Journalism in 2025
in four future scenarios: part 1
Working session regarding media organisations
www.journalism2025.com
Structure of this presentation
• This presentation consists of three parts - the first two
parts are for the workshop and the last part is for the
workshop facilitator. Please read this presentation
thoroughly if this is the first time you have facilitated this
workshop.
• Part 1: explanation of the scenario research for use
during the workshop
• Part 2: Working with the scenarios within your training
program
• Part 3: instructions for the workshop facilitator
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SVDJ research into the future of
journalism
Research was carried out in an interactive process with more than 150
journalists, scientists, publishers, directors, editors, educators and
philosophers.
The result was:
• A report to help government have a political debate about the future
of journalism
• www.journalism2025.com: a website that presents trends and
scenarios clearly and gives clarity to the changes
• Roadmaps for working sessions about the scenarios so that
journalists and journalistic organisations are assisted in their
renewal efforts
www.journalism2025.com
How were the scenarios developed?
• Trends were collected and analysed
• Trends with the greatest impact were selected
• Fundamental uncertainties were set against each other
• After which, greatly differing potential futures emerge
NB
When there is a reference to a page number in this presentation, it refers to the
SVDJ report, Otherwise, any news? When we refer to slides, we mean this
PowerPoint presentation
www.journalism2025.com
What are scenarios?
• Fictional stories about the future
• They describe the world around you:
- that which you cannot influence
- but which has a significant impact on journalism
• A thinking experiment: what if the world were to look like this?
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What do you get from
scenarios?
• A better understanding of a complex world
• Earlier recognition of important developments
• Fewer surprises
• Help to define a strategy
• Placing a sharper focus on the strategic challenges
facing your company/publisher
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Looking at the trends:
Trends in the study are divided into:
• Leading, independent trends: social and technological
developments with great influence on journalism
• Dependent trends: trends within journalism itself
The extent to which the both the steering, independent
trends, as well as the dependent trends, can be determined
accurately (see p. 24).
www.journalism2025.com
What the participants in the scenario
project are convinced will happen:
• Disruption to revenue models: subscriptions, single copy sales,
advertising
• Smart devices and social media changing the playing field
• New consumers behaving fundamentally differently: simultaneous
consumption, news snacking, references to source materials, Martini
principle (consumers wanting news 'anytime, anywhere')
• Reduction of reading time
• News consumer in the centre: on demand is the future
• Loss of interest in titles: unbundling, references, self publishing
• Opportunities for non-traditional news providers
• Images become increasingly important
www.journalism2025.com
What the participants in the scenario
project are sure will happen:
 The internet of things
 Media use is ambient: ubiquitous, embedded and adaptive
 Algorithms steer the consumption of news
 Bandwidth growth creates more opportunities for images
• Public trust in journalism falls
• The importance of transparency and the accountability of journalists
increases
• The citizen as a journalist?
• The power of change within traditional journalism organisations is
too low?
www.journalism2025.com
What raises more questions and is still
uncertain:
• Smarter use of personal details vs. privacy violation?
• Technology creates market power: impotence of
governments concerning the power of technology
giants?
 Future cuts to public broadcasting?
 De-centralisation creates more demand for local news?
• Institutional versus individual(s): control versus selforganisation?
• Sharing economy?
• Widening gap in society?
www.journalism2025.com
The scenarios vary:
1. To what extent are technological innovations accepted?
2. Will consumers take the initiative to satisfy their needs
or do they expect brands and (government) institutions
to do that for them?
www.journalism2025.com
What can we do?
What are we allowed to
do?
What do we want to do?
acceptance of technology
radical
reluctance
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benefits of new technologies are
felt far and wide
technology is very user-friendly
 good return on investment
 digital and mobile technology =
the future
 discussion about the pace of
development, the extent to which
everyone participates and safety.
 increasing awareness of links
between technology, market
power and divisions in society
Who do we trust?
How do we arrange things?
Who takes the initiative?
do-it-yourself
do-it-for-me
social trust
 take our own initiative
 trust our peers
 more opportunities to settle matters
themselves
 cut-out-the-middle-man
 crowdfunding & sourcing
 Initiative by brands & government
 trust in institutions, companies,
brands
 convenience & time savings & clarity
 strength and decisiveness of
institutions, guarantees
 transparent government and
institutions
www.journalism2025.com
radical
do-it-yourself
acceptance of
technology
Wisdom of
the crowd
A handful of
Apples
do-it-for-me
social trust
Darwin's
Game
The Shire
reluctance
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• Economy and society dominated by precocious
inventors, start-ups and virtual collaborations: new
initiatives appear and disappear rapidly
• A strong do-it-yourself mentality: co-creation, sharing
and crowdfunding make large breakthroughs. The role of
government is small.
• Influence of Google and Facebook et al is greatly
diminished: aversion to privacy violation & market
power
• The decision about what news is no longer determined
by media brands, but the crowd. Journalists are primarily
a collector, curator and community manager
do-it-yourself
(diy)
radical
acceptance of
technology
Wisdom of the crowd
trust
do-it-for-me
(difm)
www.journalism2025.com
reluctance
A handful of Apples
acceptance of technology
radical
• A handful of mega-corporations increasingly determine the
economic, social and political agenda.
• The CEOs of Ali Baba, Apple, Google and Rosneft are more
powerful than many heads of state. Many smaller players are
taken over or have to make way.
• Hardware, software, physical products, content: everything is
branded and offered via integrated chains, which is also true for
most of the news.
