By Emmy Abdul Alim

Artifacts Labs, the newspaper’s blockchain venture, is now a separate business that wants to “help other media, historical and cultural institutions around the world step into Web 3.0 through the preservation of their archives on the blockchain,” said SCMP CEO Gary Liu.

There are opportunities in Web 3.0 for the news industry to leverage for new audience engagements and revenue, said Liu, who was speaking at WAN-IFRA’s recent Asian Media Leaders Summit. “The metaverse to us is any digital world in which people can have authentically unique identities and real ownership of digital assets,” he said. 

Also on the panel discussing how news organisations can participate in the metaverse were Chen May Yee of Wunderman Thompson Intelligence, and Kapil Chhabra and Olaf Kwakman from 3D visualisation company Silver Wings XR.

Understand NFT communities

With traditional news business models increasingly being disrupted by new technologies, platforms, and alternative content creators, SCMP studied blockchain and its use for four years to learn how Web 3.0 could produce and sustain revenues for publishers.

The 118-year-old newspaper also realised that its historical archives were among its most valuable assets but they remained largely hidden. The company came to understand the value of its archives and how to preserve them using blockchain, while at the same time monetising their content via NFTs.

“Some [archives] are accessible via libraries or enterprise licensing and subscription models but are almost always at the mercy of philanthropy or are sold at a price that perpetually undervalued the content,” said Liu.

He advised news companies to first become familiar with the technologies and applications to understand how they connect and engage with their communities.

“If you want to consider NFTs as a way to make money off of existing archives, start by buying an NFT and joining an NFT community to understand why they’re buying and why they care about the community,” he said.

“Because if you just think about it as a way to make money and it becomes a short-term plan, I think there will be failure and you’ll likely misunderstand the opportunity ahead of us,” he added.

SCMP learned that more than just generating a new stream of revenue, its foray into NFTs affirmed its thesis that there was a community “eager to collect historical entities, helping to preserve these assets on the blockchain.”

“Blockchain enables us to record and publish via an immutable ledger that provides greater transparency and accountability and long-term security to news media. It is actually fully secure preservation,” Liu said.

WT Intelligence APAC Director Chen May Yee agrees that news organisations should not use Web 3.0 just because it’s trendy.

“First and foremost, [news organisations should] really think why they’re in the business, to never lose sight of that and not take on a technology for the sake of having an immersive room or for the sake of having an augmented reality story because your readers are going to see through that,” said Chen.

“If it’s not going to give them anything more than scanning a story, they’re not going to come back,” she added.

The metaverse is making money

Chen pointed out that revenue from advertising, which forms an important component of news and media organisations’ business models, is already flying to the metaverse.

For example, the beer brand Miller Lite hosted a bar in the Decentraland metaverse during the American Superbowl this year.

Other sectors such as fashion, art, entertainment, and social platforms are also exploring the metaverse.

A prominent example is the Italian design house Balenciaga in December 2020 launching a new collection not on the runway but in the video game Afterworld: The Age Of Tomorrow, with avatars dressed in its Fall 2021 line.

Other spaces to look out for include online virtual worlds social networks such as IMVU, a space that aligns with the creator generation by allowing users to come up with their own avatars and pieces of clothing that they can also sell in the metaverse, said Chen.

“If the currency of the past was how much you made, or income, and that moved to your influence in the world, now creativity has become the currency in the metaverse,” she added.

What does the metaverse mean for the news industry and journalism?

With the metaverse increasingly opening up for many sectors, it is becoming harder to distinguish between “real life” and a life lived digitally, said Chen.

“For news and journalism, where the goal is always reality and truth, this can be quite frightening,” she said.

“Is the metaverse going to amplify misinformation and disinformation or could it augment storytelling for journalists? Will these new platforms cannibalise existing ones as we saw with the internet and are we going to see the rise of new types of news organisations which may or may not have the ethics of the current ones?” she asked.

At the product level, Olaf Kwakman, Managing Partner at 3D visualisation company Silver Wings XR said the only way forward for news organisations is to embrace Web 3.0, explaining that websites can become real-time immersive experiences for users.

“You can talk to the people who visit your website,” said Kwakman, explaining that websites will move from 2D to 3D in Web 3.0.

News organisations can build metaverses that can hold their content, allow their users to visit as avatars, walk around virtual newsrooms, and interact with the avatars of journalists and other users, according to Kwakman.

Silver Wings XR founder Kapil Chhabra pointed out that currently, accessibility is still an issue as not everyone will have equipment such as VR headsets that improve the Web 3.0 experience. 

Another ‘canvas for storytelling’ 

Addressing the opportunities for news organisations, SCMP’s Liu said he currently does not see the metaverse as a primary distribution platform for news but another “canvas for storytelling.”

“The actual metaverse that we’re talking about, these 3D digital environments, some virtual reality, others mixed reality, that’s still far down the road,” he said.

“The insertion of news and content and digital media into those worlds and that becoming the primary distribution channel for content and a primary discovery channel for content, I still think it’s several years down the road,” he added.

Liu emphasised the need for news organisations to first understand that assets in the digital world have value that can be owned based on smart contracts.

Kwakman and Chabra stressed that the technology is already available for news organisations to start trying for themselves to plan and decide their next steps in the metaverse.

“We’re not 100% there yet,” said Kwakman.

“But if you don’t step on board that train early, you’re going to miss out … You can start small but just step on board, have that dream, experience if you like it, then take it from there,” he added.

About the writer: Emmy Abdul Alim is a freelance journalist, editor, and journalism trainer with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. She was previously Editor at Thomson Reuters, where she led reporters and analysts covering business and financial news and intelligence.

Edited by Debbie Goh. Debbie is a journalism professor at the California University of Pennsylvania. Before joining academe, she was a journalist with The Straits Times, Singapore.