The phrase “Table Stakes” comes from poker – the amount required to have seat at the table. The Table Stakes manual is for newsrooms, identifying what’s required to play and win the game of news in the 21st century. Developed with major metropolitan daily news organizations, it is meant to accelerate journalism’s shift to digital from print, help newsrooms evolve their practices, reach new audiences and better engage their communities.
Audiences expect fresh digital news on their own schedule. Yet, too many newsrooms provide news on their own print-driven schedules.
The target audience has gone elsewhere and other platforms increasingly control distribution, which means it’s now the responsibility of the newsroom to drive discoverability, reach and engagement.
The competitive challenges confronting metro, local and regional news enterprises demand general management perspective and skill across the newsroom.
Local news organizations can’t afford to do everything alone. Partnership and collaboration opens up doors in technology, revenue and other areas that would otherwise not be possible.
Only the newsroom (in collaboration with technology and tool-building colleagues) can attract and retain audiences that pay for content and are desired by advertisers. No one else can do this.
No business can survive without revenue and cash to pay for the work – an urgent challenge for metro news enterprises whose revenues and cash are declining.
Audience first is a mandatory change imposed by digital media realities. It is Table Stakes – without it, your news enterprise cannot be ‘in the game.’ Equally important though is this: putting audiences first not only gets you into the game but also far better positions your newsroom to provide more effective journalism whose relevance and value better serves the needs, interests and problems of target audiences. In other words, audience first is essential to fulfilling your journalistic mission.
What are your organization’s gaps in producing and publishing continuously to meet audience needs? Take these assessments to find out.
Use three steps to broaden skills in support of more effective workflows: (1) Define and build the skills required for digital publishing ‘self-sufficiency’ across the newsroom; (2) reposition producers and digitally skilled specialists to help others practice new skills while also being masters of enhanced storytelling and innovators; and (3) think in terms of roles instead of positions while shifting many traditional positions into combinations of roles.
What are your organization’s gaps in producing and publishing continuously to meet audience needs? Take these assessments to find out.
In order to overcome them, first understand the barriers to success in producing and publishing continuously to meet audience needs.
A quick grid showing the FROM > TO view of success in producing and publishing continuously to meet audience needs.
Three of measures of success arise from using digital first continuous publishing to better meet audience needs: 1) outputs achieved toward more continuous publishing; 2) outcomes achieved in audience growth by day part; and 3) capabilities built across the newsroom.
New platforms emerge regularly, different audiences gravitate to them, anxiety about “being on” them ensue, and then this cycle repeats until the next platform emerges. Avoid this by taking a strategic view of developing and effectively managing the portfolio of platforms used by your audiences.
Take this quiz for a quick read on where your efforts stand vis a vis this Table Stake.
In order to overcome them, first understand the barriers to success at publishing on the platforms used by your target audiences.
Publishing on the platforms that your target audiences use requires your newsroom to know how best to use each platform and how to manage your portfolio of platforms. The net effect is a publishing platform plan, action and performance that are strategically crafted, effectively managed, resilient to external changes and robust in growing your share of audience.
There’s a wide variety of data to monitor platform performance. Avoid unnecessary complexity and also choose and monitor indicators that are not addressable by data – such as user experience, revenue and costs.
Audiences have choices – lots of choices. So, it is imperative that your newsroom understand the needs and interest of audiences from their perspective, not yours.
What gaps do you have in using the mini-publisher perspective? Use these tools to find out.
In order to overcome them, first understand the barriers to success at driving audience growth and profitability from a “mini-publisher” perspective.
Success demands shifting your news organization 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.
Bring together all the elements of success and sustainability in a mini-publisher “P&L scorecard.” The scorecard for a mini-publisher team has three parts: audience growth and value, market growth and share, and financial contribution.
Take this quiz for a quick read on your organization’s gaps in serving targeted audiences with targeted content — and find out why your gaps exist.
What gaps do you have in partnership and collaboration? Use these tools to find out.
In order to overcome them, first understand the barriers to succeeding at partnership and collaboration.
