore, Head of International at leading podcast studio, Wondery. “But few can make a good one; even fewer can tell a compelling story over multiple episodes; and only a select few can tell a compelling story that moves/touches people.”

Zetland is a Danish media company that aims to take its audience behind the news via the several longform stories and the podcast it issues each day to its 20,000 subscription paying members.

Berlin based Onefootball has been a key player in global sports content for over a decade. The app-based platform, which grew massively in the early days of the smartphone era, now delivers content in a variety of formats, including video and audio, to huge audiences across the globe.

Monitoring and responding to hate speech is becoming an ever increasing problem for governments, social platforms, the media and brands. In order to react to hate speech companies first have to detect and understand it — often a very difficult process given the way that languages evolve.

Facebook’s long promised olive branch to publishers, the Facebook News section, which features content exclusively from media companies, has finally gone live today in the US. 

Six months after its US launch Apple’s digital news and magazine subscription service, Apple News+, has arrived in the UK. The new service gives users access to more than 150 publications for a single monthly fee. The move, an attempt to build a Spotify or Netflix for magazine/newspaper content, includes access to publications such as The Times and The Sunday Times, Cosmopolitan UK, Elle UK, Esquire UK, FourFourTwo, Empire and Hello! as well as a number of US magazines and newspapers.

Perhaps the biggest issue surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), and in particular its use in the media, is that executives need to finally grasp what AI actually is. What jobs can it undertake, and how can it save publishers time and money and improve their products.

Each year one of the key themes of DIS is how technology has energised magazine publishers in markets across the globe. This year was no different with a quartet of presentations all looking in detail at how digital innovation has helped move companies into new and lucrative directions.