Newsroom strategy - why it matters
What is a strategy and how much of a role should it play in a newsroom? As a management concept, strategy has been the subject of many books and consultant’s dreams. A nebulous concept that despite two-day retreats and a mountain of yellow post-it notes can feel like an annual tick-boxing exercise. Like so many business concepts, without the proper direction and instruction, they can be easy to gloss over or misconstrue their importance. Getting strategy right is crucial to success, getting it wrong can be fatal.
And for startups, there is very rarely the luxury of time, let alone budget to indulge in strategic consultation to finetune the process. As a result, not many organisations get strategy right, let alone newsrooms where daily firefighting, physical or security threats and deadlines compete for the title of most pressing crisis in need of attention.
Strategy is the starting point for leadership to set the organisation or team off in the right direction. It lays the foundation for coherent team effort and creates a conducive environment for innovation to occur. While innovation is the responsibility of leaders, woe is the organisation that relies solely on leadership for groundbreaking ideas. A clearly defined strategy helps create the playground for magic to happen because people are clear about the direction and how their work contributes to that pursuit. With that guidance, they will have the confidence to create and innovate.
And it’s not just smaller operations at the bottom of Africa that struggle to make strategy a priority. In the 2014 New York Times Innovation Report, one of the key recommendations made to strengthen the newsroom was to appoint a strategy team, whose key responsibilities included keeping newsroom leaders abreast of the important but future-dated plans, trends and developments in the industry.
According to their honest reflection at the time: “Many newsroom leaders are so consumed with the demands of the daily report that they have little time to step back and think about long-term questions. The team would keep newsroom leaders apprised of competitor’s strategies, changing technology and reader’s behaviours.”
Because the New York Times had yet to fully develop its product and technology teams, this team was tasked with experimentation and coordinating projects across the organisation. However, when topics are critical to the optimal running of an organisation, it needs to be part of the job of newsroom leaders to be planning the direction of the editorial team’s efforts.
In his book, “Good strategy, bad strategy” Richard Rhumelt laments what passes as strategy these days. Bad strategy is not only the absence of good strategy but that which actively destroys value. Fluffy visions, mission statements, goals, ambitions, catchphrases and templatised strategy work all contribute to the befuddled nature of it all. It’s a process that takes work, loads of it, to analyse situations, strengths, advantages, competitors, and environments. It takes a deep understanding of one’s business and industry to get it right.
“Good strategy is not just ‘what’ you are trying to do. It is also ‘why’ and ‘how’ you are doing it.”
According to Rhumelt, three characteristics are necessary to form the kernel of every good strategy:
- A proper diagnosis of the challenge (“why”)
- A guiding policy that seeks to address the challenge, by drawing on sources of advantage (“how”)
- A set of coherent actions to carry out the policy (“what”)
In the context of a newsroom, a challenge could be maximising the impact and reach of an editorial effort that could be faring better relative to potential competitors. A guiding policy could be the use of data-driven insights with a focus on audience needs. And specific actions could be the introduction of product design thinking, supported by key metrics and reports in the newsroom. With that strategy defined, specific goals can be set, resources allocated or acquired and the playing field for innovation mapped out.
Defining a strategy is akin to stating a hypothesis and brings a scientific method into play when working on the edge of new frontiers. This is the organisation’s best guess (after thorough analysis) of how to magnify results in relation to the stated challenge — whatever the team chooses to focus resources on. And in the context of a newsroom, operating without a strategy means reacting to the news cycle rather than driving it.
