INMA’s C-suite roundtable offers product and tech takeaways
Product Initiative Newsletter Blog | 03 September 2024
Hi there.
We recently gathered circa 50 C-Suite executives from leading media organisations around the world to discuss the upcoming challenges which face us and how we start tackling them to ensure a sustainable future for journalism.
As you can imagine, the conversation was deep, at times hard, and at times inspirational. Today I want to unpack some of these things.
Drop me a note if there is anything you’d like to see in this newsletter, whether it’s on a particular subject or a feature you’d like to see. I’m at Jodie.hopperton@INMA.org.
Thanks, Jodie
4 product and tech takeaways from INMA’s CEO roundtable in Vail
The C-Suite roundtable we at INMA hosted was an intense few days of presentations and hard conversations punctuated with incredible small group conversations in exceptional surroundings.
Today I want to share four themes that came across loud and clear with the implications for product and tech.
1. We need to get our heads around AI. It’s still a big subject and one I think is too broad a term. Generally I like to think of this as three interrelated areas for news: business efficiencies, improving our own products, and relationships with LLMs.
It seems that for the first of these, AI is being built into many existing tools, especially with CMS and related software. The second is still fairly limited to chatbots, which I believe limits us. We should be looking at the wider implications of tech ecosystem changes. And lastly, the relationship with LLMs comes down to: take the money, as there seem few strings attached; also, understand the wider implications and where our businesses intersect.
All of this is oversimplified for the purposes of this e-mail, but I’ll dig into the latter of these two points over the coming weeks. If you have thoughts and opinions, I am always happy to discuss these topics. Please book time with me here.
2. We need to double down on brand across ALL platforms. We must fully understand what our brand truly means before we can convey this effectively to other people. As a brand marketeer once put it to me, “If you walked into a party, who are you? What does your brand say about you, what you stand for, and why people should care about it?”
You need a personality and to be proud of it. Ultimately your brand is what other people think of you, so if you walk into that party thinking you look cool but are wearing a Hawaiian shirt, you’ll need to revisit to see if your brand is actually resonating in the way you think it is.
3. At the core of our businesses is journalism. Sometimes we struggle to define exactly what that is. In fact, I don’t believe there is a single definition. But we do know that it is human-led, fact-checked, and at times personal. We need to double down on the core of what we do that no one else can — and explain it well so the value proposition is clear.
4. Build and maintain community. We see the desire for this amongst our audience. And we know building and maintaining a direct relationship is a much better long-term plan than driving traffic and clicks.
Who is in your community? How do you truly deliver value to them? Can you help them connect? And is there a way to help the community leverage collective knowledge and insights?
Would you like to hear what other INMA members use for their tech stacks?
We are planning a survey that would ask each of our corporate members to share information about what you use and where. Aside from tools used, is there anything else you would like to know? This is your chance to have input into the first survey of its kind at INMA. Please e-mail me at jodie.hopperton@inma.org or book time for a chat at www.calendly.com/jodiehop.
Print still delivers revenue, but it has an end date
One of the things that surprised me in Vail off site was the desire to talk about print.
I was, and still am, pretty sure we’re managing the off ramp of print as costs go up and demand goes down. But the fact is print is still a profit center for many, probably most, news publishers.
There are, however, some nuances to print that are important to learn.
One thing I think I’d forgotten is that print sets the agenda in many countries — whether it’s on TV, where you’ll often hear “here’s what is being said in the media,” or specific titles of record being quoted. One participant told us a title in the UK has dropped print but improved profitability — and has now lost that all-important profile.
One reason print sets the agenda is the people who read it. One CEO in Vail told us his print had decreased from 1.5 million to 60,000 (and yes, we checked these numbers several times) but held 60% of the ad revenue during that drop because it is decision-makers who read the title.
That is incredible. If you can have a small but more valuable audience, the economics change significantly.
A print product says a lot about the person carrying it. When I lived in London and got the Tube to work every morning 20+ years ago, people carried a newspaper and it immediately branded them into certain cohorts.
This carries through to digital in a slightly different way. People don’t carry a brand, but what they share on social media and the brands they follow say something. This attachment to brand is highly important no matter what the medium, and it’s something we need to continue to work on.
So the resulting conversation around print came down to two things:
- In the short-term, making it as efficient as possible using tools such as automatic layout.
- And in the mid- to long-term, understanding what the off ramp looks like, including using print as a driver for digital while inspiring staff by tracking audience growth across all platforms.
About this newsletter
Today’s newsletter is written by Jodie Hopperton, based in Los Angeles and lead for the INMA Product and Tech Initiative. Jodie will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of global news media product.
This newsletter is a public face of the Product and Tech Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Jodie at jodie.hopperton@inma.org with thoughts, suggestions, and questions. Sign up to our Slack channel.