• News is personalised: push-info
• Niche for quality journalism. Most traditional media companies
have not survived. A few do their best to retain their
independence, but the bulk of the population considers this to be
an uninteresting rearguard action as long as people get exactly
what they want
do-ityourself
(diy)
trust
reluctance
www.journalism2025.com
do-it-for-me
(difm)
radical
The Shire
social trust
do-it-for-me
(difm)
• Small-scale, self-reliance and caution are important
societal values. The caring government has largely pulled
away. One's own district and region are the new anchor
points.
• Continuous search for like-minded people in different
communities
• Cybercrime and privacy violations: the general opinion is
that technology needs to be handled with extreme caution
• The media landscape is an archipelago of small titles.
Many journalistic newspapers and magazines have been
stopped.
• Thematic community sites to which both citizen
journalists and professionals contribute. Mostly local focus.
Sometimes only echo rooms
acceptance of technology
do-ityourself
(diy)
reluctance
www.journalism2025.com
radical
do-ityourself
(diy)
Acceptance of technology
Darwin's Game
do-it-for-me
(difm)
• Institutions win back the trust of their original public.
They show themselves more transparent and
accessible; in dialogue.
• The journalistic landscape is evolving: a number of
traditional news bringers succeed in making their
brands relevant again, and to curb the explosive fall in
viewers and subscribers. Others are too slow and fall
by the way-side. Wide variation in the way news is
offered and reported.
• Traditional media companies significantly change
their structure through efficiency savings, close cooperation and continuously experimenting with
business models.
• The public expects journalism to prove itself over
again, makes high demands and is not loyal to
specific brands
reluctance
www.journalism2025.com
Part 2
Working with the four scenarios
Working session regarding media organisations
www.journalism2025.com
The scenarios can be looked at from
three perspectives
• Perspective 1:
Implications of the scenarios, and exploring and
recognising options for action.
• Perspective 2:
Checking of current plans & implicit/explicit
strategies.
• Perspective 3:
Explore opportunities to influence the scenarios
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Perspective 1: Implications of the
scenarios, and exploring and
recognising options for action
• Implications of the four scenarios and projecting
one's own company/organisation/function
• Options for action in 2015 and 2025
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Perspective 1: implications
• Take yourself to 2025...
• Immerse yourself in one scenario at a time and imagine
that you have relevant training/experience in 2025.
(whether you agree with the scenario is irrelevant)
• Determine the consequences of each scenario for
journalism & the media sector as a whole
• Which of the existing beliefs for this time (2015) are
outdated in this scenario?
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Perspective 1 Implications for media
companies
What are the implications per scenario for:
• Current business models
• Titles in the portfolio
• Genres that can be successful
• The required competencies of employees
• Establishment of your company
• Takeovers and/or collaboration partners
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Perspective 1: options
What are the options for action in each scenario?
1. What things that you are currently doing would
you most likely have to reduce or even stop
(the most difficult!)
2. What new things would you have to start or
increase the tempo of (the nicest!)
3. What does that mean for the commitment of
resources (manpower, money, systems)
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Perspective 2: cleaning out existing
strategy
• Checking current plans & strategy
• Concrete actions!
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Perspective 2: Clean-out
If we take our existing visions, implicit and explicit strategies & plans
and expose them to the 'storm force' of a scenario:
• What is the extent of the damage caused to our existing plans in all
four scenarios?
• What are the risks, threats and opportunities in each of the four
scenarios and to what extent are they covered by the current plan?
• Read paragraph 5.3 (pages 36 and 37): to what extent does the
current strategy address the strategic challenges for journalism
described here?
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Perspective: concrete actions!
Options, monitoring and 'clean-out' requirements for all
three concrete actions. What are they?
• For the upcoming quarter?
• For the coming year?
• For the coming 3 years?
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Perspective 3
Desirability of exploring the scenarios & possibilities to
influence research
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Perspective 3: questions posed by the
scenarios
•
•
•
•
Which scenario do you deem most likely and why?
Which scenario do you prefer and why?
Which scenario do you fear and why?
Can you see any opportunities for you to promote a
scenario, whether or not it becomes reality or not?
• How can you increase the intervention capabilities (think
for example of promoting collaboration)
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Part 3
Practical use of the handbook with
scenarios
Working session regarding media organisations
www.journalism2025.com
Explanation
This presentation can be used to support your use of the scenarios to explore the future
of journalism and your role in it.
The most fruitful approach is to do that during either one or several working sessions and
a mixed group.
We advise you to appoint 1 person to act as the facilitator of the working session.
In some places the slides contain notes for the facilitator of the working session.
NB
When there is a reference to a page number, it refers to the SVDJ report, Otherwise, any
news? When we refer to slides, we mean this PowerPoint presentation
www.journalism2025.com
Preparation of the working session (1)
Reserve at least 2.5 hours for the working session
Think carefully about the composition of the group. Often, the best result come from a
mix of ages, experience and expertise. For example: journalists, publishers, freelancers,
as well as marketing & sales.
All participants should read the SVDJ report in advance (available for download from
www.journalism2025.com).
The facilitator should take the following materials for attendees:
• the summary from the report for all participants (p. 4 & 5);
• overview of the trends (p. 24)
• short descriptions of the scenarios (p. 28)
The facilitator should read this presentation and make adjustments as required (see next
slide)
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Preparation of the working session (2)
This presentation provides a brief summary of the process of the scenarios, describes
the value of the scenarios and introduces the four different scenarios.
There are then three different ways in which the scenarios can be used (in this
presentation, we call these three perspectives). You can choose one, or do all three. If
you choose to do just one, we advise perspective 1 because this is the core of scenario
thinking: experiencing the future before being required to make informed choices.
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