Silos had their heyday. This is the era of the cross-functional news media company.

“Marketing can work well planned with editorial content,” Helena Sund, engagement manager at Expressen in Sweden, told attendees at the recent INMA Media Subscriptions Summit in Stockholm. “When it comes to product, development, tech, journalists are very heavy users of your product. They can be very good at discovering bugs or suggestions for improvements. Developers and user experience designers are very good at user needs. Marketing and journalists are interested in what the users want.

“A wider perspective whether from these three departments or anywhere is helpful. Every person has a story. Every person in your newsroom might speak a language you don’t or might have a story you don’t.”

Three areas of media companies often overlap:

Communication: “We go to school for years to learn how to communicate with users/readers,” Sund said. “But when we go to work, it is assumed we know how to work together. UU, ROI, ARPU — every profession has its own terminolog, lingo, acronyms. Explain them. Translate, Establish a culture where there is no stupid question. Lead by example.”

Workflow and tools: Every team has its favourite ways of communicating: Slack, Outlook, WhatsApp, e-mail. “Explore, understand, respect, and try to bring everyone closer together when necessary/useful,” Sund said. “Every team also has its own style to communicate and collaborate. Observe, listen, and even more important: Try to help, to educate, to elevate, and to enable when necessary. Is it OK for a journalist who works on Saturdays to send a Slack message to someone who works office hours? Maybe they need to mute notifications. Or schedule the Slack message. It might sound like the smallest thing, but these are the things that get people annoyed and cause friction.”

KPIs/data/goals: “Make sure you agree with each other on how you’re using the data, the best way to use data,” said Stéphanie Barsch, an editorial consultant who previously worked for Meta. “Make sure everybody is on board and don’t just decide since you come from marketing and are used to looking up budgets that everybody is comfortable working with budgets. One way to do that is to set your goals together for the team. What is the goal for the project? Break it down. Make it smaller.”

There are also smaller, personal ways to bring teams together.

“Take a look at the story your colleague has worked on forever,” Barsch said. “Consider calling the next day when you realise some big breaking news is going on and you realise that journalist didn’t have a weekend. Don’t ask, ‘How was your weekend?’ Asking someone from the newsroom to send you copy for a newsletter can take ages, but if you send them a text and ask for their feedback, you’ll get an answer back immediately. 

“It’s not always about being right but about starting something and getting to know each other.”

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