Text/Wang Yunhui
On December 14, 2021, Sina News officially released the "Wave Chasing Plan".
This is not the starting point for Sina News's upgrade and change. Over the past few years, Sina News has made a series of far-reaching attempts to transform content creation.
Now, it's finally time to declassify.
"For a long time, we've been thinking about the relationship between people and algorithms." Wang Wei, COO of Weibo, CEO of Sina Mobile and president of the Sina AI Media Research Institute, said.
As one of the most influential information platforms in China, sina news thinks the most about the mobile and digital information wave:
How to make great strides to embrace digital civilization and improve the efficiency of content creation and distribution, while better meeting the positive content needs of users and actively integrating into the social governance system?
Now, Sina News has given its own answer.
【1】
In recent years, when chatting with friends, everyone has a common feeling:
The ecology of content is becoming more and more involuted.
From text to video, from title to content, from creation to operation, from creator to platform, the intensity of competition in every field is constantly escalating.
The threshold for content creation is getting lower and lower, but it is becoming more and more difficult to form an influence.
One of the most intuitive weather vanes is that even authoritative central media such as Xinhua and The People, whose content creation standards such as style, style, and length of manuscripts have kept pace with the times and have undergone tremendous adjustments and changes.
The reason is that the development of new technologies, especially social media, makes it possible to "spread all people to all people", any individual can independently create content, and carry out efficient and rapid mass distribution through the network platform, and even realize intelligent push based on the user's big data information.
According to the "2020 Content Creation Development Trend Report" released by the new list, the creators of the WeChat public account alone have exceeded 20 million last year; and Chen Rui, chairman and CEO of Station B, has also said that in the 5G era, China's individual video creators will also exceed 10 million.
Due to the explosive growth of content supply, the amount of information obtained by each of us is completely overloaded, so "whether we can get more traffic" has become the most important, or even the only, criterion for content creation.
Such a "traffic is king" orientation has led to the accumulation of more and more problems: headline party, provocation of emotions, pornographic violence, sensationalism, plagiarism, rubbing traffic, rumors and slander, information cocooning...
All kinds of shoddy junk information continues to "bad money for good money", coupled with the increasingly young age and low education of netizens, the entire cyberspace environment is deteriorating day by day, and the atmosphere is becoming more and more impetuous, vulgar, violent, emotional, and distorted values.
【2】
But in the last year or two, the situation has changed dramatically.
On the one hand, the government has become aware of the chaos of content ecology and has embarked on top-down policy revisions and environmental remediation.
On the other hand, China's Internet has entered the era of intelligent communication, the scale of mobile Internet users has exceeded 1.1 billion, and the consumption structure and information needs of users have also undergone corresponding changes, becoming younger and more personalized.
Overall, the era of traffic dividends has come to an end, and the young people of Generation Z (born in 1995-2009) have gradually grown into new online creators and consumers, and the general needs of users have also returned to high-value content.
According to the "2021 New Youth Insight Report" released by sina AI Media Research Institute, Generation Z has a more diversified demand for information consumption. They have richer interests, are more willing to take the initiative to contact fresh knowledge, are more willing to pay attention and time for quality content, and pay more attention to the authenticity behind hot events.
Generation Z already has a higher demand for content creation:
The traditional content creation methods that were once monotonous, formal, lacking in detail and emotional tension have been eliminated by the times.
But at the same time, more and more users are also realizing that those fragmented, low-quality garbage "fast food content" is not their real need, and trust it.
In the increasingly flooded massive amount of information, the pursuit of more scarce high-quality content has become the general consensus of creators and users.
Therefore, facing the new generation of the Internet and facing the tide of the times of China's cultural power, the ecology and methods of content creation are also being shuffled, the old order is broken, and the new order is beginning to be established.
Only those quality content with temperature and depth, which not only maintain the reverence for the authenticity and values of the content, but also close to life, use a more vivid and emotional creative language, and even continuously follow up the development of science and technology, and realize the iterative evolution of creative methods with new digital technologies, is the general trend of content creation.
So, how should we build an ecosystem that encourages quality content creation?
This is exactly the direction that Sina has been working towards.
【3】
Over the years, the adherence to quality content has been one of the most solid cornerstones of Sina News's development.
As an authoritative Internet media platform, Sina News App has always adhered to the principle of careful selection, 100% coverage of central media, and maintained long-term cooperation with more than 4,500 mainstream media, while attracting more than 40,000 leading self-media creators in various fields.
At the same time, Sina has also set up a professional and senior content team to ensure the quality of 7×24 hours of full-chain content, thus ensuring the authority and authenticity of the content to the greatest extent in the era of intelligent media.
It is also based on this production attitude of excellence and continuous improvement of intelligent technology, Sina continues to provide users with high-quality content, and it has maintained rapid development. Since 2016, it has achieved 23 consecutive quarters of sequential growth, and the scale of users has also ranked among the top three in the industry.
But Sina News' goal doesn't stop there.
In the face of many challenges such as social communication and intelligent distribution, Sina News hopes that, on the one hand, it will actively follow the progress of technology and constantly update the content creation methods; on the other hand, based on people's positive needs, it will provide users with more warm and in-depth content, help users clear the fog, drive users to explore more information connotations and extensions, and form a healthy and positive value content ecological cycle.
