The value of values: clearly defining and demonstrating our integrity
12 July 2011 · By Kylie Davis
It’s a rare — and astonishing — day when a profitable newspaper is closed down. But the decision by Rupert Murdoch to shut the News of the World is a telling example of the importance of values in the newsroom, and how our day-to-day behaviour as journalists and editors usurps any cleverly spun marketing line about what our “brand strengths” are.
Newspapers have been tossing around the idea that we have “brand values” for a while now. We like to trot out the line to reassure ourselves that our activities in online and mobile have some semblance of what appears in print. But most of us are pretty misguided as to what that really means, or how it plays out commercially.
Most editors believe their mastheads have brand values that are made up of proud histories of journalism, and the heritage of their papers to report and disseminate the news and capture interest. In these cases, we are confusing history with brand values and the rusted-on behaviours of our customers as brand strength.
The missing link that the News of the World has so deplorably illustrated is that the brand values of our newspapers are the sum of our behaviours as journalists, editors and photographers — and also as advertising teams, classifieds telemarketers, subscription teams, online newsdesks, and marketing and commercial personnel.
...[more]Virtual world of gaming holds real lessons for content strategy
13 June 2011 · By Kylie Davis
“Why didn’t newspapers invent Groupon?” was a question that got Tweeters at the INMA World Congress excited, starting a debate on creativity in newspaper companies that ran parallel to the official program.
Facebook, Google, Angry Birds, YouTube — these were all quickly identified as major game changers that newspapers should have had the technological and content understanding to embrace early on, but just stood by wringing their hands. There was a sense of frustration, but also determination by the tweeters.
“Same reason railroad companies didn’t invent air travel,” was one response. And from there the discussion quickly started to identify the early themes of the conference — the urgent need for cultural change in our industry, for entrepreneurialism, and putting money behind opportunities that drive audience participation and engagement.
The gap between newspaper understanding of what is going on at the cutting edge of content engagement and where our businesses need to be positioning themselves had been brought home to me just a few weeks earlier.
After sitting through one of those group meetings that makes you feel watching paint drying could be a more productive use of two hours, (and ironically, it was on the topic of how we engage our readers in content), I came home to cuddle on the couch with my youngest son Charlie. (He still lets me do that occasionally and after some meetings, you really need a hug.)
...[more]Refusing to step outside comfort zone creates a new kind of madness
24 May 2011 · By Kylie Davis
Einstein is quoted as saying the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
If this is the case then newspaper companies could rightly be classed as certifiable. We are constantly guilty of simply tweaking ideas a little and expecting major results, being disappointed and then trying it all over again.
But the good news is that it’s not our fault. Possibly, it’s the way our brains are wired, according to a new report from the McKinsey Quarterly. And the really good news is that with some practice, the damage is reversible.
“The human mind is surprisingly adroit at supporting its deep-seated ways of viewing the world while sifting out evidence to the contrary,” according to the report “Sparking creativity in teams: An executive’s guide.” “Even when presented with overwhelming facts, many people (including well-educated ones) simply won’t abandon their deeply held opinions.”
Is this the reason why newspaper executives, when faced with compelling evidence that they must dramatically change their business models, have instead chosen courses that were minor improvements, tweaks and adjustments?
...[more]Dopamine, Charlie Sheen and an addiction that is killing media
19 April 2011 · By Kylie Davis
Media people have long joked that the industry is addictive, but new research shows that actually it is medically true.
The constant barrage of information, new facts, tight deadlines, demands from multiple inputs, decisions needing to be made, e-mails sent, commissioning, editing, producing, writing, crafting for print, Web and mobile, telephones going, conferences being called, ads running late, and pressure to hit targets gives us a dopamine hit that is the equivalent to a hard drug and just as obsessively more-ish.
We’re an industry of junkies.
In a recent article in the McKinsey Quarterly, “Recovering from Information Overload,” Derek Dean and Caroline Webb examined how “always-on, multi-tasking work environments are killing productivity, dampening creativity and making us unhappy.”
While the article is targeted at CEOs, it’s hard not to draw parallels between the work environments they describe and any editorial floor in any media organisation anywhere in the world.
It was bad enough in the days of hot metal, but the pace has increased exponentially in recent years with journalists and editors creating and directing content to print, Web and mobile platforms in every form of communication imaginable.
...[more]Recognising when cutting resources has gone too far
13 March 2011 · By Kylie Davis
Journalism is not brain surgery. Yet increasingly, determining ways to make money out of the business of publishing is doing our heads in. And there are issues we’re not seeing that are about to give us a hell of a smack around the ears if we don’t wake up fast.
The glory days of newspapers being monopoly news suppliers allowed us to evolve into fat and resource-rich organisations with enormous brand power, depth of talent and a faith in our own genius talents. In reality, we were just on the fabulous part of a cyclical curve and the happy recipients of circumstance.
Since competition got tougher with multiple options for news and information created through the Internet and mobile devices, our ability to monetise has weakened — mainly because our desperate efforts to reengineer our businesses have focused more on cutting our costs than they have on developing new revenue streams, supporting sales infrastructure and simplifying customer interactions.
