Culture change is sometimes the biggest obstacle to transformation, INMA Newsroom Initiative Lead Peter Bale said during the recent Newsroom Leadership Master Class: “Cynicism is a killer to any kind of transition.”

Having goals and ways of measuring goals that are credible and achievable can really help, he added. During the master class, media leaders and experts shared strategies on ways to build digital transformation into company culture. Here is their advice.

Know your battles

In a time of digital transformation, what leaders need to focus on most is their people, according to Lucy Küng. The author and digital transformation expert told INMA members the industry is at a critical time, even though not everyone is fighting the same battle.

Battle No. 1: Generalist news providers are fighting the battle to become (or remain) the leading source for news. Young audiences are consuming copious amounts of news content, but don’t have the brand loyalty of previous generations — and publishers want to capture their attention.

Battle No. 2: The second battle, Küng said, is with streaming competitors.

“It’s just as difficult for a legacy broadcaster to pivot to streaming as it has been for news organisations to pivot from print to digital,” she said. “They are struggling right now.”

The main problem for organisations fighting these two battles is that they can’t rely on the old way of doing things; they need entirely new and different plans.

Battle No. 3: The third battle is against the emerging vertical of news providers who are specialising in niche topics and diverting audience attention. That is creating the need for traditional publishers to further develop such parts of their organization as product, data, user experience, and to focus on understanding customers.

Build a company-wide philosophy

Axios built its newsroom to give readers what they want in a smartphone-enabled world awash in fake news and distractions. Publisher Nicholas Johnston shared how the company’s philosophy of “Smart Brevity” has dictated its approach: “Why is the core element of an Axios story 150 words long? Because that’s how much we can fit on an iPhone screen.”

Everyone in the newsroom knows leadership is dedicated to smart, short-form journalism, he said. They are also careful to stick to the model without branching out into features like monthly magazines. And even at a new media company founded specifically on the premise of publishing short articles, he said the message he most often delivered to journalists as editor-in-chief was still “write shorter.”

It is also helpful to distill the company’s core mission into a “North Star” single sentence, in this case, “Axios is the indispensable platform for people to get smarter, faster on the world, their industry, and their workplace,” Johnston said.

Reschedule meetings

When Mette Østergaard, now editor-in-chief, first joined Denmark’s Berlingske, they had a “very classic schedule” of morning and afternoon editorial meetings and end-of-day article deadlines, which was completely focused on the printed newspaper. By examining traffic on the digital platform, however, they could see there were several points during the day when readership numbers spiked.

The data showed them they had the most readers in the morning, around noon, during the afternoon commute, and late at night. They chose to focus on the two prime times of 7:00 in the morning and 8:00 in the evening, and instead of two editorial meetings per day they now have one at 1:30 in the afternoon. Rather than coming in with one story, journalists pitch two during the meeting — one for each of the two prime time spots.

“The printed paper is not the centre of the discussion in these meetings,” Østergaard said. “Once we’ve decided what the top story is for the next morning, the editors all leave the room and then we make decisions about what story will be on the front page of the printed newspaper.”

Create your own transformation strategy

For media companies starting the transition to digital-only now, Christian Broughton, managing director at The Independent, said there are lessons to be learned about the culture around data, how companies talk about it and how journalists engage with it.

He shared one rule with the attendees: Don’t let someone else’s template run your business.

As an example, The Independent tried to achieve a conversion rate to identify subscribers. If they had followed a template, they would have measured recency, frequency and volume. Broughton said they tried this many times and it didn’t work. They decided to turn to one of their own data scientists who only had to make small tweaks to get the data to a good and helpful place.

“Rather than recency, like how many days since they last visited, it was how many active days they had in the last 30 days,” Broughton said. “You may not have been on our site in the last 10 days, but you may have been on it every day in the previous 20.”

Separate print and digital distribution

At Germany’s KStA Media, the ideas of “constant innovation” and “perpetual change” help them reach their goals.

Christine Schönfelder, chief product officer, said the company divided digital content production into three parts: content planning, content production, and content distribution.

“We made a hard separation between digital distribution and print distribution, and also between digital and print content production,” Schönfelder said.

As a result, there are now two completely separate teams, one dedicated to digital content production and a smaller one for the print product. They also introduced a special team of digital reporters focused specifically on digital storytelling, which moves KStA closer to the “goal of transforming to a digital-first production and process.”

Put stories first, business second

FactorDaily is a non-profit media lab in India that wants to use stories to spark societal change. The group looks at how technology affects society in the world’s largest democracy, and co-founder Pankaj Mishra said he has learned that fixating on profits and data can undermine journalism’s core purpose.

FactorDaily is now trying to tell stories in a way that resonates and builds community, and has recently been enlisting journalists to act as news curators, hosting in-person events to engage its audience, and generating revenue with educational workshops.

Another important part of the group’s culture is to put the stories themselves ahead of the business and of the journalists themselves. In India, large publishers and high-profile journalists have an outsize influence, Mishra said. Instead, he wants to let stories travel through the community freely rather than let profit and a sense of ownership control the narrative: “We feel that it’s time to revisit journalism’s social contract with the community.”

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