News has splintered in every direction everywhere – and it’s not going to stop. The appetite for news is bigger than ever. Mobile and online consumption has soared. Twitter makes it personal and fast. Out of the Philippines, ABS-CBN’s ANC cable news channel has gone global in a big way. From Germany, DW started driving a new English-language agenda in the middle of 2015 with a new global news service and companion app. Out of the U.K., BBC launched its first fully commercially funded non-English language website in Japan in October. To mention a microscopic fraction of the universe’s news-based innovation.

Major organisations are taking multi-platform news gathering to a new level, integrating teams and news rooms and making sure they’re on all screens all the time with platform-appropriate stories in suitable formats, from mobile video to HD broadcast. All the while keeping careful watch that their public trust barometers don’t fall.

Integrated newsrooms are now seen as a must-have. “Our producers, writers, reporters and anchors work across all platforms – they file for TV, they file for web and mobile, and they file for social. This has been a deliberate shift,” says CNN International’s senior vice president and managing director, Ellana Lee.

“We have found what we do on TV drives people to our website, and when people are on web and mobile it drives them to TV. It’s the virtuous circle of digital and linear and the result is an increase in total audience consumption,” Lee adds.

Ging Reyes, ABS-CBN Corp’s senior vice president/head of integrated news and current affairs and managing director of cable news channel ANC, says her integrated team has learned to be more responsive to the needs of our various platforms. “Our journalists have gone beyond re-purposing stories. The result is a more cohesive team that has a stronger connection to our different news audiences. We see this manifested in our stories from the national beats and the regions that are given unique treatments in our free TV and cable channels, as well as our radio and digital platforms,” she says.

ALL THINGS MOBILE

Mobile news consumption soared in 2015. News organisations have been and are piling into – and also driving – the on-the-move environment. Constant upgrades are rolling out. New technologies are being integrated all the time.

Richard Porter, Controller of English, BBC World Service Group, says the process of making all BBC sites responsive to multiple devices has been completed. “Whatever device users come in on, they will get a version that works on that device,” he says. “We recognise that audiences are coming from different devices and want to optimise the experience,” he adds.

Porter says this year’s big changes have been the focus on mobile consumption of news, which runs alongside higher quality devices and faster broadband access. “The rise of the smart phone and the way in which people are using it as a primary form of news consumption” has a major impact, he says.

The new version of the news app BBC launched in the summer “was a big step forward for us,” he says. One of the key elements is the ability to personalise news feeds. The app is also easier to use and offers a lot more features, Porter adds.

Mobile video is also a significant trend this year, Porter says. Video consumption on the BBC app went up by more than 100% after the app launched. “We hoped it would happen and it’s reassuring,” he says.

BBC now has seven million monthly unique browsers on mobile in Asia and 1.45 million on the app, which generate more than 100 million page views (from morethan one billion globally). Although there are more visitors to BBC’s mobile site than the app at the moment, the apps are generating more traffic/page views than the mobile site. In total, mobile and app make up two thirds of BBC’s Asia-Pacific traffic, and the app makes up 47% of page views, with mobile another 20%.

CNN International is also notching up digital successes. Its digital properties have around 270 million page views a month. Over 50% of all page views of CNN’s International edition (web and apps) are on mobile.

Reyes charts ABS-CBN’s digital progress, saying ABS-CBN’s 24-hour cable news channel ANC leads its category at home and is distributed in North America, the rest of Asia and Europe. The news-based Facebook community is 9.3 million strong, making it one of the leading Facebook publishers in the world. And Google Analytics data shows that the digital news portal averages 60.7 million monthly sessions. At home, ABS-CBN News’ flagship show on free-TV has a 30% nationwide rating and its radio news station tops the charts in Mega Manila.

Of ABS-CBNnews.com’s more than 60 million average monthly sessions, almost 75% are from Asia. And almost half of monthly sessions from Asia are on mobile devices. Google Analytics data shows that 46% (about 28 million) of monthly sessions from January to October this year were on mobile devices.

Reyes says ABS-CBN has been thinking digital-first for a while, and in 2015 began “to aggressively pursue stories that strongly appealed to digital news consumers, and published them exclusively on our digital platform. We’ve had a number of digital-first and digital-only presentations, which contributed to the increased traffic to our news site,” she says.

Higher digital engagement gives ABS-CBN greater insights. “We learned more about our digital audience and so we began to look at a user-centered approach in our design and in our multi-media presentations,” she adds.

SOCIAL MEDIA

The impact of social media is undeniable, and remains “extremely significant,” Porter says. BBC’s involvement in the social space includes a pop-up Thai Facebook page in Thai and English after military authorities pulled news channels off air during the coup in 2014; a BBC Nepali channel on instant message/call app, Viber, to deliver emergency info after the earthquake; Facebook Instant Articles (BBC public service youth news brand Newsbeat articles hosted on Facebook’s servers, meaning they appear instantly rather than users having to follow a link); a Line channel in English and Hindi, which now has one million subscribers; and Internet.org, a stripped-down web news platform for users with limited data.

