Ovidiu Daniel Popica - Romania
Wincott fellow: Trinity Term, 2005
Ten years ago [in 2005]I was in my birth town to tell a high school graduates class a few things about journalism and newsrooms. At that time, I had just finished my fellowship in Oxford and, after a sunny holiday, came back home full of enthusiasm, energy and fresh ideas.
Some of the Romanian students were very interested to go to university and their high school teacher tried to give them a piece of “harsh reality”. Shortly after the Q&A session has started, one question came quite brutally from a student:”After all, why do we need politics in the news? Politics is so boring! And I really don't care about...” His remark came with a supporting hum from the audience. At that time, I didn't know that was my first direct encounter with a full class of millennials.
So, I kept my line explaining we do need politics in the news because we have a duty as active citizens. We have personal projects and interests, I added. “I really care about fiscal policy because my income depends on it. I need to know about corruption and justice (a special topic in Romania) because every penny stolen from the public budget is stolen from high schools, hospitals and affects the newcomer’s chance in the labour market to get a proper job”.
“You know what - the student replied to me - even so, it is still boring”!
I left the meeting quite disappointed, asking myself what are the odds, in the forthcoming years, to get print newspaper readers from a new generation. While going back to my business magazine headquarters I remembered, very briefly, a warning from someone I have met in a seminar in Oxford: a man who presented himself as “professor of the internet” warned me, after a one-hour presentation about something, strange for me at that time, called blogs. “The media landscape is about to change dramatically in the near future. Be ready for this!” Just a couple of years later the media market reality hit me: hard and in waves.
First, the web came and flooded the newsrooms with a lot of concerns. Suddenly, I realised just transferring content from printed to online editions is a double edged sword: to gain readership, newsrooms had to publish more content, faster and...all this for free. As for commercial part, a new job emerged in the advertising department: the analytics and ad servers geeks talking about bounce rates, impressions, conversions.
Old school is old fashioned
Until I had to realise how to deal with keywords, tags, metadata and backlinks, I’ve learned that knowing how to “write SEO [search engine optimisation]” is not really enough. Something called Facebook was getting more and more of the new audience and the web presence for “Newsrooms 1.0” proved to be old fashioned. Social web presence become the new black!
That was the moment when I had to read again my old notebook to see if I correctly remembered. When I started to work as a journalist, more than 20 years ago, I learned that a story’s political significance, educational value, or broad social importance determines the newsworthiness. Well, I thought, that must have been before Facebook Pages for newsrooms and Facebook News Feed for individual profiles.
Little by little I started to hear terms like „star-rating-worthiness”, „traffic-worthiness” „like-worthiness” or „share-worthiness”. First, it was just a written status. Then, the images started to fill the posts; now most of us are hunting for videos: 30-sec clips to be more...efficient. Talking to some of my close friends and acquaintances I have noticed that our stories are strongly competing in people's News Feeds with...you name it: fluffy cats, puppies, toddlers, tonnes of selfies, Ice Bucket Contests or, at the best, some last tune of Justin Bieber or whoever might be the vogue web-made pop star.
Apparently, the average Facebook user is exposed, daily, to about 1,500 posts while he or she will eventually manage to read around 300 of them[1]. I don’t think i can get even a hundred. When a post goes to News Feed, if it doesn’t have high emotional impact on readers, the written piece will probably be lost with no comments, no shares, and may be couple of likes (from close friends circle, probably). The traffic generated to news website will be accordingly.
From Journalistic to Algorithmic
Some could argue there can be a publishing life outside News Feed. I really doubt it, especially if we are talking about new media websites. For the business news website I am running nowadays, the traffic turning point was this November: social referral (aka Facebook) became the first source of traffic only six months after launching the project. Another niche news website for which I have traffic insights gets 70% of its overall traffic from social referral. According to digital data platform Parse.ly, in July 2015, Facebook pulled ahead of Google as the top source of referral traffic for monitored news websites network[2]. Parse.ly’s chief technical officer Andrew Montalenti told in an interview this summer “social-media sources (of which Facebook is by far the largest) accounted for about 43% of the traffic while Google accounted for 38%”.[3]
I was not among the maths lovers all along my life school. When I chose to work as a journalist, it was because I felt closer to letters than digits. Nowadays, if I look at the two web giants together, I realise there is an unavoidable commonplace: the Algorithms. One algorithm decides how my story will rack in search engines; another one if my post is worthy for certain audience news feeds. And another one, somehow related to the first two, will decide how much money my website will get from advertisers.
Active inventories vs active citizens
Which, by the way, raise another question: under the algorithm pressure how do media see their public? Are they regular consumers - inventories by the new programmatic language - or critical citizens? When the media market is crowded and the advertising budgets are trimmed every year, the battle for money directs the editors rather to the first choice. Because, if you have traffic or rating, you will have a good audience volume and you will have advertising. Or, at least, some advertising.