This Tables Stake requires you to probe everything you currently do or might do by asking, “Must we do this ourselves? Or, in how many ways might it be wiser to have others do this for us or partner to do this together?”
Three types of scorecards can help you measure the success of your make/buy/partner choices as well as monitor progress toward closing partnering gaps: Enterprise-wide scorecards, front-line team scorecards, and service-level agreement and memorandum of understanding scorecards.
Legacy newspaper enterprises have a significant number of already employed folks who must learn specific new skills, behaviors, attitudes and working relationships.
It’s critically important to define — with the right level of specificity — the roles and skills you need.
Compare where you are now versus what’s required. Here’s a sample questionnaire for your staff.
This section focuses on how you must hold already employed staffers accountable for specific results that arise from learning, practicing and excelling at required skills, behaviors, attitudes and working relationships.
In order to overcome them, first understand the barriers to success in funneling occasional users to habitual and paying loyalists.
A quick grid showing the FROM > TO view of success in funneling occasional users to habitual and paying loyalists.
Through setting goals for each stage of the funnel and monitoring results, you will discover what steps work best for the audiences you seek to serve and the revenue and financial goals you wish to achieve.
Using defined criteria for making key decisions is an enormously important discipline to build in your news enterprise. The best way to learn how to serve targeted audiences with targeted content is to ‘just do it.’ Get going now!
Success manifests itself both internally in skills, attitudes, behaviors and ways of working with one another and externally in how audiences and advertisers perceive and, then, put a value on your efforts.
In order to overcome them, first understand the barriers to succeeding at diversifying and growing revenue.
A quick grid showing the FROM > TO view of success in maximizing revenue from the audiences you build
This section describes ways to track progress and measure success at diversifying and growing your revenue.
Once you’ve mastered the table stakes, there are things you can do to win. What does a winning local news enterprise look like?
This section describes ways to track progress and measure success at mastering how to use targeted content to serve targeted audiences.
Match deadlines to audience windows, change shifts, and modify key editorial meetings in terms of timing, purpose and participation.
Use these steps to create – then execute – a roadmap by which to arrive at a true digital first workflow within a reasonable time frame.
Two essential tools are key to digital transformation: a universal budget and a communications app for messaging, coordination and file access. In addition, a key role (for an individual or team) is the ‘tool master’ who continually identifies tools that work.
Print and digital platforms serve different user needs, with different cycles and rhythms, and require different organizational capabilities. But a bifurcated approach divides up labor instead of maximizing coordination and it perpetuates a losing either/or-ism (“print first or digital first”) that ignore the fact that local news organization’s must be “audience-first.”
Technology and tool issues, roles and skills and work and workflow all interrelate. Yet, technology challenges can be the most frustrating because of their drag on effectiveness and efficiency. Some of these issues are easy to deal with; others are brutal.
Consider different purposes for platforms, use criteria tailored to those purposes, and use a management process for selecting platforms.
Publishing plans for each platform begin with the audience in mind, not the platform.
You need to name specific platform “owners” — who operates as a GM or publisher — taking responsibility for all aspects of platform performance, including strategy, operations, customers, costs and revenues.
Experimentation is essential because existing digital platforms evolve; new ones emerge; and, how to use digital platforms to publish content and build loyal audiences demands continuous improvement and innovation.
If you want to shift your newsroom to an audience-first approach, then you must set and hold the newsroom accountable for audience goals. No amount of training, town hall discussions, strategy studies, brown bag lunches or other approaches to describing and encouraging audience-first changes will gain as much traction.
“Learning by doing” is your newsroom’s path toward figuring out what works best and most sustainably.
The criteria should combine assessing the audiences/platforms with the greatest revenue potential and the most readiness. Most importantly: deferring ‘getting going’ in favor of analysis runs a risk of not getting going soon enough. And, mini-publisher leaders and teams learn a lot by ‘just doing it’ – by learning about mini-publishing by being mini-publishers.
Legacy metros, locals and regionals have too few general managers overseeing too few businesses, products and services. Mini-publisher teams help close that gap.
