Technology Guide & Directory 2021-22

2021-12-20. The strength and importance of partnerships is never more apparent than the topics covered in this year’s WAN-IFRA Technology Guide & Directory, where publishers can find the most relevant tech providers to our industry.

by Dean Roper dean.roper@wan-ifra.org | December 20, 2021

Technology Guide and Directory 2021-22

This year’s edition features the following topics and our Directory provides publishers with those tech and solutions providers that they can partner with to help drive home their products.

AI and reader revenue: WAN-IFRA will publish a report in the coming weeks about how Artificial Intelligence and automation are playing a role in publishers’ reader revenue and publishing strategies. We surveyed a number of data specialists, editors and commercial executives earlier this year to gauge their adoption and deployment of AI in this regard. While adoption has been slow, publishers have big plans for AI.

The lifeline of advertising: While reader revenue initiatives have grabbed most of the headlines and interest of news publishers during the past couple of years, advertising of all kinds is still an incredibly important source of income for most publishers.

What’s your newsletter strategy? More and more news publishers agree that, when done right, newsletters are highly effective tools for driving subscriptions. So, how does one create an effective newsletter? Like nearly everything else in the news industry, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, but there are a number of key factors for success.

Today’s specs for a CMS? The pandemic has served as a stress test for publishers and newsrooms on many fronts. For example, how can they produce quality content remotely (the decentralised newsroom)? How should they tweak (or start) their paid-content strategies? It has also served as a good gauge of how their content management systems can – or cannot – help advance or manage all of the above. WAN-IFRA has just published a new report on this topic.

Getting product dev right: From newsletters to podcasts, product thinking seems to be the way forward for news media companies to engage their audiences and build themselves a sustainable future through diverse revenue avenues. Media products that intrigue, engage and retain audiences are, in fact, crucial for the future of quality journalism itself.

Print operations optimistic: Newspapers’ printing operations across the world are looking ahead to 2022 with a sense of hope. After a year of big challenges in 2020, 2021 turned out to be fairly positive in terms of revenue, according to the WAN-IFRA World Printers Forum Outlook 2021-22 survey. And that’s not all. The results of the survey indicate an upbeat 2022 as most respondents expect an even better financial result.