If you ask some Romanian editors, politics doesn’t sell very well unless the topic is scandalous, highly conflictual or politically biased. To tell the naked truth, it is very hard for Romanian media to “sell” politics when sometimes the medium itself is for sale. At discounted price as long as some media outlets are in big debt or even under insolvency procedures.
During the last five years, printed newspapers have become irrelevant. The circulation dramatically decreased, some printed publications disappeared in just a couple of months. Others, simply moved to online platforms but, being hit by advertising revenues decline, the newsrooms have lost a lot of jobs and struggle to survive with smaller teams and scarce resources.
The news radio format is missing and the only channel with national coverage to provide more than three minutes news bulletins is the public radio station.
Online media have flourished as many news platforms and blogs emerged on behalf of internet access expansion. According to most recent official figures[4], Romania has more than 16 million fixed and mobile broadband connections with mobile connections double than fixed ones. Although the penetration rate is still under the European average, having a rural gap to cover, Romania is among Top 10 Countries at Average Peak Connection Speeds[5].
The best performer among online news platforms, in terms of impressions, are sports, tabloids and couple of TV news channels websites. Online media brought more interactivity but also much more noise and less accuracy in terms of classic journalism standards.
The real lord of the news is TV, because TV news remains the most influential shaper of political attitudes and behaviour. Ten years ago, there were couple of TV stations to broadcast only news, 24 hours a day. Now, Romanian viewers can watch at least six news dedicated stations (Antena 3, Romania TV, Realitatea, B1TV, DIGI 24), plus the news programs broadcasted by generalist TV channels: among those is TVR 1, the public TV channel.
Low level of confidence
We have a lot of political talks-shows and, while the “show” component is growing, the quality of “political talk” is dimming. Very few consistent ideas, too much noise and irrelevant subjects attached to the main story, biased moderators acting as media prosecutors or political crusaders. The same political characters can be seen on all TV news channels from early morning to late primetime.
No wonder the public has very low level of confidence in politics and political institutions. A recurrent study, (conducted by INSCOP Research Institute, last December), found that among political institutions the Romanian Parliament and the political parties are the most distrusted. The Constitutional Court is the only institution to preserve the public trust, from previous research conducted three months before. The research also found that among top trusted executive institutions are the Army Forces, the Anti-corruption Department, two intelligence agencies and National Bank of Romania.
Where are the media in this ranking? Well, somewhere beneath Orthodox Church and Universities but above NGO’s, Trade Unions, and Banks. Someone might say this is good but intriguing news as well: media holds more public trust than banks but get much less money from the public.
Bucharest, February 2016
Ovidiu Daniel Popica is Project Manager of StartupCafe.ro, a news website aimed to support entrepreneurs and startups in Romania; it was started in 2015, with the supportof Hotnews, one of the most reputed Romanian news websites and Google Romania.
More than 20 years ago Ovidiu was part of a group of students whodeveloped,inthe city of Galati, one of the first FM commercial radio stations in Romania, two years after the fall of communism.While studying Law, he started as a reporter and news anchor then become editor and radio producer. He gained professional experience by training with the BBC Radio Journalism School in Bucharest and reporting almost five years for theBBC Romanian Service.
Moving away from radio, Ovidiu worked with Evenimentul Zilei, a newspaper with the second widest circulation in Romania.For more than four years, he coordinated the Business Department as Deputy Editor-in-Chief. In 2005 he was awardedanOxford Fellowship, at Green College, Oxford, under the Reuters Program for Journalism. Same year he wasone of the four Romanian mid-career journalists to be awarded with Freedom House Fellowship, and he was trained in newsroom management, leadership and coaching at Poynter Institute, USA.
Coming back to Romania, Ovidiu become the coordinator of a young journalists team as Executive Editor of "Banii Nostri" (”Our Money), a weekly business and personal finance newspaper. He improved the workflow processes and the editorial content. As news team manager, he encouraged young talents and supported journalism graduates to start their carriers and consolidate their professional skills.
In 2007, Ovidiu moved to freelance community and focused more on writing about investment funds and personal finance. He become content provider for ”Romania Liberă” one of the most popular brands in the daily newspaper market.
He founded his own company in 2010, being involved, as a consultant, in various web content and media communication projects.
[1] Time, online edition, Article “Here’s How Facebook’s News Feed Actually Works” by Victor Luckerson, posted online on July 9, 2015, retrieved from
[2] Parsely Authority Report, “Understanding Traffic Patterns from the Top News Topics of 2015” retrieved from
[3]Fortune, online edition, Article “Facebook has taken over from Google as a traffic source for news”, by Mathew Ingram, posted online on August 18, 2015 retrieved from
[4] National Authority for Management and Regulation in Communications, Statistical Report, Electronic Communication Services Market in Romania, Semester I, 2015 retrieved in Romanian from
[5]Akamai Report: State of the internet, Q3 2015, Executive Review, retrieved from