“Our approach is that we will be present where we see audiences gathering, we will go where the audience has gone, follow what audiences do,” he says.

At the same time, CNN’s Lee warns that “social media is no substitute for professional journalism. The problem with social media, even at its best, is that it rarely shows more than one aspect of a story. While social media platforms have proven to be great tools for journalists, they do not replace quality journalism,” she says.

Reyes point out the massive impact of social media-based crowd-sourced and shared information in the Philippines. “At no time did we experience more the power of crowd-sourced content than in 2015,” Reyes says.

“Social media became a big source of news content for us and other media organisations in the Philippines. The big stories covered by the traditional media took a life of their own once posted, shared and re-shared by netizens. Exposes such as the bullet scam at the airports and the proposal to tax balikbayan cargo boxes [boxes sent home by overseas Filipino workers] heavily resonated with the public and caused an emotional outburst that forced authorities to take action,” she adds.

While audience engagement has become a given, BBC’s Porter says levels of involvement are sometimes unexpected. “Sometimes we are surprised by the way in which audiences engage,” he says. The Bangkok bombing coverage in the summer, for instance, was one of BBC’s highest number of page views ever. “We are quite taken by the numbers. We pay attention to that,” he says.

BIG BRAND NEWS

Big-brand news’ importance and relevance has not been diminished by exploding sources, and trust is – as it has always been – a huge factor for news outlets. “Trust is the most vital commodity of a news organisation,” CNN’s Lee says. “People often say that they heard or saw something on social or another media outlet and then went to CNN to see if it’s true,” she adds.

Porter adds that the BBC takes nothing for granted. “There are many new choices and we don’t for a minute have a sense of entitlement... we work hard to maintain audiences. Trust is one of the reasons why we continue to remain relevant. People want a safe haven,” he says.

Porter says BBC is at the top of the global list of most tweeted URLs. “That’s a good thing because it suggests that people trust what we do. If people are sharing our content, they trust and believe,” he says.

ABS-CBN’s Reyes agrees. The new information environment may have revolutionised news consumption, “but I believe this did not in any way diminish the power and reach of big-brand news,” she says. “This new environment has helped us further widen our reach, enabling us to connect with our audience on various touch points”, she adds.

COMING SOON

Reyes says the biggest news trends in the Philippines in 2016 are likely to include a higher level of collaboration and engagement between traditional and social media.

“2016 is an election year so we are prepared for a more involved public,” she says. “Citizens will engage more with the media as they weigh in on many issues and the candidates who deserve to be elected leaders of this country. Social media sentiment may begin to have a higher correlation with surveys, which track candidates’ performance, given that about 38 million Filipinos have Internet access and smart phone penetration has increased to 40%”.

“Globally, the digital transformation continues with more and more news organisations having a stronger presence on social media. 2016 will be a year of stronger alliances and partnerships between the legacy and digital businesses. Some digital outfits will diversify into other fields, such as e-commerce or gaming. However, great visuals and compelling stories will still command the highest levels of engagement,” Reyes says.

CNN’s Lee says 2016’s biggest news trend will be change. “The audience will continue to change the way they consume news and information and... we will continue to move with our audience,” she says.

Porter expects a continuation of what’s already being seen – mobile video consumption will grow, as will efforts by news broadcasters to serve a global audience in every which way with pictures and video.

He’s not alone in saying: “We are very committed to ensuring that audiences get the best experiences whatever device they choose to come to us on”. That cannot be bad news.

Context is king

ABS-CBN unveiled its cable news do-over at the end of October, opening to door to what it says is a new era of “context amid an ever growing deluge of media information”.

The change at 24-hour channel ANC comes ahead of elections in the Philippines in 2016, and runs alongside soaring use of ABS-CBN’s online platform, which has more than 60 million sessions a month, as well as rising viewership of its flagship nightly news programme on ABS-CBN’s national free-TV station.

The new ANC lineup has news at the top of the hour and a focus on in-depth analysis across politics, business, economy, lifestyle, and entertainment. “Better form and better substance,” says Ging Reyes, senior vice president and head of Philippines’ broadcaster ABS-CBN’s integrated news and current affairs group and managing director of ANC.

ANC’s goal is “a holistic experience”, opening the day with a news roundup at 5am followed by two and a half hours of local and international news, business, politics, human interest, sports, tech, travel, arts and lifestyle, plus local weather updates and traffic reports.

This article first appeared in ContentAsia Issue 6, 2015, published in December 2015.