Success in digital media is about seeing and applying a great idea first, whether it’s industry specific or from ‘outside’.

And in London this week, speakers at WAN-Ifra’s Digital Media Europe conference kept ladling out ideas. Many came – like how Rebecca Miskin, who is Hearst Magazines UK’s digital strategy director, and David Nemetz, co-founder of US sports publisher Bleacher Report – from outside newspapers and online news media.

Miskin described the sometimes painful transformation process which had seen its digital portfolio increase mobile traffic by 70 per cent; Nemetz attributed Bleacher’s massive growth to “constant experimentation”.

Some, like Storyful founder Mark Little just saw and seized an opportunity.

A journalist with Irish state broadcaster RTE, he is betting on what he believes is a change in the way in which news is gathered: A social change based on the use of mobile, video and smart technology.

He says a revolution began five or six years ago, when any 17-year-old in Iran with a smartphone could create news content: “But how in a world like this do newsrooms find the stories worth listening to,” he asked… and set up what he says is “the world’s first social news agency” to solve the problem.

Storyful, recently acquired by News Corp, identifies and verifies stories from the social web, building databases of authoritative and authentic social media sources. A team of 21 journalists – in Dublin, Hong Kong and New York – work social media themselves to locate sources with the help of geo-location technology.

And an operation Little describes as “what AP would be like” if it has started today, then onsells its services on subscription, as exclusive commissions and by partnering YouTube uploaders.

A different take on the role of intermediaries came from Ben Christensen of Norwegian media house Amedia, which had taken the decision to cut out advertising networks and use its own Big Data to create higher value for advertisers.

The Amedia digital vice president told delegates their starting point should be defining a data policy: “A lot of publishers we’ve talked to say they derive 10-15 per cent of their digital revenue through the ad networks, having given up control of this revenue stream to the networks,” he says. “Yes, you are always sold out, but at a low price.”

Amedia bought a blog platform, magazines and Norway’s biggest directory website, giving it access to “a lot of data about what users are searching for”. Now its own ad network has a daily reach of two million people and offers highly targeted advertising, based on tracking users and geotargetting.

Says Christensen, “Value is more important than price, if you are going to create a sustainable business.”

There was more on mobile (and data) from Mark Forster from Adello, and FT.com head of operations Lisa MacLeod.

Martin Clamart, head of international for France’s MeltyNetwork kicked off a session on video – stressing the medium’s ability to keep young visitors coming back – while Steve Herrmann shared lessons from his role as online editor at BBC News.

In other sessions, Alceo Rapagna of Italy’s RCS Media Group urged a push into e-commerce, while a session on paid content brought contributions from Ifra regular Kalle Jungkvist – who advises Aftonbladet publisher Schibsted – and paid content Neil Budde.

Budde’s experience goes back to 1997 and the Wall Street Journal experiments that led to a base of more than 600,000 digital subscribers. Now as vice president and executive editor of Gannett’s Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal, he puts that into practice in a familiar environment friaght with new challenges. Since those days, “most of us are playing catchup”, he says. One policy is to encourage editorial to “go deep’ with key subject areas, focussing on quality than quantity.

WAN-Ifra consultant Gregor Waller had encouragement for publishers questioning their paid content strategies; most were approaching “the trough of disillusionment following the peak of inflated expectations”. 

Publishers need to understand their customers to understand which model is right; failing this learning process – “which can take one to two years” – there is the alternative the potential of e-paper subscriptions which account for about 20 per cent of newspaper subscriptions in Germany, half of which are new customers.

Archant digital director Paul Hood shared podium time with streetlife.com founder Matthew Boyes to describe the partnership between the UK’s biggest independently-owned regional media businesses and the startup local social network: “Streetlife allows us to listen and connect to the communities we serve,” he says.

The partnership has seen Streetlife grow from 20,000 to 120,000 users, with a million expected by the end of the year. Boyes describes it as “a place for Archant’s journalists to listen”.

with WAN-Ifra

Pictured on our homepage: Storyful founder Mark Little – ‘what AAP would have been like’ (WAN-Ifra)