As anyone working in the news industry today knows, publishers face numerous challenges across a number of areas from editorial concerns to trying to transition businesses from print to digital and grow revenues, but at the heart of most of these challenges is finding better ways to connect with and engage audiences.

Further complicating matters is the increasing generational digital gap between younger users and those who are middle aged and older.

Listen to your users

How do we solve these challenges? There’s no easy answer, but listening to your users is essential, said Stenberg during his welcome address to the audience at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe event, which is taking place in person and at Schibsted’s (and VG’s) headquarters in Oslo, Norway.

However, Stenberg noted that when talking with users, it’s essential to remember that those who are sitting in front of you are likely thinking very differently from you. And these differences might mean you are not even able to ask them the right questions.

For example, he noted that at 40, he doesn’t consider himself especially old, but he nevertheless has a very different technology view and vocabulary from his teenaged son. “Smart TVs” or “flatscreens,” to those in their middle years, are just “TVs” and “screens” for those in their teens and twenties who have never experienced older versions. More crucially, these are not just different words but represent different ways of thinking.

Stenberg also described an example of a VG developer who works as “a taxi driver” on Tuesdays. That’s interesting, Stenberg said he thought when he heard this, but he also wondered why and decided to ask the man about it. It turned out that the developer does his taxi driving in a virtual world simulation game that is an extraordinarily detailed mirror of the “real world.”

Stenberg asked the man to record a session that he could watch, which he played a short portion of for the DME audience.

Within that virtual world, he pointed out that many forms of media, such as Twitter and even VG also exist, but it’s not the real Twitter or VG, of course, but impressive, life-like parallel versions, which also have their own “employees” working for them just as that young VG developer works as a taxi driver.

‘A regular part of their lives’

“The metaverse is not something that is ahead of us. It goes without saying that for our kids it’s been there for years,” Stenberg said. “It’s something way different than what we are doing.

For today’s younger audiences, the metaverse is not something that they “enter” but rather something that is a natural, regular part of their social lives, so much so that they can find it rather strange to think or talk about it.

So, as we move forward in developing our news services and products, Stenberg said, we must keep in mind that those of us working in the news industry today are still kind of “old school” in our mindsets when compared with those younger audiences who are so very vital for our future growth and indeed, survival.