Mini-publisher perspective: What success looks and feels like
Douglas K. Smith, Quentin Hope, Tim Griggs, Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative,This is an excerpt from “Table Stakes: A Manual for Getting in the Game of News,” published Nov. 14, 2017. Read more excerpts here.
Success demands shifting your news enterprise away from the church/state functional structure of the newspaper past to a portfolio of general manager led, audience-first, and platform-driven businesses – all of which are guided by senior leaders whose time and attention is rebalanced toward medium and longer term transformation requirements.
Success looks and feels like moving through the stages of the spectrum described above until reaching fully operational and accountable mini-publisher audience and platform leaders and teams.
It also looks and feels like the ‘to’ side of the following:
FROM > TO shift in “driving audience growth and profitability from a ‘mini-publisher’ perspective”
| From | To | |
| Leadership and organization | We only have a few general managers (perhaps just the CEO/Publisher) | We have many general managers |
| We only have a few businesses, products, or services that use P&Ls | We have many businesses, products and services using P&Ls | |
| Our senior newsroom leaders spend more than 70% of time on day-to-day matters | Our senior newsroom leader spend no more than 25% on day to day matters | |
| Core competencies | We are excellent at the operations required to make, market and deliver printed newspapers | We are excellent at serving targeted content to targeted audiences as well as distributing our content to those audiences on the platforms they use |
| We have very limited experience in taking risks and/or making investments in doing things differently | Our culture is marked by serious risk taking and investment in doing things differently | |
| Several folks in our newsroom know what’s best for our readers | Our newsroom is outstanding at learning from and responding to audience needs | |
| We have two key audiences: print and digital | We have a clearly defined set of targeted audiences | |
| Shared understanding, experiences and values | The majority of folks in our news enterprise remain largely unclear about how their work blends with the work of other functions to deliver value to audiences as well as monetize that value | Lots of folk across our enterprise share an understanding of the business and journalistic basics demanded for success |
| Our newsroom and business folks don’t speak or use the same language | We have fostered across our entire enterprise a shared understanding of the basic language needed for success | |
| Less than half of the folks in our news enterprise have participated in cross-functional teams | Most of the folks in our enterprise have performance-and-goal based team experiences working cross functionally | |
| We continue to err on the side of a strict divide of edit versus business to preserve editorial integrity | We use shared beliefs and values along with various managerial processes to ensure editorial integrity | |
| Performance and accountability | Our enterprise has a cost versus revenue picture only for the paper, ‘digital’ and (perhaps) events | We compare revenue and cost at much more specific levels than just the paper or just digital. |
| Only our business folks are accountable for revenue generation | Our newsroom as well as business folks hold themselves accountable for generating revenue and ensuring our news enterprise is financially sustainable | |
| We do not have an explicit budget of money and/or people’s time for innovation | We have and use an explicit budget for innovation | |
| We are not willing to lose money in pursuit of innovation and learning what works | We don’t like losing money in pursuit of innovation – but will do so in order to learn what works |