Shirish Kulkani in the Media Voices logo

Welcome to the latest season of Media Voices: Big Noises! This season, sponsored by Glide Publishing Platform, we’ll be talking to publishing people with something to say. Media Voices co-host Peter Houston is tired of hearing the same old industry buzzwords. The publishing platitudes are starting to wear a bit thin, and he’s decided to see if he can shake the conversation up a bit by speaking to some of the biggest characters in the business.

On this week’s episode of Big Noises from Media Voices we hear from media analyst Shirish Kulkarni. He takes us through news innovation and inclusion projects, from journalism AI to community journalism, focusing really on how these can be used together to serve people who currently don’t see any value in journalism. He explains why news avoidance is a rational response to the current news ecosystem, and how news outlets that say ‘we need people to trust us tomorrow’ need to have a good long look at themselves.

Kulkarni argues that DE&I cannot be fixed quickly, that there is a failure of management to address the issues substantively, and that media organisations’ resistance to change is ultimately holding them back.

Some highlights from the interview:

On why short-termism is so endemic throughout the industry

There are all kind of irrational choices that the industry is making. Because there are easy wins to be made, but there’s a kind of inertia, stasis, a kind of central conservatism, to the industry. And I think in a way that’s a hangover of the golden age of newspapers when the business model did work, and you could just go and play golf on a Friday afternoon, and nothing bad happened.

We just thought public interest journalism was enough to get people to engage with us. I think we thought that would carry on working forever. And now we don’t know what to do.

It’s a panic now, and no one knows what to do. We jump at the next big thing. And for a while, the next big thing was Facebook. And we jumped at that. But there’s not really ever that strategic vision of what are we trying to do? How do we get there?

I suppose that’s the thing that I think we should be thinking about more; what’s the long term view rather than the short term view.


Thanks to Glide Publishing Platform who have sponsored this season of Media Voices: Big Noises. Glide exists to make publishers more successful by removing any need to get bogged down building Content Management Systems, providing an industry-leading SaaS tailored to let publishers do more and spend less. Publishers using Glide direct more resources at their audiences and products, and focus on building things that make them money. You do the content, Glide does the management.

Glide have created 3 expert guides to getting much more from a new or headless CMS, created for editorial, technology, and product teams. You can get the whitepapers here.

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