“We’ve had to change as the world has changed around us,” Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor said of the media’s challenge.

She was speaking at this year’s New News conference in Melbourne, where she was joined by editors from traditional and new titles in a panel discussion on the state of the media.

Writer and academic Margaret Simons, who chaired the discussion, said that change was a constant in each of the past four years in which the conference had been held, reflecting a period of great upheaval. But she emphasised that the media survivors were those embracing opportunities.

BuzzFeed Australia editor Simon Crerar said he was optimistic about the future of the site, which is well known for its light entertainment and shareable content.

“We’re trying to be guided by our readers. [The reader response is] quick and brutal and very measurable . . .  We need to think hard about how every story should be presented to get maximum impact.” — Dan Silkstone, The Age

Crerar acknowledged that although Buzzfeed was a relatively new player on the media landscape, the company was doing well and had an expanding news team, growing revenue and a “highly engaged” audience, which included “the highest penetration among millennials in Australia”.

Dan Silkstone, who oversees weekend editions at The Age, said publisher Fairfax Media was tackling head on the challenge of building readership.

“It’s harder than it’s ever been to have impact, and lasting impact, because of the way people’s attention spans have changed,” he said.

Silkstone noted that the old ‘top-down’ approach, where editors decided unilaterally what was relevant, no longer held sway as readers had more power in deciding what was news. 

“We’re trying to be guided by our readers,” he said, adding that reader response was “quick and brutal and very measurable . . .  We need to think hard about how every story should be presented to get maximum impact.” 

The Guardian’s Taylor agreed that this was certainly the case, especially as news stories were now “more difficult to do in an entertaining and enjoyable way.” 

She said that the past year had been “an enormous process of internal change [at the title] in order to become sustainable” and there was still a strong need to “diversity old revenue bases”.

In the wake of industry-wide redundancies, Taylor said there was “no room for complacency”. The Guardian had introduced new paid reader membership options and courted philanthropy to help sustain its global ambitions.

Silkstone agreed that it was necessary for newsrooms and publications to evolve. “We are looking at new ways to make our journalism more profitable,” he said. With the looming end of the papers’ week-day print editions and digital advertising proving fickle, new ventures at The Age included moves into podcasting, subscriber events, value-added journalism and sponsored content.

“So much of journalism is going to be packaged up. It will be increasingly user-centric and mobile-oriented.” — Simon Crerar, Buzzfeed Australia editor

“We are looking at new ways to make our journalism more profitable”, he said. With the cessation of the papers’ weekly print publications looming and digital advertising proving difficult, Silkstone pointed towards new ventures such as podcasting, events, value-added journalism and sponsored content. 

Simons asked the editors whether the era of competition between news organisation for the latest ‘scoop’ was over.

While the editors generally acknowledged that there was a sense of “growing collaboration” between journalists and news publications, Taylor was quick to point out that for The Guardian “scoops are more important than they’ve ever been”. Crerar said that, for BuzzFeed, chasing a scoop helped the site “build a reputation” as a legitimate player on the news scene.

Silkstone agreed that there were “overlapping ways in which we are competitors and also collaborators”, suggesting that perhaps the race to publish a scoop should be left to flagship stories and those that gave a publication more “brand value”. 

In closing the New News conference, Simons asked the panelists what they expected on the media landscape over the coming year. The verdict was experimentation, innovation and a continuing shift to a reader-centric approach.

Crerar also said there would be a stronger focus on video content. 

“So much of journalism is going to be packaged up,” he said. “It will be increasingly user-centric and mobile-oriented.”