nCa Analysis
Strategic partnership, in any of its various forms, is all about making the fullest use of the present and future compatibilities – it is about looking at the obvious and envisioning what is beyond the obvious.
The visit of President Serdar Berdimuhamedov to China, which led to the upgrading of relations to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (CSP), has added plenty of new content to the partnership between Turkmenistan and China.
Let’s start by looking at the framework that has been created for cooperation in the media sphere.
Of the 15 documents signed during the visit, three are related to the media:
- Agreement on exchange of news and cooperation between the State News Agency of Turkmenistan and the Xinhua News Agency of the People’s Republic of China;
- Memorandum of understanding on cooperation between the State News Agency of Turkmenistan and the newspaper Renmin Ribao (People’s Republic of China);
- Memorandum of information and news cooperation between the State Television, Radio and Film Committee and the China Media Corporation;
Two of the three are related to the cooperation of TDH (Turkmen Dowlet Habarlary), the official news agency of Turkmenistan with Xinhua and People’s Daily.
The third is the arrangement between the TV and Radio umbrella organization of Turkmenistan with an entity of similar role in China.
The obvious benefit here is that the information from the Turkmen side will have the possibility of being redistributed from the platforms of global reach. This will bring the information about Turkmenistan to the widest circle of consumers.
On the other hand, the information from China will be available for redistribution to the readers and viewers of the Turkmen media.
However, the real benefit lies beyond the obvious.
To envision that, we must keep in mind that even though the future of journalism is bright on the whole, we are still not sure what shape it will take.
All we know so far is that the content consumers are dictating the future shape of journalism, assuming that the dissemination of truthful news is the core function of journalism.
Xinhua, with its 181 bureaus around the world, is among the big four – the other three are AP, Reuters, and AFP.
It distributes its material to the wholesale and retail consumers of content and also makes much of it available at its website and social media accounts. There are hundreds of millions of subscribers if we take the entire Xinhua terrain in view.
The People’s Daily with its flagship edition in the Chinese languages and several sub-newspapers and social media, also has the network of audience in many millions.
With this in mind, we should move further to see the likely shape of things some five years down the line.
The ongoing debate inside the mass media community is far from reaching any universally accepted conclusions but there is the acknowledgment that there has to be a balance between the pursuit of more eyeballs and the desire of impact.
The case in point is the contrast between The New York Times and the Daily Mail. Both are growing, mainly on the strength of their Internet presence but they are hardly similar in content to each other. While NYT is mainly focused on the impact, the DM goes for eyeballs i.e. popularity among the consumers.
NYT cannot ignore it. The ability to score impact – and NYT has plenty of it – is its main strength. Nevertheless, it continues to keep polishing its bells and whistles too to increase the reach of its narrative.
This is one of the elements of the future of journalism. You need to go for impact as your primary goal but to improve the ability to make the impact you also need to keep widening the circle of your audience.
The arrangement of the Turkmen media with its Chinese counterparts will come into play when it becomes clearer to the media managers around the world that there are at least three conclusions that should be reached, no longer how long the debate lasts:
- The media cannot remain solely the content producer forever. In fact, it lost the monopoly on the ability to produce the content quite some time ago. The consumers of the media content are also the producers of the content although whatever they produce is still a fraction of the output of a sizeable media house. The take-home message here is that the media should also be the consumers of content, giving the vloggers, bloggers and social media advocates their proportional space on the mainstream stage.
- The media pundits are also nearing the conclusion that the future of journalism lies in collaboration rather than competition.
- If the content is the queen, aggregation is the crown princess. The content consumers don’t have the time and/or patience to visit a large number of news sites. They seek a place where they can find the news headlines with short snippets of the body of the news, from as many sources as possible. Then, it is for them to decide whether they want to go to the source to read more.
In other words, the media outlets need communities but communities are available almost entirely at the social media – the ability of the newspapers or TV channels to create and maintain their own communities of consumers is evaporating very fast.
This is why every news organization, print and electronic, creates its own social media accounts.
Partly, this is because of the confirmation bias. — People want to read and see what they like already. In addition, everyone likes to see the content that is been created and presented to their liking. That is why the same news from different media houses will have the slight change in angle to suit the bulk of their consumers.
Returning to the recently acquired arrangement between the Turkmen and Chinese media, it will be a process of continuous learning. — Which story has been most visited or read, which story has kept the visitors engaged for how many minutes or seconds, which story has garnered most likes, which story has been shared further by the consumers.
These are some of the consideration when implementing the cooperation commitments between the Turkmen and the Chinese media houses. But, there is more to it.
The social media is also going through its wishy-washy phase. The Facebook fired more than 300 people who were monitoring the news and related content posted by its members and then quickly re-hired some of them. Twitter, in the hands of mighty and unpredictable Musk has almost stopped monitoring the integrity of the news and information content in its sea of tweets. Youtube is cluttered by content producers who provide anything but real news.
The consumers are sometimes just wandering in search of reliable sources of information. This is what we have understood by observing the consumption patterns at the social media and news sites.
The Turkmen and Chinese media will need to remain in synch if they want to create their own communities.
The next question when looking at the possibilities beyond the obvious is the measurement of impact.
Under certain conditions, if a media outlet is not producing the desired impact, it starts questioning the justification of its very existence. The impact can be of two kinds: 1. The ability to influence decisions at the state and corporate level; and 2. The impact in the society to create uniformly streamlined swatches of opinion.
We will look more at it in more detail in our forthcoming series ‘The Future of Journalism in Central Asia.’
For now, there is the need to look at the other blocks of content that have been added recently to the Turkmen-Chinese partnership. /// nCa, 11 January 2023
To be continued . . .