Most importantly, it is necessary to balance the social public value of news information services with the increasingly personalized information needs of users, and create a virtuous circle of a content win-win ecosystem through a healthy and efficient industrial ecology, so as to guide the entire industry to continuously transform into the creation of high-quality content.
In September this year, Sina has officially announced that it has upgraded from a high-quality intelligent media platform to an intelligent information platform with both taste and quality, which will not only provide users with professional news information, but also rely on technical support to provide users with more quality content.
The "Wave Chasing Plan" announced this time is the further in-depth expansion of its transformation strategy.
According to Cong Song, general manager of Product Operations of Sina Mobile, there are two main aspects of the wave-chasing plan:
Internally, the focus is on ecological upgrading. For the existing influence of the original column, around the needs of users, brand shaping, and commercialization of the closed loop, continue to improve the entire link upgrade, so as to produce high-quality content on a larger scale, systematization and quality.
Externally, the focus is on openness and cooperation. Make full use of Sina's own basic capabilities and content data advantages, cooperate with more media and content institutions, and work together to create, win-win and jointly produce high-quality IP.
【4】
The Wave Chasing Project is not built out of thin air.
In the past few years, Sina News has created a number of high-quality IPs with both influence and reputation through self-production and cooperation.
For example, the video column "Focus On Focus" unites a number of authoritative media to focus on people's livelihood and social hot topics such as the national anti-epidemic and consumer rights and interests, with a total of more than 50 million plays on the whole network and a total reading volume of 800 million related Weibo topics. In particular, the "nobody" who "directs" the lens at the epidemic, sticks to his post, silently guards the society, and reports on the "faces of all beings" with wide vision and depth have become a classic case of guiding positive social emotions.
For example, the cultural tourism IP "Four Seasons Travel", which drives local cultural tourism "out of the circle" with high-quality content, has also become a veritable super IP, covering 24 colleges and universities, more than 100,000 big V bloggers and 339 cities across the country in the first season of the project, and the content read during the event reached 4.6 billion times.
For example, Sina News's self-made immersive interview column "One Day and One Page" invites China's best character reporters to lead users to go deep into the inner world of stars and celebrities such as Meng Meiqi, Huadong, Xiangjing, Urshan, Zou Shiming and other stars and celebrities with a high degree of sincerity and even direct heart dialogue, and through their respective life ups and downs and thinking, see the trend of the times, harvest the resonance of human nature, and trigger users to think deeply and interact. Since the launch of the show, it has been widely praised.
For example, grasping important event nodes, vertical field hotspots, focusing on knowledge and viewpoint planning live broadcast column brand "HeatWave Live Room", has been with the State Intellectual Property Office, china disease control, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of Emergency Management, customs and other 52 various organizations and Zeng Guang, Tao Yong and other 185 experts, scholars, KOLs in various fields, since June 2021 upgrade, has created a total of 35 hot search topics.
For example, based on the analysis and refinement of public data, on the basis of accurate expression of data and the selection of topics suitable for users, the visual data information product "Figure Room" that integrates "visual beauty" and "storytelling" into the content telling has a total of more than 100 issues, and the average reading of the whole network period is 2.5 million.
For example, the video interview column "Sina Parlor", which is quickly connected with the hot spots of the whole network, has been broadcast for more than 100 periods so far, with more than 100 dialogue guests, covering hot figures in various fields such as current affairs, politics, and business, with a cumulative reading volume of more than 600 million times and a video playback volume of more than 230 million.
For example, focusing on the unique personality and fresh lifestyle of young people in the new era, recording their struggle for their dreams, and showing their emotional needs, the character micro-recording project "New Youth" has recorded more than 200 young people's stories of "dare to think and dare to do not be ordinary" in the past 6 years.
……
The first priority of the "Wave Chasing Plan" is to summarize this series of high-quality content IP, create a quality content matrix, create new value and new experience for users, and let the outside world once again feel the persistence, innovation and responsibility of Sina News.
According to reports, in 2022, the first step of Sina News will focus on these existing accumulations, focusing on the launch of 27 new high-quality IP columns of seven major studios.
【5】
From ancient times to the present, the innovation of content creation has been endless.
Every different period of time, every different group of users, calls for different content to help them understand the world and record the times with them.
But there is a logic that has never changed.
Whether it is poetry or fiction, news or entertainment, text or video, books or the Internet, all content creation must return to, people, such a fundamental origin.
Zhou Dunyi said, The text is loaded with words.
Behind the content are our values.
Facing the future, from September this year, for the first time, he put forward his own brand slogan: "Know the unknown, see the unseen", clarify the value concept of "making AI more valuable", and now create a richer matrix of high-quality content with the "Wave Chasing Plan", the original intention of Sina News is to create more warm and in-depth quality content, and to find the "emotion" and "patience" that have a positive connection with the world.
The reason for this is that Sina not only has a solid hotspot operation capability, but also never stops communicating hotspot content to the audience.
"In the current 'post-truth' era, promoting the right values is where the value of our achievements lies." Wang Wei said, "I think this is the answer to our embrace of the future, and it is also the credo of our long-termism." ”