There are four keys to success: Give mini-publisher teams a charter and ask them to put together plans needed for team success; regularly review and manage team performance; require mini-publisher teams to use the team discipline for performance; and provide mini-publisher teams with the background and support they need to master “economics for journalists” basics
Today, the most important job of senior newsroom leaders is to transform their newsrooms by putting the Table Stakes in place. Absent this, the newsroom – indeed, the whole organization – cannot escape decline into irrelevance and even extinction.
You must design and use a framework for identifying and evaluating options for how best to achieve capacity, capability, speed, risk, revenue and cost objectives by working relationships with others as opposed to yourselves.
How can you turn make/buy/partner into a strategic capability throughout your organization? Practice!
The choice to buy differs from the choice to partner. Buying means you decide to have others do the work for you. Partner means you decide to have others do the work with you. You must structure each of these approaches for success.
You might hire or designate a senior leader to oversee partnering. Or you might make that responsibility a key role for a senior executive even if not the full-time job. Or you might designate a team for the same purpose. Absent taking one of these steps, though, partnering is not likely to happen with the rigor, discipline and repetition required.
This step begins your transition from instilling an audience-first perspective across your newsroom toward getting good at identifying and serving targeted audience segments.
Hold already employed folks accountable for results; identify, attract, hire and onboard new folks – then hold them accountable for results; and partner and/or use independent contractors – and hold them accountable for results.
Performance is the primary objective of change, not change. Instead of asking folks to commit to attending headline or tweeting training, get them to commit to specific performance results that depend on excellent headline writing or tweeting.
The game of 21st century news and information is dynamic. Senior leaders must regularly step back to evaluate the shifts happening.
The first step in executing on audience funnel discipline is to learn what the funneling approach is and how each step in the audience funnel is defined in terms of actions and objectives.
Segmentation means dividing a broad group of your audience into sub-groups who have shared characteristics. Identifying the unique needs and interests of a different audience segment is enormously helpful to moving those segments through the funnel.
You must embrace a continuous cycle of test-and-learn. Here are steps you can take at each stage of a funnel to systematically move users to deeper levels of engagement.
Identify ways to seed/earn/increase revenue at each stage of the funnel, from the first stage to the last, while shaping/using different funnels for different purposes.
You must conduct well-designed experiments that help move users through the funnel.
Users can (and often do) skip stages of the funnel, move backward, or move through the funnel at various paces.
You must dedicate a pool of financial and human resources for innovation and name a cross-functional team to guide innovation across the enterprise.
Force yourself to explore and consider the full range of revenue possibilities for the products, services and businesses you’re in or might begin.
Drive both continuous improvement and fundamental innovation efforts from a customer-first perspective.
You must manage distinct products/services/businesses from the whole enterprise perspective, including building and monitoring economic performance with ‘whole P&Ls.’
The audience teams you select should start by defining success – that is setting specific traffic, engagement, revenue and/or other goals – then craft ‘content plus’ approaches to succeeding. The content that best serves a target audience differs from traditional newsroom thinking about beats and news coverage.
You must have a team who manages, oversees and tracks progress toward fundamental innovation.
You must figure out how to collaborate – among yourselves and with others.
You must monitor innovations that emerge with an eye on quickly ‘following’ – using innovation disciplines to test whether and how what works elsewhere will or might work in your market.
You MUST establish a pool of money and explicitly dedicate resources to experimenting with fundamentally new and different ways of adding value to your markets and local communities
All news enterprises must continuously get better at what they do. But you also must be able to truly innovate.
Before you can “win” you need to understand your gaps in both capacity for innovation and your institutional capability to innovate.
The Table Stakes outlined here are about what news enterprises need to do to “get in the game.” But you don’t just want to play. You want to win. Learn what it takes to differentiate your news organization from others in ways that help you move from “survive” to “thrive.”
Eventually, you should organize the whole newsroom around audience-driven teams and, as Table Stake #7 describes, have mini-publishers drive those efforts.
Use specific, measurable, outcome-based goals to drive performance.