The alignment gap

‘Church and state’ is out of date

This week it’s the turn of my business partner Michael Brunt to step into the limelight. He has written an excellent piece headlined: Closing the alignment gap: how to unite editorial ambition and commercial success.

If there’s one thing we’ve learnt in our four years working as HBM Advisory, it’s that publishing businesses perform better when they are aligned internally.

It sounds obvious but so often they are not. We’ve encountered businesses where the newsroom and commercial department have different ideas of what the overall strategy is; where editors think that a newsletter is targeting reach – while the marketing department think it’s a retention play; and, best of all, where the commercial side didn’t tell the editorial team that their strategy had changed because it didn’t want to confuse the poor souls.

Fix these misapprehensions, whether deliberate or otherwise, and a business can fly. At its very simplest this happens when the business is selling what the newsroom is making and the newsroom is making what the business is selling.

In his article, Michael goes into greater detail about the key areas of misalignment within publishers and what to do about them. He also touches on what we do to help clients in this area.

In other news it’s just over a week until the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Krakow. Michael and I are honoured to have been asked to talk about practical AI solutions for newsrooms at the conference. If you are attending we’d love to see you at our session or for coffee, drinks or dinner. We are very flexible when it comes to socialising ;)