For the past decade or more, number crunchers have pulled costs out of newspaper businesses in much needed blood lettings that have made us mean, lean and relatively efficient. Early on, this was an exercise akin to shooting fish in a barrel. Nowadays the hunting is not so great.
...[more]When customer service means customer problem
14 February 2011 · By Kylie Davis
Do newspapers really know what readers and customers want? (Indeed, does any business?) Or does the tendency to see things through our own perspective always dominate and cramp our ability to innovate and meet market demands?
A few wildly different experiences recently got me chewing over this recently.
The first: My youngest son nearly went to school without trousers.
My boys go to school in the centre of Sydney — a city of 4 million people — and like most Australian schools, they wear a uniform. The uniform shop is located in the heart of the city's busiest subway arcades and the school pays a commercial rent for the space. So as a parent who needed to buy new school uniforms and supplies for my kids I was frustrated to learn that the uniform shop was shut for three of the five days the week before school returned from summer break (even then with very limited hours). In fact, it had been shut for nearly six weeks over the holidays. I should add the shop is only open three days a week generally.
...[more]Making the scarcity of quality journalism work for newspapers
18 January 2011 · By Kylie Davis
The internet and mobile technology is supposed to have given us the 24/7 news cycle, which you would think would dramatically expand and increase our ability to break and expose genuine news as well as increase the demand for good journalism.
But with the exception of major breaking news events — including acts of terror, or in Australia, major bushfires and this summer, major flooding — what we really have on most days is two hours of genuine news and 22 hours of cheap-to-produce repetition of known facts, opinion parading as information, populist commentary, curated audience response and easy-to-whip-up outrage repeated ad nauseam. It's a hell of a lot of white noise.
The dynamics behind this goes to the heart of the flaws in our current business models.
Every day newspapers set the agenda, revealing to communities around the world what they will be talking about around the water cooler that day. But that agenda is being purloined by television, internet, social networking and radio news teams in the early hours of the morning before most of us have woken up. There's nothing really new in this. It's been going on for decades.
...[more]Are newspapers just too good to change?
15 December 2010 · By Kylie Davis
Is the reason why newspaper companies find change so damned difficult because we are just so damned good at what we do?
I'll explain.
Capability theory argues that there is a tipping point in the life of every company and industry when the skills, values and processes that make a company talented and successful actually start to become rigidities that prevent future success.
Capabilities are found in the resources that we have as newspaper companies in money and people — the processes and procedures we use and the common values we hold. Capabilities are different to plain old resources because a capability is the ability to turn something into something else — it's our ability to take action. Newspapers can turn random facts, events and goings on in the world into a cohesive, contextual assessment that explains the world each day to billions of readers and sets agendas globally every day (or even now, each hour) and we have processes and procedures that allow this to happen. That's one hell of a capability. Those processes have, in turn, become values which now underpin our cultures.
Yet rigidities are where those capabilities that have calcified. Companies often stick to current capabilities beyond their useful life because of tradition, complacency or an inability to learn.
...[more]Hardest part of implementing change at newspapers is getting everyone on board
14 November 2010 · By Kylie Davis
Many of us treat change like it's the Wild West: a place where anything goes, where might is usually accepted as right and it's the change way or the highway.
Here's the thing, though. It's never the actual bit you want to change in a newspaper company that is ever the hard part — redesigns, coming up with new concepts, working out a strategy for delivering new content, designing an integrated organisational chart, building a business case, envisioning the future and capturing that in a strategy document.
They provide challenges, but working out what to do is the easy bit. It's getting everyone on board that usually sees the best plans go pear-shaped and the aggravation starts.
No wonder we think corralling people through the gates, surprising them with what's intended, cracking a whip and shooting the odd malcontent who strays from the herd seems like the best — and only — way to get across the prairie.
Systems thinking argues change is not one project frozen in time. It's like the Butterfly Effect theory of change management: that every single thing you change has implications on the social, cultural, environmental, economic and political parts of the business — even if the results are not immediately obvious.
...[more]Changing the newspaper’s perceptions of change
21 October 2010 · By Kylie DavisNewspapers love a simple story. Complex ideas and years of research are regularly condensed into a tightly written opening paragraph and headline. And this is usually a great skill.
But it should be of no great surprise that we’ve done the same thing to the message that “newspapers have to change,” simplifying it to the point where it’s become a rallying cry, not a particularly useful tool for analysis, strategy or genuinely improving our lot. It is just possible that building a brave new future requires more than 500 words with pic, graph and breakout quote.
In 1990, management experts Dunphy and Stace devised a change strategy matrix, which I’ve only just read about but which gave me a “road to Damascus” experience. Now I can hear the news heads in the room grumbling that “hell, that was 20 years ago” and surely there’s something more modern, more well, newsy out there that I should be quoting. But here’s the thing about change literature. Sometimes the oldies are the classics. Just like Shakespeare.
...[more]
