The global news media is in a state of disruption and change, which means companies must learn how to grow and evolve in times of uncertainty.

During this week’s Webinar, Unpacking 2023: How African media companies can thrive in uncertain times, Dr. Anderson Uvie-Emegbo, chair of the INMA Africa Advisory Committee, addressed some specific challenges and opportunities facing African news media companies. He then shared what companies must do to prepare for the future.

Several factors of change are universal within the industry, such as widespread digital transformation, cross-industry collaborations, changing revenue models, newsroom reorganisation, and more.

But Africa also has distinct individual drivers of change, such as an uncertain political economy, a demand in Afrocentric content, and the African diaspora, which is driving demand for displaced persons to connect through such things as media Web sites, podcasts, social media, and more.

“They represent a significant source of revenue for the continent,” he said. “How much are we doing with them?”

One of the biggest drivers of change is digital transformation, which Uvie-Emegbo defined as “the reinvention of an organisation.” That reinvention touches all elements and departments, including the organisation’s vision, business model, structure, processes, resources, and culture.

“There’s no reinvention … if it is just reinvention of products and not reinvention of the processes,” he explained. “Or if we’ve borrowed a business model that works in another country, but we’ve not restructured and retooled our team. If we’ve not created the right culture that supports all of this. That’s not digital transformation. And that will not be as profitable as it should be.”

To be profitable with digital transformation, Uvie-Emegbo said companies must pivot and be able to change “our opinions, our statements, our decisions.” And because of the rapid pace of digital and technological changes occurring, such pivoting must be done quickly and urgently.

The human side of digital transformation

But as companies dig into digital transformation, the consumer must take priority over the product, he said: “We need to meet what we call their unmet needs: their pain point, their challenges, their frustrations in consuming news, in getting entertainment, in all of the things they do with us.”

That comes down to personalisation, which consumers have come to expect — but not all media companies are delivering it.

“Something else it needs to address for people is that you need to address things around inclusivity, diversity in terms of representation,” Uvie-Emegbo noted. “Some consumers may feel that, well, some of the content here does not represent me, does not speak to my needs. It speaks to other groups of people. So we are not being represented.”

Ensuring a personalised and inclusive experience can go a long way in building habit and relationships that will lead to loyalty and subscriptions for news media organisations.

News media’s history is filled with digital disruptions that forever changed it. From the Internet and mobile phones to social media and the Internet of Things, these trends shaped it into what it has become today.

“They all transformed how we communicate, how we access information, how we connect, how we do business, how we generate insights about things, how we store and manage data,” he said. “And Google made search simpler, they made it more accurate, more reliable, they did it more efficiently.”

That has led to the next big disruption: generative AI.

The next big thing

“Generative AI has opened a new vista, a new front, of radical disruptive innovation because it gives human-level understanding, interpretation, and generation of what you call context-relevant conversation,” Uvie-Emegbo said.

There are many ways it could disrupt news media organisations, affecting everything from the business model to how news is generated.

“Now there’s an AI race. Who’s going to own it? We don’t know how it will play out, but we know that once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s too late,” he said. 

“What kind of content gets recommended to me will change, curation and correlation of content will change. Everything around social media will change. This changes everything.”

Building for the future

Digital progress and advancing data analytics offer new opportunities to improve the audience experience to drive conversions. Uvie-Emegbo said one way to do that is to build more local content from the African perspective.

“There are so many stories being told about Africa that is not about Africa, it’s not [being told] by Africans,” he explained. “We need African voices, African perspectives, African experiences told in African voices.”

African news media companies can take many actions to optimise the current media landscape: “The high-quality user experience is still an area that we need to obsess over and focus on. And we need a lot of risk-taking because what I’ve found is that there’s a lot of reluctance in change, in driving change that truly reinvents businesses that change the way we operate,” Uvie-Emegbo said. “And we need to take bold steps to build the required strategic capabilities in our teams.”

That will require strategic partnerships and building teams with the right capabilities, he said, reminding attendees that INMA offers many tools and resources that can help meet their needs. Uvie-Emegbo said a move toward the future sometimes requires getting rid of what no longer serves an organisation.

“The question I’m going to leave you with is: How willing are you and your organisation to burn the bridges that brought you all to where you are now?” he asked. “How willing are you to blow the bridge behind, hit the reset button, and start afresh?” 

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