The future of news is private and conversational: SCMP’s CEO Gary Liu

When Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, a 115-year-old media organization with a storied history, was looking for a CEO a few years ago, Gary Liu didn’t immediately appear like an obvious choice for the role. He didn’t have newsroom experience and has primarily held roles in tech companies like Digg, Spotify, and Google.

Yet, since Liu joined SCMP in January 2017, there have been many changes in the company: it has achieved aggressive international growth, launched digital news sites like Abacus and Inkstone, offered new storytelling approaches, and offered tech like AI-powered content recommendations for its readers.

In this Q&A, Tech in Asia caught up Liu on a wide range of topics. His answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Let’s start by talking about your typical day as a CEO. How does it go?

My days at SCMP are so varied. I spend as much time as I can internally on our product, editorial, and operations side, working with revenue-generating teams and on learning. I ask a lot of questions and listen to internal and external experts.

I have meetings with people who are curious about the Post, or are curious about the things that we as observers know a lot about – which is the rise of China around areas ranging from international policy and internal politics to technology and social and cultural influence. I also spend a lot of time caring about hiring, and making sure we’re able to serve employees through internal learning, improving benefits, and the like.

Where is SCMP at in terms of monetization? Am I right in saying that your focus right now is on growing your audience? What’s your thinking around that?

In terms of monetization, we have a very large material revenue business and a world-class revenue team internally across multiple sectors. Having these enables us to invest in new technology and the growth of our editorial team.

When it comes to reader revenue, what’s different is that SCMP doesn’t have a paywall today, although we’ll be experimenting more in the coming year.

Removing the paywall was interesting because that would be the most obvious source of reader revenue. Can you talk about the rationale behind that?

The paywall was removed in 2016 for international growth, in terms of top-line audience and impact. While SCMP is a brand that is well-recognized in Hong Kong and across Asia, we understood that it isn’t necessarily a familiar brand in the US or across Western Europe.

Removing the paywall allowed us to aggressively grow our audience. About two years after I arrived, we’re seeing a little over a fourfold increase in overall audience and an eightfold increase in international traffic.

But that doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in a paywall. By itself, digital advertising is not enough to fund sustainable, high-quality journalism – so that’s something that we’re definitely thinking about.