Let’s start with a short opinion poll.
How many of you have seen at least one cat video on the Internet this week?
Raise the hands, please.
Well, a lot; it’s good, they relieve stress.
I’ve been a journalist for almost 20 years.
The last years were the hardest
because people prefer to watch cute kitten videos
instead of reading serious news.
That means that advertising money goes to Facebook and Google,
which profit from cute kitten videos.
But for us, it means less money for quality journalism.
During the last decades,
traditional media has had two main sources of income:
advertising dollars and subscription fees.
But when the Internet was born, this business model was destroyed.
Advertising dollars from print went to the Internet,
directly to Google and Facebook,
where they can meet their client without an intermediary newspaper.
Here you can see how the money shifted from traditional media to Google
in a five-year period in the United States.
Since 2004, more than 50 billion dollars went to the Internet, to Google.
Let’s see how it looks in Latvia.
In Latvia, ten years ago,
there were overall 108 million euros in advertising.
And only 4% of them went to the Internet.
Now, ten years later, the overall advertising budget is less:
78 million euros,
and 20% goes to the Internet.
However, we have no idea
how much advertising money goes to Google and Facebook in Latvia.
Local businessmen with whom I spoke off the record
estimate it being around 90 million euros.
That money would be very useful
if it went to the traditional media instead of cute kitten videos.
So the big question is: how can media earn money to survive?
The answer is: there is not one single answer.
It’s time of experiments.
Some try to find their niche, like regional newspapers,
or The Economist, or the magazine Ir in Latvia.
Big giants like The Washington Post and The New York Times
experiment with paywalls.
But all around Europe and also the United States,
a new kind of media is born:
non-profit organizations that survive on grants and donors,
for example ProPublica, the biggest non-profit in America,
Mediapart in France, CORRECT!V in Germany,
and re:baltica in the Baltic countries.
There are two ways how we are experimenting:
with our business model, and creative ways of content delivery.
We are an NGO, a team of two and a half people.
Our annual income on average is 90,000 euros,
and with this money,
we hire around 30 contract-based professionals a year,
like video artists, photographers, and so on.
Our income comes from donations, grants, and teaching fees.
The main rule: the money should be clean.
It’s very special, taking into account that we live in Latvia,
which is a money-laundering country.
So, we work on a topic from six months till a year.
Last year, we did a research on inequality in education,
and it took us 386 hours of research.
A team of 10 people drove 1208 kilometers
and did more than 35 interviews.
And then we gave all of this for free to the mainstream media
to get a huge audience in Latvia and also in the region
because we translate our stories also in Russian and English.
Our second area of experiment: content delivery.
Recently, I heard this very excellent saying,
“Don’t blame your competitors, learn from them”.
While researching fake news in Latvia, we noticed a young, sexy YouTube guy
who by blaming and shaming the government
had collected more than 100,000 views on YouTube.
We decided to do a video annotation for our article
as a parody of this YouTube guy.
Let’s look at the video.
(Music)
(Video) Guy: (Latvian) Hello, Latvia.
If that’s still your name.
I hope you’re still together,
however you’re pulled apart.
(Music)
Inga Spriņģe: Hello, Latvia.
If that is still your name.
I want to speak on behalf of all of us.
I know that you already know,
but I want to tell you that we were robbed.
I’m sorry that you screamed, but we didn’t listen.
We were reading news and quotes on the Internet.
And those kitten pics …
they’re so sweet!
[1. Always check where the news is published –
on a recognized media outlet or on Facebook?]
[2. Is there a reference to a source? What kind of source is it?]
(On stage) IS: (English) At the end of this video,
we taught people how to recognize fake news.
It went viral.
While working on the education project,
we wanted to highlight that Latvia’s rural schools
offer a worse education than the city schools.
It’s sad, but that is what the PISA study showed;
[it’s a study that] measures education quality in 72 countries.
To compete with kitten videos on the social networks,
we used beans to illustrate our point.
(Video) IS: (Latvian) Here are the results in rural schools ten years ago.
And here – the results in Riga.
As we see, the results in Riga in the past ten years have improved,
while in rural schools, education quality has only deteriorated.
Of course, that doesn’t mean all rural schools in Latvia are bad.
There are students both in the countryside and in Riga
whose results are as high as in the international leader, Singapore.
[Singapore: 556]
However, those are exceptions,
and in Latvia many of the rural schools show poor results.
(On stage) IS: (English) We also used a very effective method
of showing before-and-after stories about the topic.
In this video we showed
how a physics teacher changed his way of teaching in two years.
This was our most watched video,
and it reached almost half a million people on Facebook.
(Video) Voiceover: (Latvian)
This is how the physics class by Jānis Čilipāns looked like
in Smārde elementary school in 2014.
There was nothing special.
Students sit in pairs, each doing their own work.
The teacher stands in front of the class and teaches theory.
But then Jānis realized that this teaching method no longer works.
Times and children have changed.
This is how Jānis’ class looked like two years later.
(On stage) IS: (English) And one more example.
On Latvian Independence Day [in 2016],
the member of the European Parliament, the famous Iveta Grigule,
sent out a postcard with congratulations to every citizen in Latvia.
She is a very controversial lady,
because she had bought her seat through a massive advertising campaign
which consisted of many such spams,
I’m sorry, postcards.
Meanwhile, she run away from every journalist she saw on her way.
So we decided to make a gift for her too.
We made our own postcard, which said:
“Dear voters! Since you elected me in the European Parliament in 2014,
I’ve done this – performed in plenary sessions four times,
signed motions three times, asked questions seven times,
and for that I’ve received 351 000 euros.
God bless Latvia!”
It went viral.
Of course, we are not the only ones experimenting.
Recently, the influential American media company Buzzfeed
attracted one million readers by … let’s watch it!
(Video) Girl: Like Rocky or something … 678.
Guy: 679.
(Laughter)
(Screams)
Girl: 679! Oh, my god!
Guy: 80!
(On stage) IS: So, can you believe it?
They blew up a watermelon,
which attracted around, I was mistaken, not a million readers, viewers –
three million viewers!
Even CNN, reported about how Buzzfeed blew up a watermelon.
Meanwhile, by attracting attention with blowing up a watermelon
and showing kitten videos,
they can earn money for important articles,
like about Trump and his affairs with Russia.
So, that is the good part about it.
So, don’t blame competitors, learn from them.
If you can earn money by showing kitten videos
and thus do important investigations,
do it.
Do it, even if your older colleagues disapprove.
One of my greatest authorities in the media world
is the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.
It’s a primary journalism institution at Harward University.
It offers the most prestigious fellowship programs for journalists.
I’ve tried but never got in.
Nieman fellows have collectively won 101 Pulitzer Prizes.
I’m following them on Twitter and reading every tweet.
And then, one day, I saw this tweet.
Yes, my path was right!
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
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