Kevin Anderson’s presentation focused on rebooting journalism, and the need to find new opportunities. But he started off with a discussion around information overload syndrome.

“The information that we are dealing with is becoming increasingly problematic,” Anderson said. “We’ve gone from information scarcity to information abundance. Rupert Murdoch built a business based on scarcity.  He is now in a position where there is less barriers to entry.”

The battle for attention is not just about news and information – it is about everything.

“What we have tried to do is create more content … but what that is doing is driving down our margins of return,” Anderson said.

He described the three challenges facing journalism as being that:

• we are losing the battle for attention – in particular on the iPad: “You are not just fighting other news apps, you are fighting every other app”
• more content is leading to lower revenue.
• we’re overwhelming audiences into inaction

He pointed our Demand Media, which has 7000 freelancers producing 4500 pieces of content every day. The overload is driving people to easy stories that they can understand, such as celebrity news.

He also described the move from a numbers model to a relevance model – from clicks to interactions, from page views to returning visitors, and so on. The organisations that survive will know that success is about your relationship with the audience and your ability to deliver relevant content to them.