The ailing news media industry needs to do more than just survive (Part 4)
There is no conclusive view of just how much a CEO’s input can affect the performance of a company. Studies flip-flop between huge impact (50% influence on revenue) and almost no impact at all. Given the number of variables that go into such studies, and across so many industries, it’s understandable that conclusions will vary. But we do know that leadership matters — when we get it wrong it can be disastrous (Trump, Zuma, et al) and when we get it right, it can be a gamechanger (see Jeff Bezos at Amazon).
When looking at building innovating, robust and thriving media companies, we are focusing ability of leadership teams to guide those organisations. Failure to innovate is a failure of leadership. It is the responsibility of leaders to build a culture and requisite frameworks to keep delivering new editorial products and revenue streams. The media industry, under the guise of oligopolistic channel protection, assumed profits equated to a job well done and a public well-served— until the great digital disruption dragged the tide out leaving many naked swimmers on the shore.
Media companies experienced such extended periods of financial success, that many thought they had a special exemption from the disruption that inevitably comes for every company. The only thing special about it was the fact that it came for an entire industry, across the globe, in the space of a decade. In the meantime, budget and skills for innovation were non-existent and when the reality of the situation transpired, media executives found themselves in a death spiral with leaky pockets, unable to come up with new ideas or the talent to execute them.
The thing that made media so successful was the very thing holding back it’s digital transformation. Success and profits of the legacy operations consumed budgets and headspace. Why support the thing that threatened to cook the golden goose (but that readers wanted)? A classic case of the Innovators dilemma, as coined by Prof Clay Christensen.
To adequately solve this, and other innovation challenges, requires a skillset and training that media executives lag behind their corporate counterparts. They are complex and necessitate brave and visionary leadership to design organisations and allocate resources that invest in potentially unprofitable avenues. In order to reduce the risks associated with innovation and experimentation, organisations need to migrate to a mindset and culture of product design thinking — and that includes the newsroom.
Data-driven audience-centricity will be key to how journalism evolves into its level of public service, seeking out the intersection of the organisation’s wants and the audience’s needs. Mission-driven newsrooms will find their journalistic sweet spot, and success, in this space.
In order to design a company culture and adequately resource a media organisation to fulfil its innovation mandate, there are new skills and functions that will need to be added to the mix. Consumer marketing, product, data science, user experience, eCommerce, audience development, editorial analytics will soon become table stakes skills for media seeking to remain relevant and sustainable. Journalists and editors will also need to improve their skills beyond words, as data and audience needs inform strategic and editorial decision-making.
But to action all of this, we first need leaders to know what the future looks like for journalism and the business of journalism. And for them to know, we need CEOs and editors to be upskilled in innovation and leadership training. Some of the more established journalism schools in the USA are responding to this need by creating new courses aimed specifically at this cohort (I was fortunate to participate in such a programme). But this will take time to become status quo, and time is one thing we don’t have.
We need to find ways to incentivise the training and development of all media professionals, but especially our leadership teams. While the Covid pandemic has made online learning more accessible than ever before, and affordable, we can go one step further by making specific funds available for professional development. In some countries, the idea of a media support fund has been suggested as a means to addressing the funding challenge of media, and we would do well to ringfence support for the specific use of professional development. We can also push for tax-breaks relating specifically to professional development and training.
The time to start upskilling leaders was yesterday, and with the armour of controlled channel protection no longer available to us, our reality is clear: “innovate, or die”.
